FREN 4630

Ghost Stories: Literature, Cinema, and TV Series

Course Description

Course information provided by the 2025-2026 Catalog.

Taking the form of ghosts, revenants, and zombies, dead are regularly summoned up in literature, film, and TV series. Their eternal return and narrative power reflect the upheavals of our troubled times as either disquieting or mischievous, tragic, or comic characters. How can we explain this return of the repressed? How do they manifest themselves in contemporary French-language fiction? What do they tell us about ourselves, our hidden memories, our conceptions of the invisible, an our projections into the future? This seminar will scrutinize many novels, films and TV series that raise these questions by combining literary, psychological, and anthropological approaches. This will provide the opportunity of rethinking some key methodological notions such as uncanny, hauntology, and spectral turn.

Prerequisites proficiency in French.

Distribution Requirements (CA-AG, LA-AG), (ALC-AS, FLOPI-AS)

Last 4 Terms Offered (None)

View Enrollment Information