THE GOTHIC: SUBLIME TO UNCANNY

This team-taught course explores parallel literary, architectural, and theoretical explorations of the “Gothic” from the mid-18th century to the present, focusing on the “darker” psychological undercurrents of the Gothic and their relationship to modern conceptions of the self.  Among the writers, architects, and theorists that the class will examine are:  Edmund Burke, Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe,and Etienne-Louis Boullée in the eighteenth century; Jane Austen, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Victor Hugo, and John Ruskin in the nineteenth century; and Sigmund Freud, Franz Kafka, Wilhelm Worringer, Hans Poelzig, Julia Kristeva, Daniel Libeskind, Peter Eisenman, and W.G. Sebald in the twentieth century.