: After an introduction on the significance of the Gothic in Scottish culture and literature, the course will look at two contemporary novels that provide two very different visions of the Gothic in Contemporary Scotland and, I would argue, in the contemporary world. The first, Jenni Fagan’s The Panopticon, tells the story of young adults in the care system in Scotland, particularly following Anais Hendricks, a fifteen-year-old orphan placed in an institution called “the Panopticon”. The questions of vulnerability and imaginative escape are central to this book, involving strategies that draw on the Gothic imagination. The second, John Burnside’s Glister, is a polyphonous account of the disappearance of children in a hintertland presented as a kind of postindustrial, maybe even a postapocalyptic wasteland. Central to that novel is the human-non-human connections as well as a deep concern for our survival as a species among other living species. This course examines the concept of alterity in relation to contemporary Scottish writing. We will tackle issues of surveillance, subalternity, and contemporary Gothic as a means of escape, as well as ecocriticism and the ecogothic.
