(Fulbright professor Eric C. Brown)
A study of the literary gothic from the eighteenth century to the present. The seminar will explore gothic conventions?dark and stormy nights, haunting medievalisms, ghouls and grave robbers, uncanny anxieties?in traditionally gothic texts as well as classical and contemporary ghost stories, urban legends, and horror films. Some emphasis on the relationship between fear and narrativity, including how representations of fear change over time and across genres, and the interdependence of fears and fictions.
Core texts for 200 level:
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Oxford, 1998) ISBN 0192834401
Matthew Lewis, The Monk (Penguin, 1999). ISBN 0140436030
Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (Vintage, 2007) ISBN 030738683X
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Prestwick, 2006) ISBN 1580491618
Shirley Jackson, We Have Always Lived in the Castle (Penguin, 2006)
ISBN 0143039970
Anne Rice, Interview with a Vampire (Ballantine, 2004) ISBN 0345476875
Jan Harold Brunvand, The Book of Scary Urban Legends (Norton, 2004)
ISBN 0393326136
Additional core texts for 300 level:
Bram Stoker, Dracula (Norton Critical Ed.), ISBN 0393970124
Stephen King, Misery ISBN 0451169522
( Janne Stigen Drangsholt)
Martin Heidegger says that ‘Poetry wells up only from devoted thought thinking back, recollecting’.
While this statement might seem to enact a movement back in time, it also functions to open up a mythic space in which past, present, and future are not so easily distinguished. This course will look at the ways in which some concrete poetic discourses achieve such an opening up, and explore the importance of myth in this process. The course will include readings of a wide span of texts by
American as well as British poets, including Ted Hughes, Anne Sexton, Denise Levertov, Stevie
Smith, Sylvia Plath, and Alice Oswald. The course will explore the relationship between myth and poetry, and we will try to elucidate the manner in which the ‘mythic method’ of these poets creates a discourse that is characterised by plurality and openness, challenging traditional ways of regarding language, as well as reality. In order to explore this in a thorough manner, we will conduct parallel

readings of relevant texts from modern literary theory, mythic theory, and other poetic discourses that might be relevant to our readings.
Core reading:
Compendium with poems, theory and secondary articles (sold at Studia).
Laurence Coupe, Myth (Routledge, 1997) ISBN 978-0415134941
Ted Hughes, Tales from Ovid (Faber&Faber, 1997) ISBN 978-0571191031
Stevie Smith, Collected Poems (New Directions Books, 1983) ISBN 978-0811208826
Alice Oswald, Woods etc.
(Faber&Faber, 2005) ISBN 978-0571218523
Sylvia Plath, Collected Poems (Faber&Faber, 1981) ISBN 978-0571118380
Denise Levertov, Selected Poems (New Directions Books, 2002) ISBN 978-0811215206
Anne Sexton, The Complete Poems: Anne Sexton (Mariner Books, 1999) ISBN 978-0395957769
Additional core texts for 300-level:
Alice Oswald, The Thing in the Gap Stone-Stile (Faber&Faber 2007) ISBN 978-0571236947
Additional theoretical articles will be included in the compendium (sold at Studia)
Recommended reading:
Jeffrey Wainwright, Poetry: The Basics (Routledge, 2007)