Training in writing expository prose. Further instruction in expository writing in conjunction with reading literature. Satisfies the second half of the Reading and Composition requirement.

America is a pretty scary place. Or is it perhaps a place that revels in frightening and being frightened? Fear makes a dramatic appearance in the literature of the United States. Over the last 200 years of American scary storytelling—a multi genre project that spans at least the disciplines of history and political theory, as well as lyric poetry, sculpture, and cinema—the nation has witnessed some of its most violent and at times indeed rather disturbing political/social upheavals. When one considers that between 1829 and 1917 alone America becomes the aggressor in a manifestly colonial rampage West, the ungodly accelerators behind a triangular trade in human flesh, the self-annihilating fratricides of an internal conflict over trivial “state’s rights”, and the deposing usurper of the queen of a remote chain of islands, before finally becoming an unwilling participant in the first Great War of the world, it perhaps does not seem so strange. (To give you a sense of scale: the American Civil War is the bloodiest conflict in American history, with more American soldiers dying than in WWI and II, combined.) This period of history, and the century which would follow it, consist in a wide variety of similar themes for gothic/horror stories. Across the last 200 or so years between 1820 and today tantalizing tales of encounter with the other or the darkness of that which is the thought “uninhabited” (empty land, empty houses, and empty minds), the jealous desire for superiority over one’s neighbor, the knock on effects of the fanatical laws of an earlier age set–in America’s case–by a terrified group of exiled zealots, along with the seemingly unending variety of new vast terrains to be lost in, all set the stage for what seems to be an unending American horror story. This class will address itself to the horror of the world America has rendered to itself for nearly its entire history. At the same time tracing a path through what these representations of our terrible life (and often life lost) belie: adamant cries against the historical horrors of an expanding state and a deep ambivalence to the strictures of a nation hellbent on civil society. Each week we will pair readings from the American 19th and 20th century with horror movies, most of which were made after 1950. We will do this to confront and query the coincidence of so much incredible American scary storytelling between 1820 and 2020. By learning to use visual and textual analysis, keeping commonplace books of quotes and descriptions, and ultimately writing two substantial papers, we will investigate the formal and stylistic patterns across scary stories told several ways to beg the question behind so much terror: Why does witnessing it seem to several audiences so terrific?

Authors and Films: Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Henry James, Richard Wright, Toni Morrison; It Follows, Cabin in the Woods, The Shining, The Innocents, Scary Movie 2.

Requisites

• Previously passed an R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Previously passed an articulated R_A course with a letter grade of C- or better. Score a 4 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Literature and Composition. Score a 4 or 5 on the Advanced Placement Exam in English Language and Composition. Score of 5, 6, or 7 on the International Baccalaureate Higher Level Examination in English.

Repeat Rules

Course is not repeatable for credit.

Requirements class fulfills