The aim of this English seminar is twofold. It is designed to help Master’s students improve their reading, writing, listening, and speaking skills through regular practice while introducing them to the formal study of a major mode of Anglo-American fiction writing – the Gothic. Gothic narratives come in many shapes, crossing over different media – from 19th-century tales of loneliness and terror (Brown, Poe, Gilman) to more modern southern fables (Faulkner, O’Connor) and Hollywood’s guilt-ridden, often uncanny works (Hitchcock, Lang, Lynch), horror fiction (Corman, Friedkin) and parodic rewritings (Sharman). Through close analyses of selected excerpts, short stories, and films, we will wonder whether Gothic fiction is, in Leslie Fiedler’s words, “a literature of darkness in a land of light and affirmation.”
- Enseignant.e: Anne Martina