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Instructors: Dr. Jochen Ecke
Event type:
online: Seminar
Displayed in timetable as:
05.874.313
Hours per week:
2
Language of instruction:
Englisch
Min. | Max. participants:
- | 15
Registration group: ELC 313
Priority scheme: Senatsrichtlinie
Requirements / organisational issues:
This class will be taught asynchronously.
Contents:
When we think of the Gothic, we think of lengthy novels: Ann Radcliffe’s Mysteries of Udolpho, which in most editions comes in at about 700 pages or the 450 or so pages of Bram Stoker’s Dracula. However, the Gothic tradition could just as well be called a tradition of shorter literary forms: Gothic novellas, ghost stories, and weird tales were a staple of 19th and early 20th-century culture. In this class, we are going to explore this parallel Gothic tradition, starting out with shorter 18th-century texts such as Horace Walpole’s foundational The Castle of Otranto (1764) and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance (1790) and then diving into the short Gothic fiction of the 19th century. We will have a look at the very first vampire story in the English language, Polidori’s “The Vampyre” (1816) as well as Sheridan Le Fanu’s highly influential queer vampire tale “Carmilla” (1871). With Mary Reynold’s “A Futile Ghost” (1899) and Elizabeth Bowen’s “The Demon Lover” (1945), we are going to explore the ghost story as a pronouncedly female domain of the Gothic. And we will consider the transformation of the Gothic into the so-called “Weird Tale” at the beginning of the 20th century with Arthur Machen’s “The White People” (1904) and M.R. James’s “Casting the Runes” (1911).
Recommended reading list:
Please buy the Oxford World’s Classics editions of Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s A Sicilian Romance. The other primary texts will be made available in Moodle.
Digital teaching:
Our online platform will be Moodle/LMS (lms.uni-mainz.de). For writing feedback, we are going to use the free online tool KAIZENA.
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