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Although the tradition of the Gothic in American literature has been likened to a "poetics of fear," this is not a course in the horror story. Still, the Gothic is a literature of darkness, as the vocabulary of its study implies. The Other, the doppelganger, the unspeakable, the proscribed, the irrevocable, violence, duplicity, and madness: this is the language of the Gothic. At once subversive and popular, Gothic literature is psychologically complex, morally unsettling, and deeply rewarding. In this class we will explore this literary tradition, begun in the years following the Enlightenment in opposition to the "age of reason." This class will consider manifestations of the Gothic in American literature from Poe to the present. We will consider fiction by Nathaniel Hawthorne, William Faulkner, Truman Capote, Flannery O'Connor and others. Recent criticism has considered the work of contemporary writers like Amiri Baraka, Kathy Acker and Paul Auster in a gothic context, so we will not be confined to genre writers.