American Hauntings
Course Description
If we really want to understand a culture in all its complexity, the sociologist Avery Gordon tells us, “we must learn how to identify hauntings and reckon with ghosts.” Accordingly, in this course, we will become ghost-hunters, investigating hauntings in American literature, ranging from the early national period into the 21st century. Drawing on such authors as Washington Irving, Edgar Allan Poe, Charles Chesnutt, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Stephen King, Toni Morrison, Louise Erdrich, and Karen Russell, we will consider the special literary strategies and problems that characterize ghost stories—narratorial reliability, perspective, suspense, etc. We will also delve into the “politics of possession” as we excavate the complex, even contending ways that hauntings operate in contests over ownership, belonging, justice, and cultural memory, paying attention not least to issues of race, gender, and class.
Meet the Instructor: Judith Richardson
"Originally hailing from the New York area, I joined the Stanford English Department in 2001, after receiving my Ph.D. in American Studies from Harvard. Since then, I’ve taught a wide range of courses on American literature and cultural history, including classes on women writers, early American literature, autobiographies, the Lost Generation, the literature of cities, and more. Having written a book about the cultural history and social politics of ghostliness, titled Possessions: The History and Uses of Haunting in the Hudson Valley, I continue to be drawn to the “uncanny” in American life and history. With this, I am currently working on a rather unruly project about nineteenth-century America’s “plant-mindedness,” tracing how a multifaceted obsession with vegetable life infused understandings of personhood, social relationships, and nationhood from the Revolution to the eve of World War I. An interdisciplinary scholar at heart, I am also delighted to serve as Associate Director of the American Studies major and minor at Stanford."
