Gothic (Fred Botting 1996)

Criticism (p. 17-20)

The approach of this book has been made possible by recent developments in literary critical and cultural theory. This is no to say, however, that earlier scholarship and critical enthusiasm for Gothic writing has been neglected, far from it. While work of this kind sustained serious interest in forms marginalised, if not forgotten, by canons as curiosities in the history of literary production and consumption, the shift in values in perspective provided by recent theories has significantly altered attitudes to Gothic texts. By challenging hierarchies of literary value and widening horizons of critical studies to include other forms of writing and address different cultural and historical issues, recent critical practices have moved Gothic texts from previously marginalised sites to designated as popular fiction or literary eccentricity. This questioning of boundaries in recent criticism is highly appropriate to studies of Gothic texts.

This introductory volume draws on different issues and perspective informing and structuring critical interpretations and reinterpretations: it is an effect of previous writing, a selective composite of various critical readings which, while referring to no specific critical statement other than those by contemporary reviewers, remains indebted to the history of Gothic criticism. The most informative work on different aspects of Gothic writing and using different approaches is cited in the bibliography. The following overview will indicate the variety of ways criticism has engaged with Gothic writing, engagements which are clearly affected by changing of critical positions. In the early part of the 20th century, from the 1920s, Gothic writing was discussed as a subgenre, of peripheral interest as part of general literary historical surveys discussing the development of the novel. Michael Sadleir's interest was a result of the list of 'horrid' novels cited in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey (1818). In J. M.S. Tompkins's study of popular novel various themes and characteristics of Gothic were situated within a general literary historical context, while Edith Birkhead examined particular tales more closely in terms of their literary merit. More favourable accounts of Gothic novels were offered in Mortague Summers's, and subsequently, in Devendra Varma's, critical histories. The appeal, for them, of Gothic writing lay in opposition to realism and rationalism, in its quest for a realm beyond the empirical and material world, for a realm of the mysterious, mystical and holy. For them, terror and horror are linked to awe and dread as ways of representing a human quest for metaphysical, religious experience in a secular age.While in The Gothic Quest (1938), Summers traced Gothic influences into the 20th century, it is examining the classical Gothic texts and in Romanticism that his work holds the most interest. He initiated attempts at classifying different Gothic texts. Categories of 'supernatural-', 'historical-', 'rational-' and terror-Gothic' have, since Summers, been amended in Varma's work, in G.R. Thompson's collections, and in Robert Hume's and Robert Platzner's debate, in order to account for different Gothic features and effects, especially that of horror.

Much of this critical work focuses on the relation between Gothic and Romantic writing. Broader definition of Romanticism, like those by Eino Railo and Mario Praz, include Gothic writings, but as examples of less ideal themes of violence, incest, passion and agony: Gothic becomes the dark or negative side to Romanticism. In contrasts displayed in Gothic presentations of darker themes, criticism finds an explicit invitation to indulge in the traditional psychoanalysis: Gothic becomes a fiction of unconcious desire, a release of repressed energies and antisocial fantasies. Themes of the divided nature of the human constitution have become established ways of discussing Gothic texts: dualities of mind and body, reason and desire, are repeatedly invoked. Popular Freudianism, assimilated by 19th century notions of human duality, is ubiquitous, informing texts like Robert Kiely's and Masao Miyoshi's on the romantic novel and the divided self.

David Punter's exhaustive survey of Gothic literature is similarly Freudian, though heavily tempered by Marxism criticism. Punter's analysis, like Franco Moretti's accounts of Frankenstein and Dracula, focuses on issues of class by relating Gothic texts to anxieties about aristocratic and bourgeois power, as well as fears abut the monstrous proletariat and forms of alienation. Since Sade's 'reflection on the novel', Gothic has been linked to revolutionary energies, a connection recently examined by Ronald Paulson. With Ellen Moers's notion of 'female Gothic' as a mode of addressing fears about sexuality and childbirth, one of the most significant directions in recent Gothic criticism was laid out. A challenge to, or interrogation of, forms of fiction dominated by patriarchal assumptions, Gothic novels have been reassessed as part of a wider feminism critical movement that recovers suppressed or marginalised writing by women and addresses issues of female experience, sexual oppression and difference.

Extensive interrogations of traditional literary and cultural institutions, related to those enunciated in Marxist and feminist criticism, have emerged in the wake of structuralist theory. Stressing the role of linguistic structures and differences in the formation of cultural meanings, post-structuralist criticism have attended relations of textual sexual and historical production and reproduction. Eve Kosofsky Sedwick's book on GOthic conventions disclosed the textuality of the genre, the play of narrative surfaces and metaphors that undermine assumptions of depth and hidden meaning. The link between textuality, power and desire in Gothic fiction has been theorised by Jerold Hogle, and a recent book, Gothic Writing (1993), by Robert Miles has examined the discursive framworks enabling the production of earlier GOthic writing. Several critical essays on specific Gothic texts have begun to interpret the genre's relation to notions of identity, sexuality, power and imperialism. Indeed, from the 18th century onwards, Gothic texts have been involved in constructing and contesting distinctions between civilisation and barbarism, reason and desire, self and other.

Gothic excesses repeatedly return to particular images and particular loci. Familial and sexual relations, power and suppression, turn of the roles and figures of father and daughter. In villains masculine sovereignty is staged and scrutinised. Old castles, houses and ruins, as in wild landscapes and labyrinthine cities, situate heroines and readers at the limits of normal worlds and mores. Historical events or imagined pasts, also, delineate the boundaries of the normalised present in a movement, an interplay, that leaves neither where they where. In its crossing of boundaries, however, Gothic is a mobile and specific form. For the images and figures that are reiterated constitute a place where cultural fears and fantasies are projected. Thus similar figures have different significances, depending on the culture that uses them. Indeed, this is the pattern of Gothic as a genre that, in generating and refracting diverse objects of fear and anxiety, transforms its own shape and focus. In structuring this book along conventional and chronological lines, cultural and historical discontinuities as well as continuities can be plotted, demonstrating the major shifts in Gothic production as well as the persistence of certain patterns. Drawing on newer critical work as well as earlier studies, this introduction anticipates future examinations of the ways Gothic texts produce, reinforce and undermine received ideas about literature, nation, gender and culture.

Why horror? (Andrew Tudor 1997)

WHY HORROR? THE PECULIAR PLEASURES OF A POPULAR GENRE.
Cultural Studies , Volume 11, Number 3, 1 July 1997 , pp. 443-463(21), Routledge.

Abstract:
What is the appeal of horror? Various attempts have been made to answer this question, generally combining arguments about the nature of horror texts with arguments about the distinctive character of horror consumers. The most common attempts at general explanation are grounded in concepts drawn from psychoanalytic theory, some depending quite directly on Freud's 'return of the repressed' argument in his discussion of 'the uncanny', others utilizing the framework of 'structural psychoanalysis' to explore the ways in which the unconscious structures forms of representation. Examples of both forms of analysis are discussed - largely in relation to horror movies - exemplified in the recent work of Wood, Twitchell, Creed and Clover. General explanations which do not use psychoanalytic arguments are less common, though Carroll has recently offered one such approach which is given consideration here. It is argued that these attempts at posing general explanations of the appeal of horror are, at worst, inappropriately reductive and, at best, insufficiently specific, failing to distinguish the diverse pleasures that heterogeneous horror audiences take from their active involvement in the genre. Alternative, more particularistic approaches are considered (exemplified in aspects of work by Biskind, Carroll, Dika, Jancovich and Tudor) which seek to relate textual features to specific social circumstances. It is argued that such approaches pre-suppose a social ontology centred upon active social agents who use cultural artefacts as resources in rendering coherent their everyday lives. This is in some contrast to attempts to provide general explanations of horror's appeal where the tacit model is one in which human agents are pre-constituted in key respects, horror appealing, therefore, because it gratifies pre-established desires. It is suggested that the former, active and particularistic conception is to be preferred and that this necessitates a renewed attempt to grasp the diversity of what is, after all, a heterogenous audience capable of taking diverse pleasures from their favoured genre.

Vera Cruz: imagens e historia do cinema brasileiro (Sergio Martinelli et al ) Sao Paulo: abooks 2005.

A Vera Cruz nunca faliu. Endividada, passou as acoes para o Banespa (Banco do Estado de SP) em 1954 que colocou um interventor acabando com a gestao de Franco Zampari (produtor do sucesso internacional O Cangaceiro - 1953- Lima Barreto).

Abilio Pereira de Almeida crious um empresa paralela de producao e distribuicao, chamada Brasil Filmes, que continuou produzindo dentro da Vera Cruz. Nesse periodo mais de sete longa metragens foram produzidas, inclusive dando oportunidade para varios cineastas novos da epoca, sendo um dele o proprio Walter Hugo Khouri, que filmou O Estranho Encontro. A producao da Brasil Filmes pode ser considerada como pequena, de baixo custo e obrigatoriamente de rapida producao, um conceito diferente do que existia na Vera Cruz. Mesmo assim o Banespa resolveu fazer a liquidacao da empresa. Nesse momento, Walter Hugo Khouri, que havia trabalhado na empresa e era apaixonado pelo projeto, iniciou um verdadeiro "trabalho de formiga", descobrindo quais eram os outros acionistas minoritarios, entrando em contato com cada um, comprando acoes, as vezes recebendo como doacoes.Com isso conseguiu reunir um volume suficiente para impedir a liquidacao da empresa, em assembleia que o banco realizaria.

The matter of misogyny in horror films

Linda Williams’s (1983) claim regarding women’s identification with the monster via a shared sense of being a social ‘outcast’, is similarly pursued in Barbara Creed’s The Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis (1993). Creed engages with an exploration of horror cinema from a psychological perspective, with particular reference to “mothering functions” and female monsters. Her core argument proposes that when the ‘feminine’ is constructed as monstrous it is frequently done in conjunction with the woman's reproductive body, which she divides in seven categories. The seven faces of the monstrous-feminine are: the archaic mother, the monstrous womb, the vampire, the witch, the possessed body, the monstrous mother and the castrator or female castratice. Creed’s discussion of sexual differences attacks Freudian explanations of the human physique (based on the centrality of the Oedipus complex) which present the woman as the sexual other of the man and often cast the woman as the victim. While Freud suggests that a woman terrifies because she is a castrated human being, Creed counters this by proposing that women are primarily terrifying because they might castrate. She inverts and dismantles Freud’s assumptions about the human mind framework by claiming that the monstrous-feminine is the manifestation of men’s fear of the woman as the “castrating other”. According to Creed, the woman is whole without a penis and this, along with her reproductive body, is what inspires fear in men. The vagina dentata is the image she uses to illustrate the masculine fear of castration and to challenge a patriarchal worldview. Her study of horror films draws largely on the literary concept of “abject”, proposed by French feminist psychoanalyst Julia Kristeva (1982). The idea of social otherness which underpins both Williams’ and Creed’s work is illuminating; however, their women-as-the-monster claims can be challenged with the argument that the majority of monsters and serial-killers are in fact male, not female (Neale 1980: 61).