Article
“A National Literature of Irrationalism”: Horror and the Weird as Foundations for an American Literature Survey Course
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies
(2022)
Abstract
While recent pedagogical scholarship has examined how to teach horror and “weird fiction” in the American Literature classroom, there has been no study of the possibility of organizing an entire American Literature survey course around such texts. I elaborate on my own experience teaching such a survey course, which used texts in the American “weird” tradition to examine the whole US literary tradition in terms of the nation’s originary conflict between the forces of reason and unreason. I pay particular attention to the first two weeks of the course, in which we set up this framework through readings of Langston Hughes, The Declaration of Independence, Jonathan Edwards, Michael Wigglesworth, and Phillis Wheatley. I discuss pedagogical considerations underlying the course design, and ways that readers might adapt the course’s principles beyond its immediate context.
Keywords
- American literature,
- horror,
- Jonathan Edwards,
- Langston Hughes,
- Michael Wigglesworth,
- pedagogy,
- Phillis Wheatley,
- survey course,
- unreason,
- weird
Disciplines
Publication Date
Spring May 15, 2022
DOI
http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol6no2.1
Citation Information
Ali Chetwynd. "“A National Literature of Irrationalism”: Horror and the Weird as Foundations for an American Literature Survey Course" AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies Vol. 6 Iss. 2 (2022) p. 2 - 25 ISSN: 2550-1542 Available at: http://works.bepress.com/awejfortranslation-literarystudies/327/