Critical Social Thought 346 - Irish Gothic

In this seminar, we will study the gothic as a malleable yet persistent discursive site in Irish literary and political tradition. From the eighteenth century to the present, the gothic has been used to represent and to imagine aspects of Irish history, in particular colonialism and its traumas, in literature. The course focuses on the ways that the Irish gothic explores violence and terror, famine, and vampirism as a political metaphor. We will read novels, short fiction, poetry, and archival newspaper writing, including work by Maturin, Owenson, Lady Wilde, Mangan, LeFanu, Stoker, Joyce, Bowen, Boland, Edna O'Brien, and Heaney.

Prereq: 4 credits in English at the 300 level.