English 149-2 - Fall, 2011

Topics in Literature

Topic: Extreme Makeovers: Converted Spaces & Haunted Remains

Class Information

Instructor: Rapatz, Vanessa
CRN: 83694
Time: MWF 1:10-2:00
Location: 105 Olson

Description

In her discussion of Toni Morrison’s Paradise, Linda Krumholz suggests that the convent in the novel “represents history as a densely layered palimpsest, a history simultaneously hidden and revealed.” The convent, in this case, works as a palimpsest because it is both a converted space and a space of conversion. The history of the structure itself has been transformed, as have its inhabitants and the former lives of both convent and characters come into play to haunt the novel’s landscape. Of course, convents with such layered histories are certainly not new settings in literary texts, nor are they the only places where past and present converge either visibly or metaphorically.

This course will examine converted and haunted spaces and how their functions and genres compare to, complement, and/or complicate our readings of these converted enclosures. We will begin our exploration of converted spaces with the early modern texts The Jew of Malta, Upon Appleton House, and The Convent of Pleasure, which will introduce several of the themes for the course, such as enclosure, exile, and memory. Beginning with these texts will allow us to consider the many different ways history can haunt settings both real and literary.

While the texts that bookend the course readings focus on either converted convents (Upon Appleton House) or spaces converted into convents (Marlowe’s drama The Jew of Malta and Morrison’s historical novel Paradise), the texts that fall in between, including works by Edgar Allan Poe and H.P. Lovecraft, provide a survey of haunted settings that cross historical, national, and generic boundaries. This variety will allow us not only to explore the function of repurposed spaces in particular texts, but also to interrogate and compare how the architecture or institutional parameters of particular literary texts influence our readings of the converted structures at their centers.

Grading

TBA

Texts

The Jew of Malta (1589), Christopher Marlowe
Upon Appleton House Selections (1651), Andrew Marvell
Convent of Pleasure (1668), Margaret Cavendish
"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892), Charlotte Perkins Gilman
Fall of the House of Usher (1893), Edgar Allan Poe
"The Rats in the Walls" (1923), H.P. Lovecraft
Four Quartets (1944), T.S. Eliot
Paradise (1997), Toni Morrison