Undergraduate Courses | Summer 2025
Undergraduate Courses | Summer 2025
358:338 Horror and Hilarity: Dark Pleasure in 19th c. British and American Gothic Literature
- Course Code: 01:358:338
E1 05/27-07/03 08620 ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS ROSENTHAL
Horror and Hilarity: Dark Pleasure in 19th c. British and American Gothic Literature
This course will explore an array of 19th c. British and American texts that can be classified as gothic: stories of monsters, violence, insanity, dread, and the supernatural. The texts in this course will primarily be composed of novellas, short-stories, plays, and a smattering of poetry. We will read iconic and lesser-known works to better understand how the genre changed over the course of the 19th c. in response to issues of empire, gender, race, and disability, all of which helped to shape the transatlantic literary imagination. In doing so, we will trace the affects of horror and hilarity and explore how these seemingly antithetical readerly responses are more compatible than one might expect.
Works by the following authors may appear in this course’s syllabus: Monk Lewis, Richard Brinsley Peake, Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Oscar Wilde, Henry James, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rudyard Kipling, Alfred Tennyson, and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.
The major assignments of the course will be a short paper, a long paper, and a final exam.
358:328 Scandals on Stage: Gossip, Reputation, and the Rise of the Actress
- Course Code: 01:358:328
E1 05/27-07/03 08619 ONLINE ASYNCHRONOUS HAAS
Scandals on Stage: Gossip, Reputation, and the Rise of the Actress
How might centuries-old gossip enrich our understanding of Restoration and early-eighteenth century theatre and drama? How did the introduction of the first generation of actresses ignite and transform the British stage and the lives of the theatre-going public? How did early actresses create, cultivate, and even weaponize their notoriety, and to what extent did said notoriety influence larger debates about womanhood, reputation, and celebrity? We will consider these and other related questions in this summer course, during which students will encounter and analyze a small collection of Restoration and early-18th century plays. Alongside these rich, raunchy, and oftentimes downright outrageous comedies, students will also investigate a number of secondary materials including periodicals like gossip “rags” and other salacious pamphlets and broadsides, personal diaries and familiar letters, works of art, popular songs, and more.