English - Free topic C: The Gothic and Haunting in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century U.S. Fiction and Film

In recent years, ideas and expressions of the Gothic in U.S. literature and culture have experienced significant renewal and revision. For example, Sheri-Marie Harrison has identified a “New Black Gothic” in creative work by Donald Glover, Jordan Peele, and Jesmyn Ward; for Harrison, this “Gothic revival” builds on fiction by Toni Morrison to “reveal how ideologies of American exceptionalism rely on repressing the nation’s history of slavery, racism, and patriarchy.”

A key component of the Gothic, haunting, has also received renewed attention: Avery Gordon argues in Ghostly Matters that haunting is “one way in which abusive systems of power make themselves known and their impacts felt in everyday life.” For Gordon, “The ghost is not simply a dead or a missing person, but a social figure”; ghostly hauntings represent not merely “individual loss or trauma” but social formations (such slavery) that continue to shape the present.

The course also makes the case that the Gothic revival cannot be understood without also examining the rise of trauma discourse, especially PTSD. A chronological approach to the gothic helps reveal how this now-dominant psychological paradigm has inflected the genre, moving fiction away, in some cases, from classic gothic features such as the Doppelgänger and towards flashbacks and personal reckoning. Thinking alongside Gordon, the course will explore how trauma’s emphasis on the individual psyche might unintentionally dilute the gothic’s socio-political commentary, even as it also expresses renewed urgency through representations of psychic damage.

“The Gothic and Haunting in Twentieth and Twenty-First Century U.S. Fiction and Film” will include both modern and contemporary texts: some canonical, others less renowned. We will consider variations of the Gothic—Southern Gothic, the suburban Gothic, the New Black Gothic, feminist neo-Gothic, eco-gothic—as they appear in fiction and film, and as they have been conceptualized and articulated by critics. We will assess how the Gothic, haunting, and trauma can be read as social figures for and expressions of issues including “the afterlives of slavery” (Saidiya Hartman), racism, gender relations, and sexuality.