Random Notes (Stuart Hall)

Stuart Hall’s Encoding - Decoding Model-> Hall’s work cover issues of hegemony and cultural studies, taking a post Gramsciam stance. 

He regards language use within a frame work of power, institutions and politics/economics. This view presents people as producers and consumers of culture at the same time (Hegemony-> willingness of a social group to control dominate the other)

è Reception theory -> Textual analysis focused on the scape for negotiation and opposition on the part of the audience.

The person negotiates the meaning of the text and this depends on the cultural background of the person.

è The meaning of a text is located somewhere between the producer and the reader. Even though the producer encodes the text in a particular way, the reader will decode it a slightly different manner.- What Hall calls “Margin of understanding”.

TROPP, Martin. Images of Fear, how horror histories helped shape modern culture (1818 – 1918). London: McFarland, 1999

TROPP, Martin. Images of Fear, how horror histories helped shape modern culture (1818 – 1918). London: McFarland, 1999. [PR 830 TRO]

Tropp examines how a series of images of “horror” in fiction interacted with an emerging modern culture over a century, shaping attitudes towards such aspects of life as new technology, urban crime and gender relationship – culminating in the recasting of life and death on the Western Front of WWI in the mold of horror story.

The term horror denotes both fantasy and reality. In fiction, it designates are kind of vicarious experience, existing in another realm, dealing with supernatural events and unbelievable characters, that readers approach with the expectation of an escape from the realities of daily experience. At the same time, the darkest of inescapable truths-natural, disasters, human suffering-bears the same label, linked by language.

Gothic fiction contained contradiction, while the means to an innocent escape, it aroused in its Victorian audience fears that lurked beneath the surface, fears connected with the ongoing upheaval of culture discarding a way of life that had been unchanged for centuries and, amid  the social, industrial and scientific revolutions of the 19^th century, making a modern world.

(From Walpole to Radcliffe)

The unprecedented success of the gothic novel means that for a vast majority of newly literate, horror tales were the first imaginative fiction read, shaping attitudes not only to literature, but to the act of reading as well.

Unable to afford books like those of Mrs. Radcliffe, theses millions of new readers had to get their thrills, though cheaper sources in ways that blurred the traditional identification of a specific story with a particular book. A whole new industry aroused to serve them by mass marketing the gothic pattern. As a result, the major novels themselves reached their widest circulation only indirectly, filtered through new forms of fiction that preserved the skeleton of the plot while eviscerating the contents.

Sir Walter Scott pointed out that the characters in gothic fiction take on the features of their class and in fact, become more representative of their class than individuals.[On novelists and Fiction, ed Ioan Williams . London: Routledge Ekegan Paul, 1968.]. Class was no longer defined as a synonym of wealth.

Sublime: 18^thcentury aesthetics that underlay Gothicism. Scenes that evoke awe, astonishment, terror; sights such as vast landscapes and ruins sounds like, vast cataracts, raging storms, thunder or artillery (Burke, 194) Strong Smells(B.198). Sublime as idea of self-preservation (Burke, 174)

Sublime was an aesthetics construct, a theory of taste, where terror had to be distanced form real experience, proximity destroyed feeling of sublime (Burke,134)

Minerva Press (William Lane)

“Full of typographical errors, printed on coarse yellowish or gray paper in minuscule type, they were constantly condemned in reviews for their overall shoddiness, their wretched paper and imperfect letter carelessly written and printed.” Lane, of course, couldn’t care less since the economies of his method made his books affordable to a less affluent audience, who didn’t seem to mind the condition of the vehicle as long as horror emerged unscathed.

Although his books were cheaper than novels had been, they were still out of reach for many readers.” (p.16)

Before Lane, libraries were for favored few, he solved the problem by organizing and supporting lending libraries; the subscriber for a small periodic sum, could borrow one book to read, the exchange it for another.

STREETER, H. W. The 18th Century English Novel in French Translation, a bibliographical Study. NY: Benjamin Blom, 1970

STREETER, H. W. The 18^th Century English Novel in French Translation, a bibliographical Study. NY: Benjamin Blom, 1970. [PR 855 STR]

Presuppositions: “Throughout the first half of the 18^th century the French idea of translation was in complete accord with the prevailing neo-classic doctrine of “bienséances”. It was the chief obligation of the French translator to modify the words of foreign literature, in order that they might satisfy French tradition of taste”. As the French dictate good taste, the French translator ignored the distinctiveness of the authors, giving free reign to his creative powers.

The Englishman was represented as an individualist, reveling in his personal liberty, and as a philosopher, delighting in profound melancholy. Yet the Englishman’s very love of unrestricted freedom led him inevitably to extravagance, especially in his language and his literature, in which in his unbridled imagination frequently carried him beyond the limits imposed by good taste and decency.  [What about Sade?]

English: too verbose, extremely voluminous and digressive introducing matters that don’t have to do with the discussion. Magnificent but exaggerated and dangerous energy.

“The gothic romance in France: Walpole, Reeve, Lewis, Radcliffe.” (p.117)

As the novel became more and more romanesque, in response to the public demand for stronger emotions, the tale of terror was the logical outcome of its development. In spite of the great popularity of the novels of Fielding and Richardson the inevitable reaction set in after they had their day.”

“The Castle of Otranto, by H. Walpole, which appeared 11 years later [Smollet’s Ferdinand Court Fathom], marks the first excursion into the supernatural. Its extravagances set the example for the novels of Mathew Lewis, and the masterpieces of Radcliffe and Scott.” In France it didn’t really cause excitement.

Italian, Mysteries of Udolpho and The Monk initiated the vogue of gothic romance in France. Lewis was preferred for its extravagance and complexity. Due to the English writers’ success, similar novels hit the press between 1797 and 1799. It decreased with the ascension of Napoleon as classicism made it back in vogue until it was then, again, restored to popularity by Romanticism.

During the last few years of the century (18th) the Radcliffean school progressed with astonishing rapitidy. Animated by the commercial spirit, taking no interest in originality, quantity rather than quality was the order of the day and countless tales of horror were put out. No French writer matched the English rivals.

Ducray – Dumimil, who wrote sentimental novels for the shopkeepers and seamstresses of the Paris faubourgs, may have been inspired by Mrs. Radcliffe in Coelina, or L’Efant du Mystere.

“The popular novel initiated by Ducray – Dumimil , was continued by Eugene Sue and inspired the “roman feuilleton.” Melodrama, to which the Gothic romance had greatly contributed, furnished a background to the romantic theater of Hugo and Dumas Pére.” (p.122).

SMITH, Andrew e HUGHES, William (Ed). Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of a Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

SMITH, Andrew e HUGHES, William (Ed). Empire and the Gothic: The Politics of a Genre. Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.

Considers relations between the Gothic and theories of post colonialism, how writers use gothic to represent images of colonial power against which a post-colonial identity is asserted. One central issue is how late writers respond to, and so renegotiate, earlier gothic constructions of a postcolonial politics, one which, paradoxically has its roots in the colonial context of the date 18^th century.

Gothic images of alienation, fragmentation and otherness are read through postcolonial ideas relating to alterity. The intersection between gothic and postcolonialism would be the presence of a shared interest in challenging post-enlightment notions of rationality.

In Gothic, as in Romantism in general, this challenge was developed through an exploration of feelings, desires and passions which compromised the enlightment project of rationality calibrating all forms of knowledge and behaviour. The Gothic, on the other hand, celebrates the irrational, the outlawed, the socially and culturally dispossessed.

Postcolonial criticism has tended to focus on how the epistemic shift from Renaissance humanism to enlightment humanism registered a corresponding shift from knowing to understanding. This new enlightment humanism placed the stress on how the subject knows, rather than what he or she knows. Such a shift makes the (Cartesian) subjects the measure of all things, and this conceptualization of humanity was reliant on defining the human in relation to the seemingly war- human. [Some humans are more humans than others, more substantially the measure of all things]. Racial hierarchies which would come to underpin colonialism

The gothic uses non-human figures to challenge the dominant humanist discourse and becomes a literary form that can be read through post-colonial ideas.

The process of refusal of the other results of a series of binary oppositions such as orient/ocident, black/white civilized/savage come to underpin colonialist ideas. One consequence of this is that Enlightment generates its own opposite, in such a way that the subject is precariously defined through historically (and therefore provisional) oppositions. This science will also try to account for what they cannot know, drawing attention to its own failings and producing its own doubles.

One of defining ambivalences of the gothic is that its labeling of otherness is often employed in the service of supporting, rather than questioning, the status quo. This is perhaps the central complexity of the form because it debates the existence of otherness and alterity in order to demonise such otherness. (consolidating the orientalism Said talks about).

Gothic tales, their contradictions, ambiguities and ambivalences, provide a dense and complex blend of assertion and doubt, acceptance and defiance, and truth and falsity and in this way they provide a space in which key elements of the dominant culture become debated, affirmed and questioned.

This volume addresses two related issues: 1) Analysing work by writers whom we consider to be writing out of a postcolonial context (Rushdie, Arundhati Roy, J.M. Coetzee, J.G. Farrel). These writes have used the Gothic in their writings to examine how mages of the otherness have been made to correspond to particular notions of terror, in terms of political uprising of racial anxieties (reassessment). 2) Gothic writings produced within a colonial context.

Random Notes

RANDOM NOTES (Adorno and Horkheimer)

“The culture industry as mass deception. “IN: The Dialetic of Enlightenment (1944). Adorno and Horkheimer.

è After examining US popular culture, Adorno and Horkheimer’s pessimistic conclusion was that it consists of routinized forms that diminish human experience and its complexities in favour of the interests of powerful corporations.

è The classical denunciation of “culture industry” loss of capacity to nourish freedom and individuality. Move from artisanal to industrial stage and presentation of life as pure entertainment (they see high culture as a vehicle of civic /moral values). The other side is to see cultural industry as a service of organized capital which provides opportunities for collective creativity and decoding.

RANDOM NOTES (James Clifford)

“On collecting art and culture”. James Clifford

Describes an art/culture system in which art (collectable) is the pivot around which culture (communal tradition) turns. This system is open and fluid, bringing in objects from distant cultures as well as exorcizing home ones, this which is crucial to the formation of “western subjectivity”. Although, he comes up with a more optimistic view then Adorno and Barthes, Clifford overlooks categories of exploitation and power.

RANDOM NOTES (Stuart Hall)

“Encoding, decading”. Stuart Hall

Account on how messages are produced and disseminated. Four stage theor (production, circulation, consummation and reproduction). Each stage in the circuit limits the possibilities in the next.

RANDOM NOTES (Raymond Williams)

“Advertising: the Magic System” Raymond Williams

Dated essay which belongs to a former kind of cultural studies when it was unproblematically  linked to cultural history in the same line as Marx (who believed capitalism transformed commodities into fetiches), for Williams advertising is magic because it transforms commodities into glamorous signifiers(car= masculinity) provoking a sense of unreal , imaginary world. Most of all makes us forget the suffering in the production of commodities.

It might be argued the use value of many commodities is their signifying function.

SAGE.V.”The Ghastly and the Gostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrel’s Empire Trilogy”. IN: Empire and the Gothic, the politics of a genre. London Palgrave , 2003.( p. 172- 191)

SAGE.V.”The Ghastly and the Gostly: the Gothic Farce of Farrel’s Empire Trilogy”. IN: Empire and the Gothic, the politics of a genre. London Palgrave , 2003.( p. 172- 191)

Sage speaks against the ideas that (1) Gothic is an exhausted 19^th century genre and (2) It is a writing devoted to psyche. (p.175)

“Modern Gothic is not just a matter of genre conventions: we assume it is still relevant in the post war period, because its recultivation of the sublime is a discourse about decay, of both the psyche and what Court Volney referred to in the early 19^th century as the Ruins of Empires and that discourse, I shall argue, acts as an anti- historicizing language.” (p.175)

In Farrell these affects out of an ironically concentration on the motif form horror tradition of moments of misperception. This is a tradition of what I will call la coda dell’occhio (p. 175). These epiphenomena, arising on the retina or in the ear occur momentarily. In the horror tradition, they are usually described in a rhetorical sequence that always end up reasserting  a skeptical or disbelieving, cynically materialist, viewpoint denying them as illusions or, rather, delusions of the individual subject, momentary derangements of the perceptual apparatus. (p. 176).

Closer acquaintance usually reveals a mundane object, which after the moment of misperception lingers on in the text as an uncanny moment adaptation of Burke and Gilpin’s  rhetoric about obscurity, distance and sublime landscapes. [See Sage: The Epistemology of error: Reading and isolation in the mysteries of Udolpho Q/W/E/R/T/Y/6 (October 96).

The story of the 19^th century gothic is the story of the domestication of the sublime. The sublime is provoked by Nature, or, its human equivalent ruined military or ecclesiastical architecture, the grander and more ambitious the better. The 18^th century gothic adds an analogy with the graveyard, the skull beneath the skin. By the 1840s, all this has been translated indoors, and with not without humour.

Negative sublime (the energy of this indoor jungle which arises from its cultural decay) civilization has retreated from the place and what remains is “other”: wild, anarchic, barbarous, dangerous and sinister. The technique is purely metonymic: the realistic detail is a celebration of decay. This work argued a simple case for the links between Farrell’s writing and a Gothic inflection of the sublime.

SAGE, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1988.

SAGE, Victor. Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. Basingstroke, Macmillan, 1988.

PREFACE

There is something about horror fiction which has always provoked readers to account for it. The extremity of the genre, the recurrence of its symbols, and déjá vú effect of its language seem to demand a broader explanation than other, apparently more self-justifying, literary forms. Contemporary reviewers of the “Gothic novels” although they differed sharply as to what interpretation to give them, were in no doubt that they were a species of political writing. The Marquis de Sade was perhaps the most influential of these commentators. He took the novels of Lewis and Mrs. Radcliffe as a response to the political trauma of the French Revolution “let us agree that…”

In 1930 the French surrealist André Breton developed this view of the Sade’s, integrating it with a Freudian perspective:

è Ruins, return of the past, subterranean passages representing the perils of the path towards the light, storms as roar of cannon extract of the human hecatomb the glorious restoration of life.

(A.  Breton. “Limits not Frontiers of Surrealism”. IN: Surrealism. London, 1936, pp. 108-109)

A direct connection is made between the essentially random activity of the individual subconscious and the determining pressure of the political culture. Surrealism, thought Breton, worked in an analogous fashion, subversively exposing the collective myths of the modern period, and this is in part why he sees the English Gothic novelists as such an important precedent for his own artistic programme. His remarks are important and influential in modern views of the subject but also unnecessarily reductive his insistence on a purely unconscious response by these writers lacks a certain explanatory power. Why does the genre survive, for example, as a demonstrably recurrent strain in 19^th century fiction long after the French Revolution?

And if we are to accept the unconscious factor, how exactly do the materials of this tradition become available to the individual writer’s imagination? The idea in itself that the unconscious is a timeless activity, unmediated by other cultural and ideological factors, yields no really possibility of giving a convincing, or even a detailed, account of the interaction between this kind of writing and the cultural context in which it may appear.

The availability of literary materials is a notoriously difficult question, especially when one has the problem of a species of writing that appears over a vastly extended historical period.

Breton’s reductivity is perhaps even more inhibiting in seeing the horror genre as a “fantasy”, and it is opposed, on the analogy of the pleasure and reality principle, to realism. Thus Breton comments on the choice of genre, as if it too were an unconscious factor. This view is still quite widespread. The horror novel is portrayed as the dark unconscious of the 19^th century, which surfaces periodically in a struggle with an “official”, “dominant” or “bourgeois” mode of realism.(the handiest most recent account of this position is Rosemary Jackson. Fantasy, the literature of subversion. London, 1981).

The curious effect of this is to confine discussion to a new kind of literary formalism which again fails to take account of real complexity of determining factors in the culture.

The psychoanalytic dichotomy (conscious x unconscious) has become crude a–historical metaphor for competing literary forms. This loose adaptation of Freud defeats its own ostensible purpose it gets rid of the nation that anxiety is common to art and life. In the act of trying to open up discussion of the subject, we find at the outset that horror fiction is sealed into an opposition with other literary forms. The notion of “subversive” is robbed of its efficacy by the implication that the only major thing it subverts is “realism”, another literary genre.

But Sade, Breton and Freud were originally right, to this extent: that horror is not a literary genre, in the narrow sense, at all It is a cultural response, which implies a broad series of relationships with the whole culture in which it is produced. The narrower the conception of a genre, the more one is moving away from the possibility of explaining it. (See for example, F. Jameson “Magical Narratives: Romance as a genre”. IN: New Literary History, Vol 7, # 1, 1975)

è Protestant tradition, a common set of doctrines which hold English culture together.

POSTCRIPT

Gothic writing has a greater unity and a greater rhetorical sophistication than readers sometimes give it credit for; however, this is not claiming that it is a form of literary self- consciousness.

We must call a political reflex into play if we are to speak of heresy, and often the images of the monstrous, the proscribed and the alien are precisely this - an imaginative play with heresy. Heresy in political terms is not the same as from a merely emotional or psychological point of view. It is a part of a way culture witnesses itself. Much of the horror novel’s concern with “superstition” in one form or another carries the implication of unstated orthodoxy. The typical rhetoric “feint” of the gothic writer is to provide striking images of the unthinkable with a false discredit. In the relative nature of credibility will come a flash of horror usually from an earlier, sometimes from a more primitive, part of contemporary culture. The peculiar rhetorical form of horror discredits and authorizes the unthinkable at the same time. Values admitted by the canons of “rationality” are paraded before the reader but it’s then discredited. The key to this form is what is unpacks about a particular concept of rationality. (Epistemological doubts are a hallmark of protestant faith with the assimilation of “faith” to “reason” accomplished as a result of the attacks of Hume and the Deists). Gothic as a cultural experience of the 19^th century reader horror fiction is, essentially, fantasy about history. It is a special form of the historical romance, in one sense.

The narrative form in gothic is often fragmented. The function is to concentrate the reader’s experience in particulars; discontinuity (Calvinist attitude towards history and providential modes of thinking) horror fiction is itself symbol of a resistance to the organic process of history, the breaking down of experience is a method of revealing its essential unity. (?) Hence, the frequent puzzling are close in method to empiricism, almost satirically close. The horror in the novel turns to the nature of the empirical concentration on random or accidental events that reveal an invisible structure from the fragments to the whole.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

Morgan, Jack. The Biology of horror: Gothic Literature and Film. Illinois, Southern Illinois Univ. Press, 2002.

            The author builds a biological model of the Gothic, revealing a dark inversion of comic regeneration, that is, an organic interpretation of the form and function of horror, emphasizing its close relation to comedy. (Transhistorical conception). His conclusions of the gothic reality are aligned with J. Kristeva theories, which address horror’s existential and cultural significance in an uncanny positive and therapeutic key.

·         Detachment of body and mind: “Mentality meanwhile is off on its quasi-independent career as if our physical organism were, except in the case of eating and sex perhaps, a vestigial evolutionary issuance” (p.1) the thought tends to regard itself above the biological, nature is characterized as perishable. 

·         Method and classification: “It proceeds for the most part inductively, working as much as possible from examples, and follows from my impressions that a case might be made that horror invention, loosely designated as “gothic” over the past 2 centuries or so, merits, even demands, consideration as a primary fictional form” (p.4) horror emerges from our bio-existential situation, reflecting our agonies and exigencies of physical life.

·         “ Classic  “high” literary Gothicism, with its assertive physicalness, may then be viewed as a modality within the historical Romantic project, though grotesque imagining was alive of course well before the Romantic sensibility took it up and has continued to flourish well after, horror awakens thought shockingly to its intimate and inescapable connectedness to the flesh and to pain…” (p.5).

·         Gothic strategies: “by passing the rational and addressing the visceral instead, pointing up to the dangerous political and totalitarian possibilities of manipulated horror imagination” (p.11). Horror was used as political manipulation of the masses, ex: Nosferatu – Jew – rats – pestilence. Maggie Kilgour say gothic is a bricolage of other references (Rise of the Goth Novel p.4).

Comic – Horror Double Helix

·         Aesthetics of Horror Þ Aike and Barbauld’s “On the Pleasure derived from obj. horror”.

·         There is a begrudging acceptance of horror into the standard literary canon until the late 18^th century. (Usual vehicle is melodrama, sensational elements and adjectives that may be applied to the comic).

“I think a ‘loose’ definition of the literary gothic in fact comes closer to the mark than does a ‘purist’ historical one. Horror literature has arguably itself been somewhat too codified, too identified with it high gothic expression with the result that its visceral generic nature has been obscured. An alternative view would see literary horror issuing from an informal vernacular tradition and, as earlier suggested, greatly antedating the ‘high’ gothic literary expression it would receive in the 19^th century. Marginal expressions of a horror mythos might have been traditionally anti-comic term with scholarly currency.” (p.24).

           The Italian is quoted as example of a gothic story that entails relief, rather than joyous affirmation, ending in a comic fashion.

·           Horror would then be the opposite of comedy: “Whereas the comic mode, granted sometimes its grim moments, is pervaded by images of vitality and insurgence, horror is pervaded by virtually unrelieved vision of dissipation, menace and decline.”

The Muse of Horror: Traditions of dreadful Imagining.

·           “The ability of horror to function in the physical without resort to the deus ex-machina possibilities of the supernatural is evident as well in films such as the First Deadly Sin, Psycho, and Silence of the Lambs, with their human monsters”. (p.40)

·      “The high gothic romance mode in this context represents a powerful and dramatic refinement and codification of a horror imagination boated in fleshy peril; gothic artifices embody apprehensions reflective of the treacherous adventure biological live is involved moment by moment”. Long before the novel of gothic romance the generic horror tradition was constituted by catastrophic pestilences, martyrdom, religious terrors, sadistic criminality, public torture, execution, etc.

·      Metaphor of the house/body decay: fall of the house of usher, horror fiction in the protestant tradition (Hugenot see text), shared archetype of mortality. (p.42)

·      Protestant confrontation with the pagan myths of the Roman tradition, chance to access mythic, folk, iconographic, non-textual energy of  Catholicism, however on Protestant terms. Uncanny submerged they feared would return.

MACABRE AESTHETICS

·      “The rhetoric of horror is constructed toward summoning up and underscoring a readership’s visceral sense of embalmment among these forms, of being situated in the treacherous landscape of physical life, in a dimension we are unable to comfortably rationalize.” (p.68) Literary horror seeks to put readers in touch with a morbid sense of their own physicalness.

            The gothic imagination uncovers aspects of the organic environment we find repulsive or unsettling, conjuring “the repugnance the retching that thrusts me to the side and turns me away from defilement, sewage and muck”. [Kristeva]. The lack of clear light, water and fresh air inverts the entire system of the biologically wholesome and vital.

·      Gothic as a Bricolage: Maggie Kilgous, it “feeds upon and mixes the wide range of literary sauces out of which it emerges and from which it never fully disentangles itself… the form is thus…assembled out of it and pieces of the past”. Gothic literature exploits what mythic possibilities are at hand, be they Egyptian forms, medieval Christian, folkloric or others. (Organic focus or fertility)

THE ANXIETY OF ORGANISM

Horror is the most psychological/physiological of all genres, Linda Badly, “with the possible exception of pornography”.

·       Sartre’s Nausea: (Roquetin) – “I have seen enough of living things, of dogs, of men, of flabby messes which move spontaneously” (p.24).

·      Sebastin’s garden in suddenly lost summer. (Gothic mansion/tropical garden)

ACQUAINTANCE WITH THE NIGHT: AMERICA AND THE MUSE OF HORROR

Horror mode into a new region. A migration that tends to call into question attempts to strictly historicize the gothic genre or confine its genius geography cally. American landscape was considered inhospitable to literature in general and specially so to the dark dramtic need for decadent tradition and antiquarian setting. Also antagonist to the gothic morbidity was the Enlightment reason and optimism from which the USA cultural identity largely emerged. The body is the gothics essential landscape. Maurice Levy (p.36) criticizes the lack  of old houses  and castles in  A. horror Ensaontrism.

DARK CARNIVAL: THE ESOTERIC OF CELEBRATION.

Joker is the nefarious jester figure that haunts Gotham. Horror - comic synergy. Gothic is the excessive, transgressive dynamic of carnivals “looseness”. Montessori takes advantage of the carnival season in cask. Festive horror generated by the carnality, blasphemy, scatology, from a comic discourse to a pathological. (See Black Film Orphen’s 1959) (See The Italian p. 273). Carnival is a part of the Romantic grotesque of which the gothic was an extension.

LANGUISHMENT: THE WOUNDED HERO

  The mythic restoration task cannot be accomplished; the healing venture has failed – Thanatos, the death force, not Eros reign. Body as squalor. 

SINISTER LOCI: THE PROPRIETIES OF TERROR

·      Properties remote and private – the ideal gothic setting – where one may indulge    dark practices. Patterned aristocratic dwelling above the vulgar village, out off from scrutiny, moral conventions, ordinary reach of law. A casa de Mariz is not a medieval fortress, but it retains the gothic remoteness, seclusion that lends themselves to grotesque ocurrences.

·      Unhomely: the Gothic “outside” familiar words provides no relief from an inner hauting, instead, “inner” terror flicker in structures, objects and landscape.

APOTROPAION AND THE HIDEOUS OBSCURE

Burke: to make anything veru terrible, obstcurity seems in general to be necessary … (p.54). Blur or obscured sense of danger. The Fall of the House of Usher: reader disoriented, no coordinates of time and place [Schedoni in Radcliffe’s The Italian whose intemperate intellectualism the other priests are rather awed by, though they “observed that he seldom … undisguised before him] Excess, lack of moderation, humility, obsession.

THE SOUL AT ZERO: DARK EPIPHANIES

Mortality implicit in vitality. Conciousness correlative to physical organism. Kristeva: theraupetical horror to stimulate bodies healthy energy, like arsenic in homeopathy (Kristeva, p. 208). Horror provokes rational ordered civilization, will be indispensable to the aesthetics of terror (p. 229).

SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

SAGE, Victor. The Gothic Novel. Basing stroke: Macmillan, 1990.

            Literary history has tended to marginalize 18^th century Gothic as a minor product of Romanticism. Such attitude pigeon-holed the Gothic as part of an excessive reaction against the dominance of Augustan rationalism by an age that had grown weary of Enlightenment values. These early novels of terror, so the account ran, with their gothic Machinery and conventions are nothing more than a were curiosity for a modern  reader.

            But the actual history of critical opinion is more diverse and interesting than such literary-historical judgment. The genre is not a dusty corner but an arena open to the social and political interests of the day. Both Literary form and the commentary on it are permeated by controversy, explaining something about the value of this writing during a period of fast social change and political transition.

→ Horace Walpole and The Castle of Otranto (1764)

·         Critical reception (unfavorable) X public reception (successful).

·         Mineral Press (William Lane), booksellers, circulating libraries.

·         Expansion of readership, futility of the novel, critical debate.

Proscribed by the canoes of good taste and morality, manufactured and consumed in large doses by women and sometimes by critics, the Gothic novel expanded like an open Secret in the last decades of the 18^th century. Locked in our modern view, the genre looks all too unified, but the fiction market of the 1970s was polarized by a range of contradictory social and political factors. (Methodism, female emancipation, political radicalism, anti-Catholicism, etc.).

·      The Pursuits of Literature (satirist?) tendencies followed the Revolution.

·      Sade’s “Ideé surles Romans” revolutionary up heaves. In: Crimes d’Amour.

Nothing illustrates this process more aptly than the reception in 1796 of one of the central Gothick texts, The Monk. The rhetoric of this novel, like Udolpho and Melmoth, uses the anti-Catholicism prejudice of the audience as a tactic to gain acceptance.

·      These writes (Walpole, Beckford, Lewis) form a tradition of Whig dilettantism which one might broadly speak as a form of cultural dissent. The dissent was more theatrical than political.

·      Charlotte Smith “democratic” views.

The development of the Gothic Villain, that gigantic sinister figure, needs to be seen in this context of political suspicion, because the archetype partially derives from the English translations during the period 1794/96 of Schiller’s  the ghost-seer, Schink’s ‘Magical-political’ victim of Magical disillusions and Marquis Grosse’s Horrid Mysteries.

            J.M.S Tompkins Gothic was… “a struggle to possess and appropriate the language of cultural division”. (SAGE, p.16)

·         Burke + Gothic architecture (Burke, p.)

·         Mrs. Raddiffe rationalism (explained supernatural)

·         Blackwood Magazine flourished between 1820-50 specializing in ghost stories and bizarre tales/new Monthy Magazine.

·         Elenor Sickels (The Gloomy Egoist) based on the assumption that theological doctrine plays a conditioning or determining role in the obsessively repeated motifs of the Gothick romance.

·         Mario Praz (The Romantic Agony).

NOTES – Renata Wasserman’s course (August 2006)

NOTES – Renata Wasserman’s course (August 2006)

FRANKENSTEIN:

It was proposed that Victor is the scientist while Walton is romantic. However, it depends of how you understand Romanticism. If you think of the sublime, Victor Frankenstein is the one who goes for the sublime (his quest is Napoleonic), while Walton can be seen as a “classical” figure. In this sense Victor is romantic. And Walton x Frankenstein (double)

GOTHIC X BAROQUE:

             English renascence is a bit baroque, Shakespeare was alive during the Baroque, he does not obey the classical rules, he is excessive, packs in too many discourses. French classicism (Carvel, Racine) do not like Shakespeare excesses. // Cloning as a bad word (Mobile cloning, credit card cloning, etc)

DRACULA:

            John Polidori wrote The Vampyre the first story of that sort. Sheridan Le Fanu writes Carmilla: references to homosexuality, fear of giving yourself up to strong feelings; she seduces a girl but, eventually, gets caught in the end.

            Bram Stoker’s Dracula deals with unbelievable things, structurally complex it is a genre which needs validation. This validation is shown in the narrative in things as short-hand writing (indicative of business – like language) and it is still linked to the women work-force in the job market. Type writers, telegraphs, etc are also indicatives of this making of the “truth”, validation. This come in the sense of making or creating records, people work: contracts, solicitors, and business. The novel is put together in a way that nobody (no narrator) takes responsibility for it. The novel ends up with Mina’s account, which could mean that all the documents weren’t true.

MODERN X MEDIEVAL (Associated with foreign lands)

            First time a novel measures up England to the continental countries (unlike the gothic novelists). It takes a Catholic man to take care of a catholic threat (primitiveness).

            There is a super imposed sexuality in the females, at the time, critics did not acknowledge the sexuality in the novel or either did not want to talk about it. Whether one or the other, as far as Victorian Society goes, it was a way of having your kicks and not having to mention it, which might explain the success of this book.

            The Catholic witch-doctor is necessary to cure the savage/primitive in the realm of the city. Stage accents are used to depict different nationalities.

            Characters in Dracula are always around a dinner table. Oral pleasure associated with the society, characters stuck in oral phase? Dracula does both the orally the phallic. Lucy gets symbolic raped (stake) and the body is mutilated.

             Dracula invades England, buys property there. He gets there on a Russian vessel and he is described as having an aquiline nose, there are heaps of gold in his room, he is associated with the Jew. History rectifies the novel, play (thrill by). Jew echoes the question of the blood/Christ/church.

            Jonathan introduces Dracula to paper money, the new economics. Dracula bleeds money. 2 scenes: going down the wall with black cape flowing behind him (?) and a scene where he is among old type gold coins from all over the world. (L’Argent – E. Zola). But Dracula is not the old Jew banker he’s a transitional type of financer, (but also the foreigner and aristocrat), who must be stopped before he learns, everything. (Prejudice xenophobia. Fiction slightly out of control. Violence in the books, Dracula guards the frontiers of the orient (greater evil) against the contamination (fear of contamination).

H.Ibsen → Ghost

Characteristics of English Modernity:

Frames:                   (Dracula)

England → other countries

Protestantism → Catholicism

Science → Superstition

Invasion of non-modernity into Modern England the solution is to attack this “antiquity” with its own weapon (Van Helsing). Dracula is the invader from the past. In Frankenstein the scientific development brings fear of the future. (Frankenstein trying to create life, while women are supposed to). Only entities, like the church or women, have the legal right to create (Gothic x Religion) 19^th century trying to be naturalistic/scientific but still co-opting withhold costumes, such as going to church. Romanticism had a direct relationship with God, did not need to go to an establishment (church).

            Jan Watt decides the novel begins in the 18^th century in England. Bakhtin mentions the Alexandrian Greek novel. And there’s the Spanish Model. Is there such a thing as a gothic novel? Todorov indecidability.

             Theodor Storm – Germany x Denmark (Shimmel Rider) - dam, burial, imposture, all sidedishes of the gothic. Natural elements – destructive power of nature, gothic landscape hostile relation, sublime which is however valued in the sense human beings do not control nature, impulse for domination, hubris in trying to dominate nature. Cautionary tale. Acknowledge the power of nature “appropriate” → co-opt, adapt, “bourgeoisie order” → not in good use.

            The Bourgeois order tames the gothic, reasonable because most of us prefer order, fictional control although acknowledging the power of nature.

Difference between Terror x Horror:

Horror frequently involves bodily fluids.

Dostoyevsky and Poe, examples of psychological terror. Psychosomatic disease.

Ø  Gothic

Architecture: Caves / towers / castles preferred settings

Nodal Moments (gothic moments)

Property money – who is the real owner of the castle?

Circulation of money where does the money come from?

Contract – Emily in Udolpho

Devil – Sign and seal is necessary for selling the soul.

Write in bold ongoing issues (capitalism – Dracula)

Takes place in the borders of something:

Ø  Human x Mechanical

Ø  Human x Animal (The Fly)

Ø  Life X death

DER SANDMANN:

This text has been lead as a defense of the Enlightment .

There is a character called “Clara”, a fireplace in the centre of the room (Lar > Lareira), which is the “good” Fire and fire in the father’s office, “bad” fire (shift in the fire’s meaning). Nathaniel moves away from Clara (Luminous) attracted by knowledge. Cappolla  (cientist/magician)and the fear of the eyes [huge eyes in dolls in many horror films]. Power of the eyes, windows of the soul, Oedipus guided by the little girl.

While in Dracula water and earth are important the theme here is fire. Alquimist (Faust) unnatural Nature, pursuit of knowledge and its dangers (Adam/Eve), Marlowe Faust (Helen of Troy) Prometheus > fire technicality.

Der Sandmann would be more suited for a psychological reading, as it may expand the world we apprehend with our senses, learn about Nature and extend our perceptions.

 Der Sandmann materializes.

Sublime: What is taking the place of the natural Sublime in these texts? There is little or no natural scenes.

* Debasement of the term unheimlich, as in awesome elimination of romanticism? (Problematic reading)

Mother – double – Maid

Clara – Olimpia

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF USHER

Poe’s fear of claustrophobia? (only mention this psychological aspects of the author if you have concrete evidence and make a point of it or people can say: so what?).

In the house of usher the house’s description makes it look like a face: things hanging from (the roof), crack (nose), empty eyes socket (windows), door (mouth), tarn (secluded lake) no way in or out.

The lake closed in itself, suggesting one genetic line of family branch, the fact that she falls on her brother suggests incest as a theme. Isolation, even the burial is in the house. Narrator is a catalyst of the situation. Reflection of the house in the lake. Nothing gets out of the house.

Fragments, mirrors, house collapses (implosion) / pictures / stories imbedded / books mentioned/ poem in the middle (head, eye, reason). Things in the story coalesce, come together. Constricting, repetition.

[Flannery O’ Connor - southern writer “A good man is hard to find”. She’s Catholic, clean style “Good country people”, a story about a mechanical leg and lack of love. Woman is a philosopher embusted by a salesman on the top of a roof, she’s needy.]

*Poe’s Berenice > Vagina Dentada. Fear of women having teeth in usual places.

* Poe’s detective story > Purloined letter and Golden Bug. (helper sidekick: Sancho Panza)

THE CASK OF AMONTILHADO (1846)

Poe does not obey the construction of characters as we know it, dispenses cause and effect (don’t know where it comes from and don’t see the consequences) Placed in the present. Accumulate signifiers, Poe likes the grosse. Psychic material, it is interested in exorcising rather than Passing on Wisdom, desire for impunity, absolute power, no jester.

Some themes raised in the course:

* The Mob (Revolution) The Monk’s final cleasing and lack of control.

*Psychic

* Man x woman

* Science