‘Here There Be Tygers’: The North American Short Story in the Dark Mode

A particularly fruitful way of studying this phenomenon is an examination of the short story. In its reliance on spatiality rather than temporality, as well as in its philosophical underpinnings of radical uncertainty (as Charles May has shown), the short story is a perfect lens for capturing the gothicity of US American and Canadian literature. This course explores a number of ways in which the North American short story reflects the various ‘hauntings’ and anxieties of the cultures from which it originates. Setting the precursors of horror fiction (Poe, Hawthorne) and practitioners of the Southern Gothic (Faulkner, O’Connor) against writers associated with a number of realist traditions (Carver, Munro, Atwood) and contemporary proponents of the bizarre (Saunders, Gaston), this course is designed to address and explore the dark undercurrent in North American literature.