ENGL 26000 Gothic Literature: Monsters & Madness
GE-Human Culture: Literature/Human Diversity The Gothic is one of the most dominant genres in global popular culture today. Uncountable novels, films, television shows, and video games adopt Gothic conventions—gloomy mansions, spectral figures, terrifying monsters, nightmarish visions—to tell their stories. What is the reason for the immense appeal in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century of a genre that dwells upon grotesque and disturbing subject matter? How has the Gothic—a genre born out of the particular historical and social circumstances of western Europe—captured the imaginations of people from countries and cultures all around the world? Why does modern human society seem to need Gothic stories? In this course, we will seek answers to these questions through the study and contextualization of twentieth- and twenty-first-century Gothic texts from around the world.
Credits
3