American Literature: The Gothic and Edgar Allan Poe

A course on English and American literature: the Gothic, the fantastic and the horror in the short stories of E. A. Poe.

In this course I will try to offer a glimpse into the most common Gothic and uncanny motifs that occur in the works of Edgar Allan Poe. I the introductory part I intend to discuss examples of both English and American literature, while in the second part of the course emphasis will fall on specific examples/texts by E. A. Poe. This course is more than just literary analysis: we will try to look at the ways the elements of the gothic generate fear and horror, as well as a sense of anxiety. Such elements include, of course, monsters, ghost, doppelgangers, ladies buried alive, mad protagonists, repetition of places, characters and objects, as well as labyrinth like settings, claustrophobic gothic mansions. I will look at how, by what means such elements reflect on characters/narrators and how they create suspense in the most unexpected ways.

Each lesson discusses a story/poem written by Poe and attempts to offer a unique interpretation of these literary texts. How do Poe’s stories master the elements of horror? How do such texts create suspense? To answer these questions we will try to make use of Sigmund Freud’s concept of “the uncanny” as well as Tzvetan Todorov’s concept of “the fantastic.”