IDND026

Description

This course examines a genre that has persisted since the eighteenth century: the Gothic. Both popular and canonical, Gothic narratives walk an uneasy line between indulging the reader's desire for the thrill of a good ghost story and suggesting that the paranormal elements might all be the figment of an overactive imagination. The Gothic, in other words, is a genre that challenges the distinction between reality and imagination, truth and fiction. This course considers how issues of mediation dovetail with Gothic narrative's blurring of the line between reality and fiction. How do the conventions of the Gothic adapt to visual and audio media? Why do so many fictional Gothic stories manage to fool their readers into believing that these tales are nonfiction, and how does choice of media factor into this confusion? How have ideas about the ways media represent, record, and distort reality influenced the construction of Gothic narrative? How might the media themselves be Gothic? To address these questions, we will study Gothic narratives across a range of media, from print books to film/television to social media platforms, art and podcasts.