We'll read a variety of nineteenth-century supernatural texts and explore the following:  Is there an identifiable "formula" for the ghost story?  How do authors cultivate a suspension of disbelief within a text?  Do contemporary audiences react as earlier readers might have?  Why do supernatural tales endure--do they serve a cultural or psychological purpose?

TEXTS

Great Ghost Stories, Ed. John Grafton
The Yellow Wallpaper and Other Stories, Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Young Goodman Brown and Other Stories, Nathaniel Hawthorne
The Raven and Other Poems, Edgar Allan Poe
The Gold Bug and Other Tales, Edgar Allan Poe
"The Eyes," Edith Wharton
The Turn of the Screw, Henry James
Green Tea and Other Stories, J. Sheridan LeFanu

AUTHOR LINKS  

Class participation is worth 10% of your final grade. Other assignments, with grade percentages and descriptions, follow.

Responses/Quizzes (10%): Each day, you should be familiar enough with the reading to be able to write a response in class (I'll give you questions as prompts.) We will use the responses in class or I'll collect and grade them as quizzes.

Tests (30%): We will have a test (identification, short answer, and/or essay) at the end of each week. Tests will cover texts and terms discussed during the week.

Conversation Paper (25%): Choose three characters from any of the texts we've read and write a "conversation" among the three characters that highlights in some way their importance to the text. At some point, you should enter the conversation! The paper should be approximately 3 pages long. Remember to use quotation marks around direct quotations. Also, put the author's last name and the page number in parentheses like this--> (Poe 14) if you use some of the original text. The goal is to write a new dialogue emphasizing the characters' essence, so use direct quotations sparingly.

Group Presentation (25%): During the final week of class, you will be involved in a group presentation. The goal is to demonstrate some aspect of the significance of the text(s) creatively.

• Write a short play about the further adventures of one of the characters in a way that demonstrates one of the most important qualities or characteristics of the work as a whole.
• Or write a play about what happens to the character before we meet them (if the original text isn't clear on this point) in a way that sheds insight into the text.
• Or select several characters from the texts we've read since the conversation papers and do a three-dimensional "conversation," or staged scene. (With this option, however, you cannot use any character that you wrote about in the conversation paper as a major part of the scene…he/she may have "walk- on" roles if needed.)
• Or write a play that places several characters in a contemporary setting of some kind.

SCHEDULE