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.