A gothic & romantic seminar, run by candlelight: the Romantic poets, the haunted houses of Shelley, Poe and the Brontës, the descent with Homer and Dante, the Russians, the absurd, and the Bard — named texts, exact weeks, artifacts due.
One need not be a Chamber — to be Haunted —— Emily Dickinson, 407
One need not be a House —
The Brain has Corridors — surpassing
Material Place —
Poetry teaches you precision. Mathematics teaches you wonder. And the gothic — your literature — teaches the third thing: that knowledge has a price, and the people who pay it are the interesting ones. Victor Frankenstein is a cautionary tale about research ethics. The Underground Man picks a fight with arithmetic. Ivan Ilyich dies arguing with a syllogism.
Every program you're aiming at reads your prose before it reads your proofs. So this track is built like the others: named texts, exact weeks, artifacts due — a seminar you teach yourself, in the canon you actually love.
Daily transcription of passages worth keeping — by hand. The oldest scholarly technology there is.
One piece by heart every two weeks — 12 by December: Ozymandias, Dickinson, Dante's opening terzina, a soliloquy…
One finished piece per week, alternating poem / essay. Finished means revised at least twice.
Thirty minutes, aloud: defend the week's reading, recite, read your own work as if to a room.
Keats wrote the odes at twenty-three. You are allowed to take them personally.
Mary Shelley was nineteen when she dreamed the creature. The gothic is young people writing about the cost of knowledge — it was always your genre.
Odysseus goes down to the dead to ask directions. Dante goes down to map the whole thing. That escalation is Western literature in one move.
Dostoevsky spent four years in Siberia and came back arguing with utilitarian arithmetic. He is the patron saint of everyone who knows a valid argument can still be wrong.
You will be pushing application boulders all month. Camus insists you imagine yourself happy about it.
"Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow" — read in the last week of a semester you built yourself, it stops being about futility.
Poe claims he wrote "The Raven" like a mathematical proof — test that claim in week 8 while you're writing real ones. The Underground Man attacks 2×2=4 the same autumn you're proving what arithmetic can and cannot do; Sisyphus meets Gödel in week 22; and Frankenstein is the oldest essay ever written on the ethics of the lab. The gothic is not an escape from the science — it is the science, haunted — and it's why your statement of purpose will not read like anyone else's.