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.