ENGH 655 Nineteenth-Century American Literature:
American Gothic to 1914
Spring 2012
Professor J. Samaine Lockwood
jlockwo3@gmu.edu
Robinson A456
Office hours: R 1:30-2:30 p.m. & by appointment
CRN: 13848
Robinson B204
R 7:20 p.m. - 10 p.m.
General Information
Course description
The late eighteenth century witnessed the founding of the United States as well as the peaking of the
Gothic mode’s popularity in Britain. Since that time, the Gothic has influenced and been influenced by a
broad range of American writers. In the long nineteenth century, the period on which this course will focus,
these writers called on the Gothic to interrogate Enlightenment ideas about rationality and personal liberty,
to explore the dark, complexly racialized recesses of US history, and to grapple with the roles gender,
sexual desire, and sexuality play in national life. It is to these intersecting issues, what we might call the
cultural work of the American Gothic, that this course will attend.
We will begin our inquiry with two foundational texts: English author Horace Walpole’s seminal work of
Gothic fiction, The Castle of Otranto (1764), and colonial American Mary Rowlandson’s 1682 captivity
narrative, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God. From there, we will trace the Gothic in its American
manifestations up through the early years of the twentieth century. Along the way, we will sleepwalk with
Charles Brockden Brown’s Edgar Huntly and journey through the subterranean passages of Pauline
Elizabeth Hopkins’s ancient African civilization of Meroe; we will parse the confessions of fintional
murderers, analyze mesmerisms, ghostly visitations, and possessions, and dwell on the various ways that the
Gothic mode has been used by African American women writers to limn the contours of slavery and its
legacies. We will also read broadly in theories of the uncanny and the spectral and their relationship to
individual, collective, and national identities: Nathaniel Hawthorne, Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Jacques
Derrida, Avery Gordon, William James, and W. E. B. Du Bois may be among those we will consider.
Grades will be based on a combination of participation, a short report, a short essay, and a final research
project.
Required Texts
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker, with Related Texts (Hackett)
Sigmund Freud, The Uncanny (Penguin)
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, The Yellow Wall-Paper, Herland, and Selected Writings (Penguin)
Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood (Washington Square Press)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Bedford)
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw (Bedford, Third Edition)
Herman Melville, Billy Budd and Other Stories (Penguin)
Toni Morrison, Beloved (Random)
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto (Penguin)
Other readings are available on our course Blackboard site or online. Students must have, and regularly
check, a GMU email account and be prepared to regularly access our Blackboard course site.
Office of Disability Services
If you are a student with a disability and you need academic accommodations, please see me and contact
the Office of Disability Services (ODS) at 993-2474. All academic accommodations must be arranged
through the ODS (http://ods.gmu.edu).
Course Assignments
Grading
Participation (this includes the précis-presentation): 20%
Final project proposal: 20%
Final project: 60%
Group précis/presentation
Early in the term, I will ask you to sign up to be part of a group that will make a 15-minute presentation
(this estimated length doesn’t include the follow-up discussion) on a secondary work of literary criticism
pertaining to the day’s reading. The presentation should have three parts: 1. A written summary of the
article’s arguments and methodology (how it makes its argument and approaches the texts under
consideration (no longer than 2 pages)) 2. A critique of the article’s arguments (presented aloud) and 3. A
question set designed to use the article to help us advance our discussion of the literary text at hand (no
longer than 1 page). Presentations will be given after the class break (about midway through the meeting)
and will involve the distribution and reading of the précis (part 1), the presentation of part 2, and the
distribution and use of part 3 to facilitate the beginning of the discussion that will emerge in response to
the questions.
Each group will have 3-4 members. You may divide the labor however you see fit. Everyone will be
awarded two grades for this assignment, one determined by me based on the presentation itself and another
determined by your group members and based on participation.
Final Project Proposal
This assignment is due no later than April 14 for final grading, though I encourage you to submit it much
earlier. (I will accept submissions as early as March 1.) By means of this document, you will communicate
to me your ideas for a final project, and I will provide detailed feedback and suggestions for development
and improvement. We may exchange this assignment back and forth a number of times. I will grade only
its final form, either when you tell me it is final or at the April 14th submission, whichever comes first. I
will accept early versions that only have the 2-page close reading and abstract.
This assignment has three parts. The first is a pithy, powerful close reading rendered in only 2 pages
(single- or double-spaced, your choice, though it must be in a reasonable 12 point font). This close reading
will not have a traditional introduction, but will open with a clear, specific, no-more-than-2-sentence
analytical thesis and then proceed to explicate the argument through close consideration of literary details. I
will be looking especially for successful marshalling of evidence and the use of that same evidence to help
you develop your analytical insights further.
The second part of the assignment is an abstract, not to exceed 250 words. In this abstract, you will
present the what, why, and how of your final project. Although you will have not yet written the final
project, you should think of the abstract as a plausible fiction in which you detail what you will eventually
accomplish as if you had already accomplished it.
The third part of the assignment is a bibliography of at least 9 sources (both primary and secondary, not
including the literary text(s)). You will have to briefly annotate no more than 4 of these bibliographical
entries. We will talk later in the term about how to annotate sources.
Final Project
I am open to your final projects taking a range of forms. I require, however, that each, in a fundamental
way, involves close analysis of one of the texts from the pre-1915 period under consideration in this course
and substantial, critical engagement of primary and/or secondary materials. You will be required to
workshop a draft version of this final project with a group made up of me and your peers during one of the
last weeks of class.
Format requirements for assignments
To be accepted, all written assignments for this course must be
 properly named and submitted on Blackboard by the deadline
 typed in a readable, reasonably-sized script such as 12-point Times New Roman
and have
 a works cited list formatted according to MLA style
Each submission should also have
 page numbers
 1” margins on all sides
 a specific, relevant title (it must include the title of the work of literature under
consideration and relevant key topics from your paper; for example: “The Vampiric Child
and the Lifeless Mother: Discourses of Childrearing in Mary Wilkins Freeman’s ‘Luella
Miller’”)
 a header with your name, the course name, the term (Spring 2012), and my name
(Lockwood or Prof. Lockwood)
Academic Integrity
GMU has a clear Honor Code by which all its students agree to abide. It is worth quoting in full:
To promote a stronger sense of mutual responsibility, respect, trust, and fairness among all
members of the George Mason University community and with the desire for greater academic and
personal achievement, we, the student members of the university community, have set forth this
honor code: Student members of the George Mason University community pledge not to cheat,
plagiarize, steal, or lie in matters related to academic work.
All work you do for this class must be your own and must not have been submitted previously. You must
correctly cite and document any sources that you use in any written work. If I suspect that you have broken
the Honor Code, I am obligated to report it.
Communication
Contacting me
I encourage you to contact me as needed regarding any aspect of the course. In order for us to work
together to support your intellectual growth, we should spend some time discussing your individual work,
your ideas, and your questions. The first and best way to contact me is in person. Face-to-face
conversations are the most effective way to get work done. Given the late hour of our class meetings, I have
designated half of my office hour time to special appointments; please contact me to set up a meeting.
Another good way to contact me is to email me M-F. (Please know that on weekends I check my email less
regularly, sometimes not at all.) Email is an appropriate medium to use when you want to let me know
you’ll be absent or to pose a clear, direct question. It is not a good forum for topics like new insights you’ve
had into a reading or challenges facing you in the class. Those issues deserve a one-on-one meeting.
Blackboard (Bb)
For this course, we will be using Blackboard, so you must have access to a computer. All paper assignments,
many readings, etc. will be on or managed through our Blackboard site. Blackboard is now available
through myMason. If you need help, call ITU support 3-8870 and, if you don’t get the answers you need,
email courses@gmu.edu.
Schedule of Readings and Assignments
[Note: I expect that you will always come to class with the materials we have read in hand (or, in the case
of pdfs, on a laptop, iPad, Kindle, etc.). Please actively engage these readings and films by marking up your
text and/or taking notes. Please give some forethought to how you will capture your insights as you read
pdfs. I prefer using Adobe Acrobat Pro, but I am sure there are many other methods that will support your
active engagement of the text.]
Assignments due are in bold
Jan 26
Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
Screen What Lies Beneath (2000)
Feb 2
Mary Rowlandson, The Sovereignty and Goodness of God (Bb)
Screen The Panic Room (2002)
Feb 9
Charles Brockden Brown, Edgar Huntly and “The Difference Between History and
Romance”; William Godwin, “excerpts from Enquiry Concerning Political Justice
(1793)” (all in the Hackett edition of Edgar Huntly)
Group #1 Précis/presentation: Jared Gardner, “Alien Nation: Edgar Huntly’s Savage
Awakening” (pdf is also on Bb)
Feb 16
Edgar Allan Poe, “The Black Cat,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (Bb); Nathaniel
Hawthorne, “The Haunted Mind” (Bb); Sigmund Freud “Family Romance” and “The
Uncanny” (both in The Uncanny)
Group #2 Précis/presentation: “Slavery and the Gothic Horror of Poe’s “The Black Cat”
(Bb)
Feb 23
Herman Melville, Benito Cereno
Group #3 Précis/presentation: Peter Coviello, “The American in Charity: ‘Benito Cereno’
and Gothic Anti-Sentimentality”
Group #4 Précis/presentation: Justin D. Edwards, “Gothic Travels in Melville’s Benito
Cereno” (Bb)
Mar 1
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl and Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby,
Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book” (pdf is also on Bb)
Mar 8
Thomas Nelson Page, “Marse Chan” (Bb); Charles Chesnutt, “The Goophered
Grapevine,” “Po’ Sandy,” “Mars Jeem’s Nightmare,” and “The Gray Wolf’s Ha’nt” (all on
Bb as separate pdfs); Georg Hegel, from The Phenomenology of Spirit (Bb); Frantz
Fanon, from Black Skin, White Masks (Bb)
BREAK
Mar 22
Henry James, The Turn of the Screw
Screen The Others (2001)
Group #5 Précis/presentation: Eric Haralson, “‘His little heart, dispossessed’: Ritual
Sexorcism in The Turn of the Screw” (Bb)
Mar 29
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, “The Giant Wistaria” and “The Yellow Wallpaper”; Mary
Wilkins Freeman, “Luella Miller” and “The Lost Ghost” (Bb)
Ap 5
Pauline E. Hopkins, Of One Blood; William James’s “The Hidden Self”; and W. E. B.
Du Bois I. Of Our Spiritual Strivings and V. Of the Wings of Atalanta from The Souls of
Black Folk
Ap 12
No class
Ap 14
Last day to hand in Final project proposal (by 11:59 pm to Bb)
Ap 19
Toni Morrison, Beloved and Avery Gordon, “not only the footprints but the water too”
(Bb)
Ap 26
Workshops for Groups 1-3 (workshops begin at 7:20 pm, 8:20 pm, and 9:20 pm)
May 3
Workshops for Groups 4-6 (workshops begin at 7:20 pm, 8:20 pm, and 9:20 pm)
May 10
Final project is due to Bb by 11:59 pm