"The Gothic," as Joseph Bristow pertinently observes, "provides a generic space in which many kinds of sexual otherness can take shape." Barely hidden in the eerie settings of Gothic horror, then, queer characters are only seemingly displaced onto abject terrain. In fact, more often than not, Gothic texts instigate a fascination with sexual otherness on the side of the reader – but it takes one to know one, as the disclosure of queer subtexts necessarily leads the reader into dangerous territory: mandatory as a key to understanding the text, the decoding of queer subtexts also fundamentally presupposes an identification of the reader with their queer subject. What is more, the Gothic affords a motif that seems exceptionally apt to facilitate the processes of queer recognition: the double. This seminar will therefore focus on Gothic texts that, arguably, use the literary motif of the double – be he a portrait, a rogue, or the devil himself – as the irreducible queer remainder of a fragmented self that persistently reasserts itself in the course of a century that is increasingly wrapped up in the task of defining homosexuality as a clear-cut identity category.

Please read:
Hogg, James. The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner. Oxford: OUP, 2010.
Stevenson, Robert Louis. Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Ed. Katherine Linehan. New York and London: Norton, 2003.
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ed. Michael Patrick Gillespie. New York and London: Norton, 2006.

Please watch:
Fight Club. Dir. David Fincher. Perf. Edward Norton, Brad Pitt, and Helena Bonham Carter. 1999. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2013. DVD.
Black Swan. Dir. Darren Aronofsky. Perf. Natalie Portman, Mila Kunis, Vincent Cassel, and Barbara Hershey. 2010. Twentieth Century Fox Home Entertainment, 2011. DVD.