The American Novel
MIT OpenCourseWare offers this literature seminar built around the idea of haunting in American fiction. Readings trace how colonial violence, slavery, and other buried histories resurface as ghosts, guilt, and unresolved memory in novels by writers such as Hawthorne, Faulkner, and Morrison. The course materials include a full syllabus, weekly reading assignments, discussion questions, and paper prompts that ask students to connect a novel's supernatural elements to the historical wounds it reworks. Class sessions are structured around close reading and discussion rather than lecture, with an emphasis on how form and narrative voice carry historical weight. Assignments include short response papers and a longer critical essay. All materials are available free through MIT OpenCourseWare under its usual open license, with no instructor interaction but complete access to syllabus, readings list, and assignment sheets as originally taught.