Spring 2015

Instructor: Prof. Deidre Lynch

This is a class on the aesthetics and politics of the Gothic tradition, from Frankenstein to Freaks. How has this tradition’s fascination with those who come back from the dead mediated social anxieties about the generation of life or the lifelike? We’ll be considering vampire and other monster fictions by such authors as John Polidori, Mary Shelley, Sheridan LeFanu, Bram Stoker, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Gaston Leroux. We’ll conclude the semester with an investigation of early horror cinema exploring how the modern medium of cinema gave Gothic preoccupations with the animation of the dead a new lease on life.

Taught through the Harvard College General Education Program, Culture and Belief Division