Ghost Stories
Herbert Marks
Comparative Literature
Consulting the spirit world with the help of a Ouija board, the poet James Merrill received an unsettling message: “Give up everything except the ghost!” If all art is haunted, as Merrill seems to suggest, and artists are spiritual conjurers, the barrier separating the dead and the living grows thinnest when we approach it through the medium of the ghost story. Beginning with spirit photography and the vengeful phantoms of Nō theater and Japanese cinema (Ugetsu), this course will pursue a succession of notable ghosts who have haunted the house of fiction from biblical times to the recent past. Our sessions will be focused on such figures as the ghost of Samuel (in the Bible’s most enigmatic tale), the neurotic governess in “The Turn of the Screw” (both the original story by Henry James and its musical recasting by Benjamin Britten), ritual masks from Africa (of which the I.U. Art Museum has a notable collection), the troubled souls, alive and dead, in Merrill’s The Book of Ephraim and W.G. Sebald’s Austerlitz (the first a mock-epic exploration of the spirit world, the second a study of haunted memory in the wake of the Holocaust), and, of course, the ghost of Hamlet in Shakespeare’s most famous play (which we’ll link to some lesser known precursors and successors).
This class meets with CMLT-C 255.
Catalog Information: HON-H 234 LITERATURE OF TIME AND PLACE