Description: |
ENG 281 (I-4) The Gothic Imagination: Contradiction and mystery lie at the heart of the word “gothic.” Why do we sometimes take pleasure in fear? Why at the dawn of the modern gothic sensibility would an English landscape architect take the trouble to plant dead trees in the gardens of the imposing Kensington Palace? And today, why do we flock to movies that fill us with terror? Who was the first teenage goth, and what did it mean to be “goth” in the eighteenth century? Why do vampires, zombies, ghouls, and ghosts continue to be hugely popular with readers and moviegoers? Why, in other words, do the undead continue to live so vividly in the stories we tell? To understand the enduring appeal of the gothic imagination is to understand an important aspect of ourselves as well as our history over the past two and a half centuries. As the novelist Michael Crichton has memorably written, “If you don’t know history, . . . you are a leaf that doesn’t know it is part of a tree.” Or, in the more gothic formulation of Richard Davenport-Hines, “The gothic imagination continues to haunt us all.” This semester we will seek to understand the vogue for the gothic in all of the arts over the past two and a half centuries: both the extent of the gothic imagination and possible reasons for its influence. In this brand new course—ironically, a course not haunted by its past iterations—students will have the opportunity to explore manifestations of the gothic imagination from the earliest days of romanticism, to Southern Gothic fiction, to the present day. |