The American Gothic as the One True American Literary Form

Note: The following is an essay originally written for Professor Nancy Easterlin after she took over the Short Story as a Genre class during the Fall 2010 semester at the University of New Orleans following the untimely death of the late Professor J.W. Cooke. Date of creation: December 26, 2010. If referring to this essay academically, please remember to make the appropriate citations so as to avoid running afoul of your institution's plagiarism policy.


The American Gothic functions as a window into the greater American consciousness, offering a keen insight into the workings of the American psyche, and as such, it can be claimed that it is the true, defining genre of American literature. In the Introduction to American Gothic Fiction, Allan Lloyd Smith, writing of The Great Gatsby, says the American Gothic is about "the return of the past, of the repressed and denied, the buried secret that subverts and corrodes the present, whatever the culture does not want to know or admit" (Smith 1). The tropes of the genre divulge a great deal about the American character, fears given form revealing basic traits and archetypes that allow the critic to infer a great deal about the author and society.
Smith goes on to say that the imagined Americas in which the genre takes place are "largely imitative if eccentric version of the dominant culture" (3), and that the works themselves "are not so much working to adapt the Gothic mode; instead the Gothic emerges from the conditions they seek to describe." The entire experience of the New World, and the actions and consequences of its settlers, created new pressures that crystallized the American Gothic as an emerging genre: "the frontier experience, with its inherent solitude and potential violence; the Puritan inheritance; [...] the relative absence of developed 'society'" (5). This essay will explore the importance of the American Gothic to the larger American meta-narrative, the inextricable role of religion in both, and will dissect three short stories representative of the genre by examining the tropes used in each.

Oral Performance and the Transfiguration of the Commonplace

Note: The following is an essay originally written for Professor Niyi Osundare's Poetry as a Genre class during the Fall 2010 semester at the University of New Orleans. Date of creation: September 27, 2010. If referring to this essay academically, please remember to make the appropriate citations so as to avoid running afoul of your institution's plagiarism policy.

In the short 2010 documentary "music in high places" [sic] Taylor Pate, then Poetry Editor of the New Delta Review, at Louisiana State University was interviewed. The impetus for the documentary was investigation into the lives of young Baton Rouge poets and musicians who had grown up in alternative educational forms, namely Christian schooling and homeschooling, and how this affected their art. Pate, the son of a Christian pastor, was asked to what extent he felt prosleytization was informed by performance. His reply? After services, Reverend Pate would ask the family questions, not about the details of the content of the sermon, but technical issues pertaining to the broadcast of the sermon, such as whether the microphones were adequate or the congregation was involved: "So, how do you think people liked it... was it loud enough?" The content of the message was not unimportant, but the performance aspect of the sermon is of greater importance that one might previously realize, and that there was a fundamental difference between a sermon given orally and one that existed solely on the page.