Haunting: Page, Stage, and Screen

(3 Credit Hours) · Undergraduate

If you visit any major city in the United States (and beyond), ghost tours are perennially one of the most popular tourist attractions, whether equipped with spooky, mist-decaled buses or bloody-faced period costumed walking guides. Why does this delightful and disturbing tourist trap thrive in so many locations? Perhaps the best way to understand any person, any place, and culture is to understand their dead. In Haunting: Page, Stage, and Screen, we will examine haunting as a method of representing grief, loss, systemic violence, and survival in spite of all that. By reading haunting across genres of prose, drama, and film, we will consider how metaphors of haunting function as an orientation to the past across mediums and cultural contexts. Does be haunting mean the same thing in different historical moments and geographical locations? What kinds of haunting are made available on the page, on the stage, or on the screen? Can a text or a person be haunted even without a ghost? Beginning with Hamlet (one of the earliest and most important literary ghosts), we will trace haunting to the present. Ultimately, by thinking critically about haunting, we hope to learn a little about living.