Department of English

Described as “preternatural,” “phantasmagoric,” and “hallucinatory,” Charlotte Brontë's Villette treats the psyche as a boundless repository of gothic content. Storms rage inside and out. Crones, spirits, and nuns emerge from dreams to wander the waking world. This course uses Villette as a starting point to articulate how gothic genres articulate the psyche. Through the semester, we will read Villette slowly and carefully to trace how it constructs the psyche and its horrors. We will collect words, themes, and tropes: nerves, flashes, doubles, displacements, storms, shudders. We will map the conceptual and geographical contours of the gothic as we place the novel in conversation with psychoanalytic theory and empire studies. Further, we will trace the dispersion of the gothic into twentieth-century postcolonial fiction through Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea (1966), Jamaica Kincaid’s Lucy (1990), and Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993). Through this course, we will develop an understanding of the gothic as a mobile and flexible genre: one that folds psychic and material reality into the register of the horrific and the supernatural. Assignments will include class presentations, short writing exercises, and peer reviews; students may choose between a creative or critical final project.