Great Issues in Humanities
Dr. Sally Jordan

HSP 135 CRN 4308
Monday and Wednesday, 4-5:30
Observatory

The Literature of Horror

In this class, we will read and analyze horror fiction from the late-eighteenth century through the mid-twentieth century. One issue we will examine closely is the connection between horror literature and social history. For instance, the genre which inaugurated the literature of horror, the gothic novel, arose in England during the late eighteenth century. Is it merely a coincidence that this genre exploded in popularity just as England was struggling with a major societal unraveling? How did the real-life fears of riot and revolution intersect with the invented fears of crumbling castles and ghostly apparitions?

Other questions we will consider include the making of monsters: from what or whom does a culture shape its monsters? Why? What is the function of monsters within the larger culture? Is monster-making a way to police social norms, or does it allow a space for the forbidden to flourish and the repressed to return? We also will study theories about the sublime and the uncanny to begin thinking about the aesthetics and the psychology of horror. What things scare us, and why? And why do we sometimes enjoy and seek out fear?

The course work will include reading, discussion, written assignments, and research projects. The texts we will read include the first gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s bizarre Castle of Otranto; another gothic work by the most popular writer of her day, Anne Radcliffe; Mary Shelley’s story of science gone wrong, Frankenstein; several stories by the ever-morbid Edgar Allen Poe; Sheridan Le Fanu’s intriguing tale of a female vampire, Carmilla; Robert Louis Steven’s meditation on the monster within, The Strange Case of Dr. Jeckyll and Mr. Hyde; Bram Stocker’s tale of the fearsome foreigner, Dracula; Henry James’s uncanny story about possibly possessed children, The Turn of the Screw; some of H.P. Lovecraft’s deeply disturbing short stories; and Shirley Jackson’s comic yet creepy novel The Haunting of Hill House.