Courses: Expository Writing:

EXPO S-20s Summer Seminar: Gothic Literature (31783)
Patricia M. Bellanca
(4 units: UN) M,W 6-8:30 pm, 51 Brattle Street, Room 121. Tuition $2,025. Limited enrollment.
Summer Seminars are restricted to high school juniors and seniors enrolled in the Secondary School Program, and to Harvard College rising sophomores. Harvard College students see additional information.

"Horror, madness, monstrosity, death, disease, terror, [and] evil": these preoccupations, according to a recent critic, have animated Gothic fiction ever since it emerged in the late 1700s. In this seminar, we will share these preoccupations as we examine a range of Gothic texts, from eighteenth-century Gothic fragments to stories by H. P. Lovecraft and Isabel Allende. And we will ask these questions about those texts: What makes Gothic fiction "Gothic"? How do we account for its immense popularity? Why have high-minded readers and writers always tended to scorn it? (What are they so worried about?) And what have modern Gothic writers and readers made of the genre they've inherited? We will develop a working definition of the Gothic in our first segment, which will take a group of short stories as its primary texts, including Isabel Allende's "If You Touched my Heart" and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper." Next, we will read Jane Austen's Gothic spoof, Northanger Abbey, in the context of both the popular fiction Austen parodies and the heated eighteenth-century debates about what young women should read. Our third segment will focus on Edgar Allan Poe and his tales of paranoia, insanity, and incest. This segment will extend the course's focus from the Gothic mansion to the Gothic mind and thereby prepare us for our final section on the work of twentieth-century Gothic writers.