CLCS 335 Hauntings
This creative writing/cultural theory course focuses on the concept of haunting and related phenomena such as possession or exorcism. The course draws from recent scholarly work in hauntology, a term coined by Jacques Derrida in his SpectresdeMarx (1993). What emerges from this area of research is an unusual theoretical space in which to consider literature and culture, both philosophically (as critical thinkers) and creatively (as authors and performance artists). The class explores and creatively experiments with texts that function primarily as a medium for giving voice to those realms of human experience that are generally considered unreasonable and extrasensory; otherworldly perceptions of parallel dimensions that transcend the laws and rational orderings of the knowable physical world. Students will reflect on ghostly metaphors and manifestations as they are summoned, in various forms and to different ends, by fiction writers, performers, and filmmakers who tend to link stories of haunting to social-psychic-emotional disturbances: expressions of diasporic sensibilities and hyphenated ethnicities, stigmas of invisibility related to shadows of class and gender, spectral polyvalence and the paranormal activity emerging from recent theoretical discourse around taboo conceptual couplings such as the queer child and/or the "unruly/child".