Hauntings: Trauma and the Narratives of the Supernatural in American Fiction 4219-SC0020
The course offers students a survey of the literary motif of haunting in American fiction with a selection of short stories, with a particular emphasis on fiction written by women, ranging from the early 19th century to roughly the First World War. Apart from tracing a strong tradition of hauntings in various inflections and guises specific to the American sensibility, the course aims to show how the figure of the ghost, the motif of the haunted house, as well as more subtle inflections of hauntology, resonate with contemporaneous cultural and social contexts to channel or subvert the relations of power in the context of collective and personal traumas.
Such an approach will help students see how the experience of haunting, and so, as it would seem, a highly specific form of encounter, sheds light on such issues as intimacy and cohabitation, individual and communal memory, materiality and spirituality, gender and race, colonialism and slavery, capitalism and technology, as well as, last but not least, how it comments on mortality and death from both psychological and religious perspectives. Apart from literary texts, students will read selections from texts of cultural criticism and critical theory involved with spectrality, hauntology, trauma studies, memory studies, environmental humanities, new materialisms, and death studies, which will significantly supplement the more traditional gothic approaches.
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Term 2026Z:
The course offers students a survey of the literary motif of haunting in American fiction with a selection of short stories, with a particular emphasis on fiction written by women, ranging from the early 19th century to roughly the First World War. Apart from tracing a strong tradition of hauntings in various inflections and guises specific to the American sensibility, the course aims to show how the figure of the ghost, the motif of the haunted house, as well as more subtle inflections of hauntology, resonate with contemporaneous cultural and social contexts to channel or subvert the relations of power in the context of collective and personal traumas. Such an approach will help students see how the experience of haunting, and so, as it would seem, a highly specific form of encounter, sheds light on such issues as intimacy and cohabitation, individual and communal memory, materiality and spirituality, gender and race, colonialism and slavery, capitalism and technology, as well as, last but not least, how it comments on mortality and death from both psychological and religious perspectives. Apart from literary texts, students will read selections from texts of cultural criticism and critical theory involved with spectrality, hauntology, trauma studies, memory studies, environmental humanities, new materialisms, and death studies, which will significantly supplement the more traditional gothic approaches. |
Course coordinators
Type of course
Mode
Learning outcomes
Upon completion of the course, the student:
1.has knowledge of American haunting literature historically and culturally, particularly in the context of trauma theory and power relations
2.understands how the phenomenon of haunting influenced the literature and philosophical thought of the 19th and early 20th centuries
3.can apply basic methods of analysis of various cultural texts
4.is able to apply the formulation of conclusions based on the reading of source texts
5.can formulate research questions on complex cultural phenomena using the example of the literature of haunting
6.understands the impact of power relations and belief/belief systems on the shape of social life
Assessment criteria
a) 2 micro-essays (1 page) on the assigned topic (20% of the final grade)
b) class participation (40% of the final grade)
c) final essay (5-7 pages) (40% of the final grade)
Grade scale (in percentage)
100-97% 5!
96-91% 5
90-84% 4+
83-78% 4
77-68% 3+
67-60% 3
59-0% 2
Bibliography
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Bloom, Murray Teigh. “America’s Most Famous Medium.” American Mercury, May 1950, 578–86.
Blum, Deborah. Ghost Hunters: William James and the Search for Scientific Proof of Life after Death. New York: Penguin, 2006.
Ellenberger, Henri. The Discovery of the Unconscious: The History and Evolution of Dynamic Psychiatry. New York: Basic Books, 1970.
Goldsmith, Barbara. Other Powers: The Age of Suffrage, Spiritualism, and the Scandalous Victoria Woodhull. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Collected Novels. New York: Library of America, 1983
Hawthorne, Nathaniel. Tales and Sketches. New York: Library of America, 1982
James, Henry, Sr. “Spiritual Rappings.” In Lectures and Miscellanies, 407–24. New York: Redfield, 1852
James, Henry. Collected Stories, Vols. 1-2. London: Everyman, 1999
James, William. Essays in Psychical Research. The Works of William James. Edited by Frederick H. Burkhardt, Fredson Bowers, and Ignas K. Skrupskelis. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986.
James, William. The Writings of William James: A Comprehensive Edition. Edited by John J. McDermott. 1967. Reprint, New York: Modern Library, 1977.
Knapp, Krister Dylan. William James. Psychical Research and the Challenge of Modernity. The University of North Carolina Press, 2021
Kontou, Tatiana and Sarah Willburn. The Ashgate Research Companion to Nineteenth-Century Spiritualism and the Occult. Ashgate, 2012
Lutz, Tom. American Nervousness, 1903: An Anecdotal History. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1991.
Oppenheim, Janet. The Other World: Spiritualism and Psychical Research in England, 1850–1914. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2004
Poovey, Mary. A History of the Modern Fact: Problems of Knowledge in the Sciences of Wealth and Society. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998.
Royle, Nicholas, The Uncanny (Manchester University Press, 2003)
Taves, Ann. Fits, Trances, and Visions: Experiencing Religion and Explaining Experience from Wesley to James. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999
Toop, David, Sinister Resonance: The Mediumship of the Listener (Continuum, 2010);
Trigg, Dylan, The Thing. A Phenomenology of Horror (Zero Books, 2014)
Trigg, Dylan, Topophobia. A Phenomenology of Anxiety (Bloomsbury, 2016)