AJ24083 Gothic Literature

Faculty of Arts
Autumn 2010
Extent and Intensity
0/0/0. 2 credit(s) (plus 3 credits for an exam). Recommended Type of Completion: zk (examination). Other types of completion: z (credit).
Teacher(s)
Bonita Rhoads (lecturer)
Guaranteed by
Jeffrey Alan Vanderziel, B.A.
Department of English and American Studies – Faculty of Arts
Contact Person: Tomáš Hanzálek
Timetable
Tue 16:40–18:15 M22
Course Enrolment Limitations
The course is only offered to the students of the study fields the course is directly associated with.

The capacity limit for the course is 15 student(s).
Current registration and enrolment status: enrolled: 0/15, only registered: 0/15
fields of study / plans the course is directly associated with
there are 9 fields of study the course is directly associated with, display
Course objectives
Scholarly interest in Gothic fiction has surged in the past decade, leading to a flood of new publications on the genre. At the same time, an actual MA program in “Gothic Studies” has been created at the University of Glamorgan and an MLitt degree in “Gothic Imagination” is now offered at the University of Sterling. In light of this intriguing academic trend, this course explores the expanding relevance of the Gothic to our understanding of modern culture. Why is it that the excessive motifs of Gothic plots – haunted houses, trembling virgins, cruel aristocrats, family curses, madness and sexual transgression – reveal so much about the cultural anxieties of modernization? We begin in the late eighteenth century with the first Gothic novels (Walpole, Radcliffe, Austen) but our primary focus will be on nineteenth-century writers (Shelley, Poe, Hawthorne, Bronte, Dickens, Wilde, James). Because Gothic tales portray horrific and violent forces erupting into ordinary life, they evoke an array of Victorian social misgivings regarding the inadequacy of the bourgeois family, the fragility of national, sexual and racial identity, the menace of urban crime, the ascendancy of science, and the disappearance of the sacred in a century of secularization. Beyond literature, our readings will include cultural criticism along with psychological and formal theories that relate to the Gothic (Burke on sublimity, Ruskin on architecture, Freud on the uncanny, and Kristeva’s concept of abjection).
Language of instruction
English
Further Comments
The course can also be completed outside the examination period.
The course is also listed under the following terms Autumn 2007, Autumn 2012.
  • Enrolment Statistics (Autumn 2010, recent)
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