Claire Kahane - Terror in Our Time: Ian McEwan and the Modern Gothic

Gothic fiction is a popular genre meant to evoke terror using methods that are usually considered disreputable. Yet our finest writers use Gothic elements to represent the anxieties of their time. Ian McEwan's fiction, for example, often includes a terrifying scene that propels the story forward. How do we understand his recurrent use of such scenes? Why does it appeal to us? We'll closely examine some early stories, a novel and its film version, and his post-9/11 masterpiece, Saturday. Recommended reading: The stories Homemade, Butterflies, and Disguises in First Love, Last Rites, and the novels The Comfort of Strangers and Saturday, by Ian McEwan; Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach.

Claire Kahane is professor emerita of English at SUNY-Buffalo, a graduate of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a past visiting professor in the English department at UC Berkeley. A psychoanalytic critic, she has published works on modern American and British fiction, trauma, and Holocaust literature. Last year, she organized a public seminar at Berkeley on psychoanalysis and war.

Tuesdays, January 27-March 3 (6 classes)
1:30-3:30 p.m.
Location: University Hall, 2199 Addison Street, Room 41C
Click here to view a clip of the instructor's presentation

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Recommended reading for "Terror in our Time: Ian McEwan and the Modern Gothic": * "The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction" (read online at Amazon) * "The Gothic Mirror in The Mother Tongue" by Claire Kahane * Other McEwan novels you have time to read Websites of interest for this course: http://www.ianmcewan.com/ http://www.litgothic.com/LitGothic/general.html

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