Ghost Stories and the Uncanny

In this online course we will read some classic ghost stories from M.R. James, Rudyard Kipling, Edith Wharton and others. Ghost stories achieve some of their effects through the presence of what Sigmund Freud termed the uncanny. We will explore Freud’s concept of the uncanny and use this to think about ghost stories, which often turn on an invasion of the strange (the unheimlich or unhomely) within the familiar (the homely or domestic), or the eruption of the past in the present. For instance, a Cambridge academic finds a bronze whistle in a ruined building belonging to the Knights Templar and takes it to his hotel room in M.R. James’ story ‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad’; a young Polish scholar working in an Italian archive becomes obsessed with a 16th-century woman named Medea da Carpi in Amour Dure by Vernon Lee.

We will read a wide range of Victorian and Edwardian ghost stories on this course, as well as E.T.A. Hoffmann’s uncanny classic ‘The Sandman’, which Freud discusses in his essay.

Week 1. E.T.A. Hoffmann, ‘The Sandman’ (short story, 1817) and Sigmund Freud, ‘The Uncanny’ (essay, 1919).

Week 2. M.R. James: ‘Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad’ (1904) and ‘A Warning to the Curious’ (1925; short stories)

Week 3: Vernon Lee, ‘Amour Dure’ (novella, 1887)

Week 4. Rudyard Kipling: ‘They’ (1904) and ’A Madonna of the Trenches’ (1924; short stories)

Week 5: Edith Wharton, ‘Afterward’ (1910) and ‘Kerfol’ (1916; short stories)

Week 6: Mary Butts, ‘With and Without Buttons’ (1938) and May Sinclair, ‘The Intercessor’ (1911)

By the end of the course, you should be familiar with:

•Some of the key writers of ghost stories and their work.

•Sigmund Freud’s notion of the uncanny and its role in ghost stories.