ENGH 300 with Professor Lockwood
12:00 PM to 01:15 PM TR — East Building 201
In this course we will consider US culture's many ghosts, those elusive figures that body forth the desires, the dark histories, and the dreams that dwell in the national imagination. As we survey the specter-saturated landscape of American literature from the early national period to the early twenty-first century, we will focus on four specific cultural manifestations of the ghostly: the enduring myth that Native Americans have "disappeared" and so have been rendered ghosts; the haunted house as an uncanny and specifically gendered setting: African American enslavement and the Gothic; and the representations of Chinese Americans as mystical and aligned with the spirit world. Along the way, we will encounter the apparitions conjured by writers as various as Washington Irving, Shirley Jackson, Sherman Alexie, Lafcadio Hearn, Toni Morrison, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry James, Maxine Hong Kingston, Edgar Allan Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Charles Chesnutt, Bret Harte, William Apess, and Sui Sin Far. This course will feature fiction, but we will also touch on slave narratives, murder confessions, poetry, and essays. Grades will be based on informal and formal writing, participation and exams.
November 28, 2011