Take a vacation from the rational, quantifiable, and verifiable, and dip your toes into the ineffable. Unbridled, boundary-bending, and binary-busting, supernatural literature makes space for lived (and undead) experiences outside the mainstream. This course will examine the following questions: How are supernatural stories culturally situated? How is language used in supernatural texts, and when and why does it break down? What can we learn about the “real” through studying the fantastic? Course content will vary with each offering. Potential areas of focus might include magical realism, the supernatural and folklore, the gothic and gender, the gothic and race, the contemporary ghost story worldwide, and monstrosity and the grotesque. This course may be repeated for different topics. This course will be offered in 2022-23, and in alternating years thereafter.