Monsters, ghosts, vampires, mad scientists, lost-and-found manuscripts, evil twins, creaking hinges, hidden trapdoors, incantations, seances, and a long etcetera of complicated bodies, spaces, and textualities typify Gothic fiction. We have been trained to understand these and other constitutive elements of the Gothic through psychoanalytic paradigms such as the uncanny, the id,
abjection, and repression. This seminar rests on the premise that, by overemphasizing repression, we have repressed other potentially illuminating approaches to the Gothic. Our goal is to explore these alternatives, paying special attention to questions of embodiment, cognition, and aesthetics as advanced by foundational and recent work in disability studies. Even though our focus falls mostly on British and American literature, the seminar welcomes and will be enriched by local, comparatist, and interdisciplinary perspectives.