General honors (GH) classes

The Gothic in literature and film is an aesthetics of nightmare. Unsurprisingly, three of the most prominent examples of the Gothic all began in scary dreams:  Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Bram Stoker's Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde—the works this Honors course will focus on, along with films such as Nosferatu, Altered States, and Young Frankenstein.  These works present their audiences with symbols of the dark, sexual, and destructive sides of the personality and plot cautionary tales about the dangers of neglecting the unconscious.  

We will investigate how in these Gothic works of horror the unconscious erupts and takes the archetypal form of monsters that embody psychic disintegration—a mad scientist’s murderous creature, molded from remnants of the dissecting room and the tomb; the Darwinian, ape-like double of a respected doctor; and the vampire who enters the souls of young women to claim their bodies and their blood.  We’ll also consider how these stories use terror to help us see the dangers lurking in the unconscious, and like compensatory dreams, can give readers and viewers a new outlook on life that embraces both the destructive and the creative potential stored within these archetypes.