Humanities Arts Cultural Stu 0248 - Lit. in the Age of Terror

"Literature in the Age of Terror" undertakes a cultural study of terror that reaches from the French Revolution to the twenty-first century. The course argues that our specifically political use of the words "terror" and "terrorism" emerged alongside a late eighteenth-century fascination with anxiety, paranoia, and panic to form part of a broad historical phenomenon that literary scholars call Romanticism. Under what political conditions, we ask, did the genre of Gothic fiction come to be read as a "terrorist school of novel writing?" By extension, how do Romantic-era reflections on the fantastic and phantasmagorical, media and mediation, revolution and counter-revolution continue to inform the discourse surrounding 9/11 and "The War on Terror?" Readings explore British reactions to the Reign of Terror, the rise of the gothic novel, the threat of "theory" in the Anglo-American academy, and a growing body of contemporary writing that engages with the legacy of 9/11.

Culture, Humanities, and Languages Writing and Research In this course, students are expected to spend nine hours a week of preparation and work outside of class time.