LIT 4013 - Spring 2025 - Mariano

The Gothic novel is said to have been born in the 18th century and rumored to have died in the next; but, in fact, its forms and faculties have been animated and reanimated many times, awakened to respond to the anxiety, fear, outrage, and uncertainty of shifting cultural, social, and political conditions. This course is focused on the intersection between historical representations of deviance and atrocity and the historically-specific (re)emergent trends of Gothic themes, motifs, and modes of analysis. We will read U.S. American literature in transnational and global contexts, from the colonial era to the contemporary moment of the “new gothic,” to explore how gothic conventions have shaped the representation of atrocity and its aftermaths, imbuing landscapes, bodyscapes, memoryscapes, and other sites of memory with historical significance and collective meaning.