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

This course focuses on developing visual language literacy and theoretical frameworks through analyzing and creating a range of narrative media. We will examine a range of visual scholarly and creative works, starting with sequential art and moving into time-based and interactive media.

Students will:
1. Learn “close reading” strategies for…[Read more]

Is the divide between human and machine becoming harder to maintain? From the Golem of folk tales to Frankenstein and even Siri, the concept of the semi-artificial person, or cyborg, is long-lived, appearing across popular, religious, and scientific imaginations. As technology becomes more personal, the cyborg becomes less alien, and the prospect…[Read more]

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.

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

The article traces two phases of SF about human species change, the first in the 1940s and early 1950s, the so called “golden age” of SF. In this first phase the advent of the posthuman is brought on by eugenics or sudden mutations caused by fallout from nuclear war. It consists of well-known books by most of the leading authors of the period: C…[Read more]

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

A review of Robert Leucht’s “Dynamiken politischer Imagination. Die deutschsprachige Utopie von Stifter bis Döblin in ihren internationalen Kontexten, 1848–1930” (2016) and Ulrich Bach’s “Tropics of Vienna: Colonial Utopias of the Habsburg Empire” (2016)

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.