American Gothic

American Gothic treats horror not as entertainment but as a cultural symptom, a way of reading how anxieties about race, gender, science, and religion get displaced into haunted houses, mad narrators, and alien crews. You'll move chronologically from Brockden Brown and Poe through Faulkner, Jackson, and Butler, pairing fiction with films like Alien or Rosemary's Baby, and the work is mostly close reading: one essay, a homework assignment, an open-book final, and steady class discussion. It fits naturally after introductory AMER lit surveys and pairs well with courses on race, gender, or American history, since the payoff is learning to argue in prose about what a culture finds unspeakable.