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The haunted house has the power to defamiliarize our sense of the domestic, turning a typical symbol of safety (the family home) into something otherworldly and threatening. It invites us to question our sense of place, of home, and of history, encouraging our connection with our surroundings, even if only to ascertain whether that noise was, in fact, just the house settling. ENGL 486 uses the haunted house as a way into the importance of place in stories designed to elicit fear, from their origins in the Gothic mode to recent manifestations in horror and supernatural fiction. The iconic structure of the haunted house provides an umbrella broad enough to encompass haunted physical buildings as well as the more figurative places of insular communities and abusive relationships and the more complex hauntings of domestic violence and mental illness. Students will leave this course with a greater understanding of horror fiction, and having engaged with scholarly approaches to setting, context, and temporality that are transferable to other areas of study. This seminar encourages students to look analytically at the dimensions (place, space, time) of something that often feels nebulous or overwhelming (fear), and to locate the generative potential in horror’s liminal spaces.

**This course is repeatable for credit under different topic titles.

About Repeatable Courses

With repeatable courses, the course number (e.g., ENGL 466) is repeatable, but the topic is not. You can take as many topics as you like under the same course number, but you can only take each individual topic once. 

Questions? Please email our Undergraduate Assistant