DePauw University, ENG 264/WGSS 290: Women in Gothic Literature (Fall 2020)
John Henry Fuseli The Nightmare (1781)
This course will be listed in the English department but will also count towards the Women's, Gender, and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) Program.
In 1976, Ellen Moers used the phrase "Female Gothic" to describe "the work that women writers have done in the literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called the Gothic. But what I mean -- or anyone else means -- by 'the Gothic' is not so easily stated except that it has to do with fear." In this course, we will trace that fear from the 18th century to the present day and from the haunted castle to the college campus through writers such as Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, Shirley Jackson, Helen Oyeyemi, Carmen Maria Machado, and Sarah Waters. This course will have several goals: to read closely but widely Gothic literature by women writers, to analyze the tropes and motifs of that tradition, and to define for today what "women's Gothic" and "Gothic feminism" means. Students should leave the course with an understanding of women's roles in the Gothic tradition and how that tradition reflects cultural tensions and social anxieties.
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