This article offers an analysis of texts which were written in 1802-3 and published in 1812 under the title Panopticon versus New South Wales, namely Jeremy Bentham’s first two letters to Lord Pelham and A Plea for the Constitution, arguing that, in his attempt to show the superiority of his Panopticon plan over the transportation scheme, the reformer depicted New South Wales as a Gothic dystopia. ‘Gothic’ is here understood as a literary genre, an ideological term and a (...) critical tool. Bentham upset the conventional cartography of his time by showing that the ‘archaic’ or ‘barbarian’ practices that Gothic novels located in Catholic Europe were actually present in British penal policies. In addition to drawing on the rhetoric and the dichotomies which underlay the Gothic novels published during his lifetime, Bentham anticipated scenarios – such as reverse colonization and contamination – which would be explored in Victorian fiction. By extrapolating in dystopian fashion from trends which were present in the British body politic, Bentham’s Australian writings show how a historical period may be haunted by its future potentialities. (shrink)

A lucid intervention in current debates about identity and difference, this book uses the concept of Otherness to look again at both Gothic fiction and Postcolonialism.

Applying ideas drawn from contemporary critical theory, this book historicizes psychoanalysis through a new and significant theorization of the Gothic. The central premise is that the nineteenth-century Gothic produced a radical critique of accounts of sublimity and Freudian psychoanalysis. This book makes a major contribution to an understanding of both the nineteenth century and the Gothic discourse which challenged the dominant ideas of that period. Writers explored include Mary Shelley, Edgar Allan Poe, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Bram (...) Stoker. (shrink)

In Alice Walker’s vignette “The Flowers,” a young black girl’s walk in the woods is interrupted when she treads “smack” into the skull of a lynched man. As her name predicates, Myop’s age and innocence obstruct her from seeing deeply into the full implications of the scene, while the more worldly reader is jarred and confronted with a whole history of racial violence and slavery. The skeleton, its teeth cracked and broken, is a temporal irruption, a Gothic “smack” that (...) shatters the transience of the pastoral scene with the intrusion of a deeper past from which dead matter/material de-composes the story’s present with the violent matter/issue of racism. Walker’s story is representative of an important trope in fiction, where the pastoral dead speak through the details of their remains, and the temporal fabric of text is disrupted by the very substance of death. Against the backdrops of Terry Gifford’s post-pastoral and Fred Botting’s Gothic understanding of the literary corpse as “negative[ly] sublime,” this essay explores the fictional dead as matter unfettered by genre, consistently signifying beyond their own inanimate silences, revealing suppressed and unpalatable themes of racial and sexual violence, child abuse and cannibalistic consumerism. Along with Walker’s story, this study considers these ideas through new readings of Stephen King’s novella The Body, Raymond Carver’s story “So Much Water So Close to Home,” and The Road by Cormac McCarthy. While these writers may form an unlikely grouping in terms of style, each uses pastoral remains as significant material, deploying the dead as Gothic entities that force the reader to confront America’s darkest social and historical matters. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Gothicism and Early Modern Historical EthnographyKristoffer NevilleGothicism: Problems and PossibilitiesEarly-modern Gothicism, or self-identification with the Gothic peoples described by classical authors, has usually been considered a Scandinavian, and particularly Swedish, affair. Particularly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Swedish court and universities insisted militantly that the kingdom was the Gothic homeland, and this has fostered an assumption that Gothicism represents a kind of embryonic nationalism. This (...) interpretation was almost inevitable given the circumstances of modern interest in the phenomenon. Scandinavian scholars were the first to pick up the Gothic thread in the earlier twentieth century, and Swedes in particular have dominated the literature on Gothicism. At least in the early years, this may be [End Page 213] related to a general trend to interpret the past in terms of a relatively inflexible, modern concept of nation. These earlier studies accordingly relied largely on the same, mostly Swedish, sources. Later work has generally not expanded the framework of the discourse, however.1 A number of important early modern texts that show the much broader appeal of Gothicism are not accounted for in the standard narrative of the rise of the phenomenon in the early modern period. I will show that the Scandinavian interpretation has been allowed to overshadow a much broader Gothic tradition that encompassed a broad part of Europe, including the German lands and Spain. Gothicism has thus been reduced to just one aspect of its original scope, and the scholarly nuances and historical jockeying that shaped the narrative have largely been lost. This reduction has had consequences not only for the familiar version of the story, largely derived from Swedish texts, but also for our understanding of history writing in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.The Gothicism debate may be unique in its breadth and in the intensity of interest that it elicited. It is also remarkable for the variety of approaches to historical writing that scholars applied as each tried to develop a more impregnable argument than the last. Linguistic, geographical, archaeological, antiquarian, and textual methods intersected freely, inviting shifting and overlapping versions of the Gothic narrative that sometimes trace the linguistic legacy of the tribe, sometimes the ethnic legacy, and sometimes bind the two together. All of these narratives were basically concerned with the antiquity of the Goths and their legacy in early modern Europe. The implications of this were different for various regions and rulers, but most wanted to claim for themselves the strength, prestige, and antiquity of the tribe that toppled the Roman Empire, thus enhancing their own often dubious historical legitimacy. [End Page 214]This debate often took a polemical character, particularly in the political sphere, where there were fierce disputes over which region was the true homeland of the tribe, and thus which area (or people or ruling dynasty) could claim the greatest honor from their exploits and claim to be their most direct descendants. But there was also a very clear corollary to this contentious discourse. As scholars from across a wide area produced mountains of evidence pointing to the Gothic origins of their own regions, it became possible to think of Gothic origins not only in terms of difference—which kingdom, dynasty, or geographic region could claim the greatest antiquity and eminence—but also in terms of shared history and common identity across political, geographical, and linguistic boundaries. In general, the polemic was restricted to the origins of the Goths. Many writers seem to have accepted that the Gothic lands cumulatively formed a sort of historical unity that was lost through later political divisions, but which could still be traced through other means. Particularly in the Holy Roman Empire—a largely political boundary encompassing many smaller states ruled by famously fractious princes of different confessions and languages—the more conceptual notion of deep-seated Gothic origins opened the way for a different alignment of identity both within and without the boundaries of the Empire, and especially with Scandinavia, which contributed such rich arguments to the debate.There are several significant problems in a study of the early-modern view of the Goths beyond the historiographical ones outlined above. They were widely associated with other tribes... (shrink)

In the last thirty years the living-dead, the revenant, the phantom, and the crypt have appeared with increasing frequency in Jacques Derrida's writings and, for the most part, have gone unaddressed. In Cryptomimesis Jodey Castricano examines the intersection between Derrida's writing and the Gothic to theorize what she calls Derrida's "poetics of the crypt.".

The article explores the way American author Cormac McCarthy uses the Gothic genre in his novel The Road as a means to address what has been called “our globalized order,” in particular the way it has turned human beings into consuming or consumed entities. Some dimensions of this globalized order indeed involve the reintroduction of slavery through human trafficking, unprecedented greed and labor capitalism, surveillance and personal data gathering. Hannah Arendt notes in The Origin of Totalitarianism that the disasters (...) of the twentieth century had proved that a globalized order might “produce barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages.” The artist’s task is to find the right language and images to address the breaking of the world. French philosopher J. P. Dupuy, for example, has argued that the financial world is a way to contain the violence of competition, placing it into acceptable forms away from primal physical competition. McCarthy’s graphic use of Gothic tropes—including cannibalism, the wild forest, the haunted house, the chase, the conflict between light and darkness, the blurring of boundaries between different categories—creates a shock. The article also addresses the larger question of the impact of globalization on Gothic literature, and the impact of Gothic literature on real world matters as it contributes to and reflects upon and challenges global regimes of economic, social and economic power. In other words, what is the cultural work that the Gothic does in the present? (shrink)

ABSTRACTMary Darby Robinson is well known for writing her final volume of poems, the Lyrical Tales, as a direct answer, sometimes poem by poem, to Wordsworth and Coleridge’s 1798 Lyrical Ballads. What has been less studied is how deliberately hybrid in style and allusions her response-poems are in the Tales, especially how prominently they foreground Gothic imagery, theatricality, and hyperbole in poems that also ape the emerging “romantic” mode of the Ballads themselves. Part of that “cheekiness,” I argue, stems (...) from the condemnation of the Gothic that both Wordsworth and especially Coleridge had articulated in print, while also echoing it, albeit in highly modified ways, in their poetry. Most of what Robinson attempts with her hybrid Tales, though, develops the penchant in Gothic for symbolizing deep and unresolved ideological conflicts in Western culture. Her answers to Wordsworth and Coleridge, which I exemplify with selected Robinson Tales, therefore, bring out those very conflicts underlying,... (shrink)

Although Ralph Adams Cram seemed part-Jeremiah, part-Cassandra, and part Miniver Cheevy, he ultimately forged a synthesis between his medievalism and the needs of his own society.

This paper seeks to establish that Bernard Mandeville's ideas on courage and honour shaped the Scottish debate about ancients and moderns by formulating a perspective how eighteenth-century civil societies grew large, luxurious and feminine without losing their ability to wage war. My focus is on Mandeville's positive influence on David Hume, whose writings were a springboard for many Mandevillean ideas in Scotland. In contrast to a recent claim in scholarship, Hume aimed to discredit, instead of developing, Shaftesburyan ideas of ancient (...) courage. The concluding part of the paper will discuss Andrew Millar and Adam Ferguson in this context. (shrink)

This paper seeks to establish that Bernard Mandeville's ideas on courage and honour shaped the Scottish debate about ancients and moderns by formulating a perspective how eighteenth-century civil societies grew large, luxurious and feminine without losing their ability to wage war. My focus is on Mandeville's positive influence on David Hume, whose writings were a springboard for many Mandevillean ideas in Scotland. In contrast to a recent claim in scholarship, Hume aimed to discredit, instead of developing, Shaftesburyan ideas of ancient (...) courage. The concluding part of the paper will discuss Andrew Millar and Adam Ferguson in this context. (shrink)

This is my (Subhasis Chattopadhyay's) draft of PhD pre-submission. Dr. Scriver has (had) put it up online in her blog and I found it today, that is 1:06 pm, 28th May, 2017. I am grateful to her since intellectual ideas can otherwise be hijacked. She has done a wonderful editorial job.

The value of this essay is not to reiterate the extant views on horror literature, but to make available for the first time to the world at large the textual foundations of considering horror literature as a genre by itself. The Gothic is a different genre altogether though most of us want to conflate and confuse between these two genres. Someday I shall write at length about the nature of the horrific. Suffice to say for now that the focus (...) is that long ago, H. P. Lovecraft in his essay mentioned within this essay distinguished between the gothic as a literary genre and horror literature as another literary genre. And Lovecraft showed us that the horror as a literary genre is by far the greater of the two genres. This essay does not get into the literary values of either the gothic or the horror novel. That has been treated in a fuller manner by this author in his PhD thesis. (shrink)

This paper introduces the concept of gothic violence in order to better theorize how domination operates in Mary Wollstonecraft’s unfinished novel, The Wrongs of Woman, or Maria. The fictive companion to A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Maria is an account of the titular character’s struggle for self-determination in all aspects of her life, including her desire for a companionate partnership. I argue that Maria’s ultimate lack of freedom is directly attributable to coverture, the patriarchal legal fiction whereby (...) wives are subsumed under the legal persona of their fathers or husbands. Building on scholarship that positions Wollstonecraft as a republican feminist, I show how Maria articulates what I call gothic violence, a form of psychic domination that places the other in a condition of unfreedom by denying their status as an autonomous being and holding them in subordination through a variety of techniques, such as denial of legal and social status and testimonial quieting. I show how gothic violence results in the unfreedom of women through its reliance on domestic settings and intimate relationships, and with the support of law and custom, of which coverture is a central example. I conclude by suggesting that attending to gothic violence in Wollstonecraft’s thought allows us to further see the continuity between her political and fictional writings. (shrink)

Cyberpunk fiction has been called “the supreme literary expression, if not of postmodernism then of late capitalism itself.” This thesis aims to analyse and question this claim by rethinking cyberpunk Action, postmodernism and late capitalism in terms of three - interlocking - themes: cybernetics, the Gothic and fiction. It claims that while what has been called “postmodernism” has been preoccupied with cybernetic themes, cybernetics has been haunted by the Gothic. The Gothic has always enjoyed a peculiarly intimate (...) relation with the fictional. Baudrillard's theories, meanwhile, suggest that, in a period dominated by simulation, fiction has a new cultural role. By putting “theory” into dialogue with “fiction”, the thesis examines Baudrillard's suggestion that the era of cybernetics “puts an end to science fiction, but also to theory, as specific genres”. The version of the Gothic the thesis presents is one stripped of many of its conventional cultural associations; it is a material Gothic.The machinery for re-thinking the Gothic comes from Deleuze-Guattari’s A Thousand Plateaus. Deriving not from the familiar literary sources but from Wilhelm Worringer’s work on “barbarian art”, Deleuze-Guattari’s version of the Gothic departs from any reference to the supernatural. The crucial theme in Worringer, Deleuze-Guattari establish, is that of nonorganic continuum. Following Deleuze-Guattari’s lead, the thesis analyses key cyberpunk texts such as Ridley Scott’s Blade Runner, David Cronenberg’s Videodrome and William Gibson’s Neuromancer in terms of what it calls this “hypematuralist” theme. While these texts have often been analysed in terms of “postmodernism” and “cyberpunk,” they have rarely been discussed in terms of the Gothic. Here, though, it will be shown that these texts, and important precursors, such as Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition, are centrally concerned with the breakdown of the boundary between the animate and the inanimate.. The thesis aims to demonstrate that, in its fixation upon catatonic trance, bodies that do not end at the skin, and agency-without-subjectivity, cyberpunk or “imploded science fiction” converges the Gothic with cybernetics on what, following Gibson, it calls the flatline. The flatline has two important senses, referring to a stale of “unlife” and a condition of radical immanence. The thesis is divided into four chapters, each of which considers the flatline under a different aspect. Chapter 1 concerns the flatlining of cybernetics and postmodernism; Chapter 2 deals with the flatlining of the body, paying particular attention to the Deleuze-Guattari/Artaud concept of the Body without Organs; Chapter 3 focuses upon the flatlining of reproduction, opposing both sexual and mechanical reproduction to Deleuze-Guattari’s idea of propagation; Chapter 4 considers the flatlining of fiction itself in the context of hyperreality. (shrink)

It is argued here that understanding John Dewey's thought as that of a prodigal liberal or a fellow traveller does not capture the complexity of his work. It is also important to recognise the portion of his work that is historie morale. In the very best sense it is epic, encapsulating the hopes and dreams of a history of the American people in the early 1900s. It is a work that simultaneously pursues modernity and the past — for the sake (...) of coping with the present. It also calls attention to an unnoticed element in his work 'inexperience'. (shrink)

It is commonly accepted that we discuss the Gothic in terms of the margin. These two seem to be inseparable and associating them appears “just natural.” However, in light of the contemporary critical debate on the ubiquity of the Gothic, the mode’s “natural” marginality might appear somewhat out of place. While the Gothic is still increasingly popular in popular culture, it has also become incredibly popular among literary scholars. In fact, it not only permeates the culture we (...) live in, but it also appears to occupy a mainstream position in academia these days. Viewing the Gothic as a notion shaped to a certain extent by the critic, this article investigates-and reconsiders-the persistence of the Gothic margin in contemporary critical discourse. Following Paul A. Bové’s consideration of the ways in which institutionalized criticism partakes in discourse, it sees contemporary Gothic criticism as at least potentially operating within discourse in Michel Foucault’s terms, and thus considers the possibility of the Gothic margin being in fact a critical construct, functional within the contemporary discourse of criticism. Hence, the article poses questions about the origin of Gothic marginality, the contemporary status of the Gothic margin and its potential functionality, and finally, possible results of the loss of the marginal status for the Gothic as a critical object. It seeks the answers by means of scrutinizing critical accounts, such as Fred Botting and Dale Townshend’s introduction to the CriticalConcepts series on the Gothic, and by contrasting different attempts at presenting the Gothic and its status. Finally, it considers the distinction between the past-the era of critical neglect-and the present-allegedly the times of the vindication of the Gothic. In so doing, it aims at determining whether and why the marginality of the Gothic could indeed turn out to be constructed by the critics. (shrink)

Studies in economics and humanities generally have intrinsic problems that this work illustrates, along with innovations for overcoming them. The main limitations and weak-points of orthodox theory necessitate the use in their stead of other multi-disciplinary approaches, like complexity science, agent-based simulations and artificial life simulations. An example of an artificial life simulation applied in the economics field concerning the exchange process shows the benefits of such new conceptual and methodological instruments.

The comparison of Thomas Aquinas’ Summa Theologiae with the architecture of a cathedral is not new. We find it in 1850 in Karl Werner’s System der christlichen Ethik (1850, 47), and in 1860 the German architect Gottfried Semper writes in the preface to his two-volume manual Style in the Technical and Tectonic Arts: art... appears isolated and relegated to a field especially marked out for it. The opposite was true in antiquity, where philosophy held sway over this field as well. (...) Philosophy was seen as an artist herself and a guide to the other arts. But in growing old, she turned to analysis and devised dead categories instead of living analogies. In just the same way, Gothic architecture was the.. (shrink)

The opening story in Winesburg, Ohio by Sherwood Anderson is called simply “Hands.” It is about a teacher’s remarkable hands that sometimes seem to move independently of his will. This essay explores some of the relevant contexts and potential links, beginning with other representations of teachers’ hands, such as Caravaggio’s St. Matthew and the Angel, early efforts to establish a sign-language for the deaf, and including the Montessori method of teaching children to read and write by tracing the shape of (...) letters with their hands on rough emery paper. The essay then explores filmic hands that betray or work independently of conscious intentions, from Dr Strangelove, Mad Love, to The Beast With Five Fingers. Discussion of the medical literature about the “double” of our hands in the brain, including “phantom hands,” leads on to a series of images that register Rodin’s lifelong fascination with sculpting separate hands. (shrink)

Exploring the links between Speculative Realism, psychoanalysis, and literary criticism, this article examines OOO’s entanglement with the ‘uncanny’. Reading OOO against three notable treatments of the concept - Sigmund Freud’s 1919 essay “The ‘Uncanny’”, Ernst Jentsch’s 1906 paper “On the Psychology of the Uncanny”, and Martin Heidegger’s discussion of uncanniness in his Introduction to Metaphysics (1953) - it argues that OOO reconfigures the ‘uncanny’ as a profoundly ontological concept premised on aesthetic enstrangement. Using E.T.A. Hoffmann’s short story “The Sandman” as (...) a case study, it assesses what the consequences of this reconfiguration are for literary criticism and, in particular, the study of the Gothic. By splicing OOO into the history and practice of Gothic scholarship, this article traces the outline of an “object-oriented uncanny”, pushing the ‘uncanny’ out of Freud’s shadow and into the “great outdoors”. (shrink)