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Entertaining monsters: teaching the Gothic novel.

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Abstract

Some of the difficulties instructors find in teaching the Gothic novel can be resolved by helping students understand how Gothic texts use language to bring about their effects. Students who interrogate the meaning of the Gothic through writing and reflecting about its various critical uses benefit by experiencing how the Gothic also questions notions of identity, culture, and society. More importantly, though, they realize that the Gothic is a specific and highly conventional means of interrogating themselves and the world they live in.

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Many educators believe that students enter their classrooms as willing participants in the effort to change the way they think. But as Robert Leamnson suggests, many undergraduate students--particularly freshmen--may feel otherwise. In fact, Leamnson argues that many students come to classes feeling mostly defensive about the prospect of learning something new. The reason for this defensiveness has less to do with the decreasing standards at secondary schools than with the difficulty of learning how to think in ways that literally change their brains, not to mention their minds. Indeed, most learning tasks require changes that usually occur with some degree of difficulty. As Leamnson writes, "to change our minds at someone else's suggestion can be traumatic" (Leamnson 40). This trauma can be compounded by an unwelcome course, topic, or method of teaching.

The invitation to undergo a significant mental change is particularly resisted in undergraduate courses on the Gothic. Teaching the Gothic novel is neither simple nor straightforward and any pedagogy that claims to offer such approaches are either woefully misguided or shamelessly misdirected. Some of the reasons for this are not difficult to understand. Some students, unfamiliar with the uses of Gothic conventions, come prepared to denounce the genre as a whole by claiming it to be unedifying at best and evil at worst. Others suggest that it is nothing more than an inappropriate means of exploring, even celebrating, humankind's tendency to commit evil acts. Students who do claim familiarity with the genre usually do so from a limited frame of reference that mostly consists of cheap horror movies or a quick reading of a Stephen King novel. Clearly, teaching undergraduate students to read Gothic novels requires not only a certain amount of patience, but also a significant strategy to help students overcome their initial ambivalence. Part of this strategy, I suggest, should require teachers to help students learn how to experience visceral responses to verbal messages. In other words, if students complain that Gothic literature is frightening, teachers ought to explain that fear...

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