GOTHIC, THE LITERATURE OF EXCESS (CL3054)

This course addresses the dark side of the imagination: monsters, vampires, hauntings and demons. It opens students to the history and genealogy of the fascination with excess, the supernatural, and horror, tracing the development of a genre from its 18th- century inception through to its late bloom in the Victorian era; leaving it to students to pursue through their pick of twentieth- and twenty-first gothic. Authors studied include Horace Walpole, Matthew Lewis, the Marquis de Sade, James Hogg, R.L. Stevenson, Henry James, and Bram Stoker. The course also attends to visual representations of gothic in painting, ballet, television, and film.

Code:

CL3054

Name:

GOTHIC, THE LITERATURE OF EXCESS

Discipline:

CL (Comparative Literature)

Type:

Regular

Level:

Undergraduate

Credits:

Can be taken twice for credit?:

Pre-requisites:

None

Co-requisites:

None

Learning Outcomes

To be able to articulate the continuities linking gothic fiction to other media in which gothic has flourished (painting, film, dance, etc)
To develop an awareness of some of the different historical factors against which gothic has been reacting
To explain why gothic is still so alive today in the twenty-first century
To grasp methodologies appropriate to studying gothic literature
To learn about the pleasures and problematics of gothic literature

GOTHIC, THE LITERATURE OF EXCESS (CL3054)

Learning Outcomes

Archived Syllabi