GRMN 150W - Freshman Seminar: the Berlin Wall in Literature and Film

Fall (4) Morrison

Man, Monsters and Machines: The Self and Other in the 19th Century Ghost Story. In 1816 Mary Shelley set out to write a story that “would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature, and awaken thrilling horror – one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of the heart.” Shelley’s fantasy of creation and control, of scientific experimentation gone badly awry, finds an echo in the works of authors such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Achim von Arnim, Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne. All of these authors share a fascination with the border between life and death, the natural and the supernatural, the real and the imagined, the self and other. Do ghosts walk? Can shadows separate themselves from the body and take on a life of their own? Do horrors exist or are they merely the products of our fevered imaginations? This course will examine the Romantics’ preoccupation with haunted houses, spectral apparitions, automatons, monsters and mesmerism. Drawing on Freud’s theories of the uncanny and 19th century research on mesmerism and the supernatural, we will examine works that explore the often unstable boundaries between the known and the unknown, the explicable and the mysterious, the familiar and uncanny.