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Mar 19, 2025
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2022-2023 Hill Book (Class of 2026) [ARCHIVED HILL BOOK]
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ENG 170 - What Ghosts Can Say: In/Visible Men & Women (Cornerstone Seminar)Three Credits
Periodically or As Needed
“What ghosts can say-/Even the ghosts of fathers-comes obscurely.”-Adrienne Rich “Ghost stories represent the return of the repressed in its most literal and paradigmatic form.”-Julia Briggs What can ghosts say? More precisely, what can representations of ghosts in literature and film say? From Macbeth (1606) to The Turn of the Screw (1898) to The Sixth Sense (1999), ghosts make frequent appearances in fictional narratives. While ghost stories can be fun and spooky, they can also be means of investigating what haunts the cultural imaginary; they teach us not just about the dead but the living. In this course, we will examine a diverse array of “ghost stories”- understood as a flexible genre-in order to explore how fictional ghosts often reveal real psychological and historical trauma. For example, in novels about American racial injustice such as Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing (2017) and Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987), ghosts make visible the invisible, telling the stories of those whose have been erased or silenced until they return in spectral form. As a cornerstone English course, we will also practice close reading, collaborative discussion, and clear, persuasive writing, skills beneficial in and beyond college.
General Education Attribute(s): First-Year Seminar, Literature Cornerstone
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