COM5216 - Haunted: Literatures of Ghosts, Spectres, Apparitions-2022/23

This module reads stories of hauntings, both literal and figurative. We will explore the complex meanings of literary ghosts, spectres, and apparitions in a range of short stories and novels. Through our readings of ghostly figures, we will study literary experiments with lingering traces of the past, unseen truths in the present, and looming fears about the future. Topics under consideration may include: conceptions of time; modernity and its fragments; repressed, violent, and forgotten histories; strangeness and unbelonging. You will gain familiarity with key works of non-Western fiction; literary techniques of modernism and surrealism; and theories of the uncanny, the alienated, and the marginal.