Review, Hoeveler & Heller, eds., Approaches to Teaching Gothic Fiction (2003)

Approaches To Teaching Gothic Fiction: The British And American Traditions by Diane Long Hoeveler

My rating: 3 of 5 stars


This is a collection of essays mostly about actual courses people have taught, so it's mostly rather dry, factual reporting of practical applications of various kinds of pedagogy to the Gothic. (The stand-out exception was the guy who brilliantly made his class of non-majors write an epistolary novel together.) I found it interesting mostly because I want to incorporate more Gothic in my teaching (although even there, I would have preferred at least partial focus on more modern Gothic, instead of the one essay about teaching Anne Rice and Stephen King*). I mean, it's an MLA book, I should not be surprised that the approach is, ahem, conservative. (And I did appreciate Tamar Heller pushing the boundary with her essay on teaching race, gender, and imperialism in Victorian Gothic.)

So, yeah, not of interest unless you really are interested in teaching 18th and 19th century Gothic. (Or, of course, Anne Rice and Stephen King.)

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*Because of which, I think, all the other essays in the book, when they mention modern Gothic/horror, do so as if "Anne Rice and Stephen King" is a suitable synecdoche for the whole shebang (instead of just two examples of an extraordinarily diverse genre) which is the kind of superficial understanding I was actually hoping a book about teaching the Gothic would not have.



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