| Lerninhalte |
Originating in the late-eighteenth century English novel, the Gothic has evolved into a transculturally popular genre that comes in many forms and media: from the visual arts and music to fashion and film, from long and shorter prose fiction to the memoir. After tracing the origins of the literary Gothic to the cross-national influences of Romantic writers such as E. T. A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Matthew Lewis, the seminar will explore its history in the nineteenth-century Gothic novel and short story. While focusing mainly on literature and film, the seminar sets out to analyse how intermedial transformations have shaped the cultural phenomenon of the Gothic throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. Concepts such as 'the uncanny' will be examined as well as the effect Gothic culture has on gender constructions. The political and public aspects of a Gothic aesthetics will be analysed in more loosely defined genres such as the memoir. The goal of the seminar is to engage with the historically changing meanings of the Gothic, both as a genre and with reference to some of its enduringly popular key texts. In order to focus on interrelations between genres, the seminar will proceed by turning to crucial motifs and configurations of the Gothic such as the shapeshifter, the vampire figure, the ghost, the witch, seances and dreams. A list of relevant texts will be made available on Moodle in due course. |
