ENGL 071G. Gothic Shorts

Despite the grandiosity of the novel among fiction-telling genres, a good short story can do things a novel cannot. Good short fiction revels in an economy of language, distilling something great in a narrative ironically small. Edgar Allan Poe famously argued that this matter of length makes short print media a superior form. As texts capable of being enjoyed in a single sitting, short stories aim to create a "unity of impression," unbroken by distractions from the outside world. In Poe's case, the "impressions" he attempted were inextricable from the gothic sensibility he's remembered for today. Inspired by this affinity, "The Gothic Short Story" investigates uncanny intimacies between short narrative and the gothic across an array of media. Subjects and authors we'll explore include the Salem Witch trials; Juan Francisco Manzano's Autobiography of a Slave; Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales; Poe; Frederick Douglass's The North Star; Louisa May Alcott's "Blood & Thunder" tales; the illustrations of Aubrey Beardsley and John Vassos; Henry James' The Turn of the Screw; ghost stories by Edith Wharton; and the "Southern Gothic" in works by Flannery O'Connor, William Faulkner, and Zora Neale Hurston. We'll also explore theory on the aesthetics of fear, from Edmund Burke's concept of the "sublime" to Julia Kristeva's "abject" and Sianne Ngai's work on paranoia and disgust.
For majors and minors, this course can count either as an 18th/19th or as a 20th/21st century course, depending on the topic of the final research paper.
Humanities.
1 credit.
Catalog chapter: English Literature
Department website: http://www.swarthmore.edu/english-literature

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