Bad Blood: Conflict and the Family in Literature and Cinema

The family home, often thought of as a refuge from the outside world, can also be a site of tension, competition, violence and horror. Why does dysfunction in the domestic sphere shock and fascinate us, and why is the gothic so intimately tied to the domestic? Readings and viewings from: Shakespeare, Shelley, Brontë, Wilde, Nabokov, Salinger, Hitchcock, Kubrick, Park Chan-wook.