The “Schoolhouse Gothic” represents teachers, students, and academic institutions using Gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse, and the trap. Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel The Accursed both exemplifies and deviates from this tradition. Like other Schoolhouse Gothic works, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power…[Read more]

The Gothic metafiction of Stephen King and Bret Easton Ellis focuses on author-protagonists who fear what they create because their creations are re-creations, projections of their creator’s anxieties, some conventionally Gothic (the multiple/split self) and others specific to postmodern conceptions of subjectivity in general and authorship in p…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse, albeit an ambivalent one, is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Presumably benign institutions, schools may seem more like unfeeling bureaucracies, brainwashing factories, militaristic zones, or lawless waste…[Read more]

To review the history of the Gothic as a counter-Enlightenment discourse is to see the suitability, if not the inevitability, of the Gothic treatment of education and educators. Schools and schoolteachers are keepers and transmitters of enlightenment. At the same time, schools and teachers are figures of power. They decide when children work, when…[Read more]

Literary Gothic emerged in the eighteenth century, the so-called Age of Reason, and takes as its subject the enemies of reason: superstition, madness, barbarism, taboo, etc. In the Gothic, these adversaries are engaged and often defeated. At the same time, however, the Gothic is a claustrophobic, paranoid literature, both profoundly skeptical of…[Read more]

The X-Files may be one of the most popular forms of historiographic metafiction, as Linda Hutcheon defines the term, ever produced. The show is, among other things, an extended meditation on the inescapability and elusiveness of history, both personal and public. At the center of the show is Fox Mulder’s personal history—his obsession with the mem…[Read more]

This essay examines the blend of male and female Gothic conventions in James Baldwin’s Go Tell It On The Mountain

from Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 50:1 (2008), 51–68

This is the Fall 2017 course syllabus for AML 2010: American Literature to 1865 to be taught at Florida SouthWestern State College.

A contribution to the Editors’ Forum on Queer Form, edited by Kadji Amin, Roy Pérez, and Amber Musser, for ASAP/Journal.

Because nineteenth-century paper was made from rags, the materiality of paper money became a likely ground from which to debate the nature of value in modern capitalism. On one hand, if paper money was backed by nothing but itself, then it was worth little more than itself: a gathering of lowly rags. On the other hand, the process of turning…[Read more]

Margaret Randall states that “as we re-search our histories … infrequently there is an exploration of an uncharted, complex terrain, and some new mapping happens” (8). Adopting Randall’s statement, this paper examines travelling poetry and anti-capitalism in the poetry of Lorna Dee Cervantes and the song lyrics of Rage Against the Machine (RATM…[Read more]

Explains why we should pay more attention to Hawthorne’s narrative of his discovery of the “mysterious package” in “The Custom House” and Scarlet Letter narrative-arc.

The essays I am posting on Humanities Commons are also on Librarything and Goodreads. These aren’t reviews. They are thoughts about the state of literary fiction, intended principally for writers and critics involved in seeing where literature might be able to go. Each one uses a book as an example of some current problem in writing.