English 200-C: Introduction to Literature and the Humanities: Witch Lit

From Macbeth, Shakespeare's 1606 tragedy of witchcraft and ambition, to Jen Silverman's 2018 Witch, a tongue-in-cheek drama of a woman's deal with the devil, few figures have had as lasting an impact on literature as the witch. Our task in this course will be to consider the aesthetic, religious, and social structures that have made the witch such an enduring figure. We will study the cultural fascination with witches by exploring their literary representation from the premodern to the present day in a range of works including plays, novels, and poems. To contextualize our reading, we will pair our literary study with analysis of archival documents produced by witches (testimonies, spell work) and about witches (trial records, witch hunt manuals, and true crime pamphlets).