The 20^th and 21^st centuries have seen the Gothic permeate from the dark forest and the crumbling castle into the bourgeois suburbs. We will deal with the literary, cultural and social status of Gothicism in the novels and short stories of Flannery O'Connor, Alice Monroe, Paul Auster, Cormac McCarthy and Truman Capote. We will deal with questions such as -- How has the uncanny penetrated into the very core of our everyday, bourgeois existence? What does its centrality in current literature testify to?

We will try to distinguish between the three generations of Gothic prose fiction: the first generation, in which the Gothic may be read as the return of the repressed, the next one, in which the repressed came closer to home, and the current one, which makes it nearly impossible to distinguish between the mundane and the Gothic.