English 200-A: Introduction to Literature and the Humanities: American Horror

What draws us to horror? From haunted houses to slasher films, gothic novels to teen vampire fiction, mindless zombies to maniacal psychopaths, the passion for scary stories has remained an indelible part of American culture, reflecting our anxieties back to us. This course takes a closer look at the tradition of horror in American culture, from seventeenth-century accounts of the Salem Witch Trials to twenty-first century feminist horror; classic tales by Poe, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Edith Wharton to weird fiction by H. P. Lovecraft and Thomas Ligotti; mid-century horror by Shirley Jackson and Richard Matheson, to recent masters of the form like Clive Barker, Stephen King, and Carmen Maria Machado. We'll also watch several films by directors such as John Carpenter and Jordan Peele, complementing these primary texts with theoretical readings on the nature of horror, from the eighteenth-century gothic to Freud's uncanny, "monster theory" to the "spectral turn." Finally, the course will interrogate canons of taste and art, highbrow and lowbrow, respectable "literary" fiction versus disparaged mass-market genre fiction. When you're done reading for the night, you might want to leave the light on...