SCHC 450 H04 19557

EngLit, Humanities, AIU

Notes:

This course asks why the dead refuse to stay dead. We will look at a range of literary works and films that depict ghosts, specters, and other visitors from the “spirit world,” with an eye toward the following questions: Why have ghosts and ghost stories had such long-standing appeal? How do ghosts in novels and films serve as metaphors for social or psychological processes that more “realistic” depictions have a hard time grasping? What kinds of loss and what failures of memory make stories of ghosts and the undead urgent at particular historical moments? We will read and analyze works that push these questions in three main directions. A first set of texts treats ghosts and specters as figures for the continued “life” in the present of colonialism and chattel slavery. A second set views ghosts as beings impossible to categorize (neither dead nor alive), and hence as figures that disrupt the categories we use to make sense of the world (hetero vs. homosexual; male vs. female; black vs. white). A third group of works depicts ghosts and specters as the occasion for exploring psychic traumas and the challenge trauma poses to efforts at keeping the past in the past.