Victorian Gothic
This course will look at the Victorian Gothic with a special focus on genre and adaptation in video games. We will start with a discussion of early Gothic literature, differentiating between terror and horror (the Schauer-Romantik school). The rest of the course will be divided according to the many subgenres of Gothic literature that took form across the period, including the rise of the Imperial Gothic, late-Victorian Slum Fiction, the rise of the Detective Novel, and Sensational Murder Mysteries. Each of our course units will conclude with a discussion of the Gothic genre’s legacy in modern video games, focusing both on the (re)interpretation of Victorian Gothic tropes and techniques across mediums, and focusing on how literature and gameplay allow us to do different things with these horror stories. We will finish the course with a special unit on literary texts that are inspired by neo-Victorian video game precursors: this final unit might, for example, include a study of the Castlevania Series, which is based on the Japanese video game Konami and which features Dracula and Carmilla as primary characters.
You need not be an expert on video games, nor on the Gothic literature; rather, we will use these two mediums (literature and video games) to learn about the many forms and legacy of this horrific tradition, from the nineteenth-century to now. Class presentations and guest lectures will pay particular attention to using the video game as a pedagogical tool –e.g., using games in the classroom to think about Gothic terms and tropes and their legacy. We might, for example, talk about the use of avatars and the Gothic Double, or we might examine the relationship between the game’s non-linear narrative and the Gothic’s rejection of time discipline. Possible texts for this course include, AC Doyle’s Sign of Four; Margaret Harkness’s A City Girl; Arthur Morrison’s A Child of the Jago; Florence Marryat’s The Blood of the Vampire; Sheridan Le Fanu’s Carmilla; Bram Stoker’s Dracula; and Alan Moore’s From Hell. Games that we might discuss include (depending on students’ interests), The Sherlock Holmes Series, Assassin’s Creed: Syndicate, Bloodborne, The Order: 1886, etc.