Sections offered SPRING 2022:
#34609 |
HERBERT MARKS |
MW 3:00 PM–5:30 PM
|
GA 1118 |
CLASS NOTES: Meets with CMLT-C 255; meets In Person. For more information visit https://covid.iu.edu/learning-modes/index.html
Consulting the spirit world with the help of a ouija board, the poet James Merrill received an unsettling message: “Give up everything except the ghost!” If all art is haunted, as Merrill seems to suggest, and artists are spiritual conjurers, the barrier between the dead and the living grows thinnest when we approach it through the medium of the ghost story. Beginning with spirit photography and the vengeful phantoms of Japanese cinema, this course will pursue a succession of notable ghosts who have haunted the house of literature and the sister arts over the course of the last century. We shall be looking at the work of such conjurers as Ueda Akinari, Benjamin Britten, James Merrill, Kenji Mizoguchi, Edvard Munch, and W.G. Sebald, while considering some explanations, psychological and social, for our fascination with the uncanny—and perhaps a few occult techniques popular among modern spiritualists.