nicolebergenart

You found the ghost! Let me know with your favourite ghost, fictional or otherwise:

Every good gothic manor needs a ghost. This one’s from Crimson Peak. I don’t watch a lot of movies, but this one is one of my favourites. I do, however, read a lot of gothic fiction.

Every November, I participate in #gothlitnovember on YouTube with Rachel of Second Thoughts about the Mission. Here’s the video playlist:

Notes about Gothic Literature

✓American Gothic Fiction Alan Lloyd-Smith (library textbook):

“the message of Gothic…is that it isn’t so much a matter of whether you can repeat the past as whether the past will repeat itself in you” (p.1)

“But in this enigmatic American erosion the Gothic object is allowed its own life, remaining stubbornly resistant to interpretation, however persuasive” (p.74)

“A all these instances suggest, domestic Gothic is intimately bound up with the idea of the house, gender, and the family, which becomes, through metaphor, a way of externalizing the inner life of fictional characters” (p.102)

‘“The past isn’t dead,” says one of Faulkner’s characters, “it isn’t even past,” which might serve as a motto for American Gothic itself as it explores the tensions between a culturally sanctioned progressive optimism and an actual dark legacy.’ (p.118)

✓Unsettled Remains: Canadian Literature and the Postcolonial Gothic, Edited by Cynthia Sugars and Gerry Turcotte 

“Initially, it is fair to say, the Gothic emerged as a way of responding to the unfamiliar by demonizing and even fetishizing the “unknown” – be it human or landscape. Often this monstrous presence was figured as an Indigenous one – a danger lying just beyond the garrison but not sufficiently removed. Over time, Canadian writers began to appropriate this force, to bend it to a national purpose, and to map the parameters of an identity that might embrace what was resonantly local so that the Gothic became a way to insist on, rather than deny, a colonial history. In effect, the gothic mode was used to articulate a suitably “haunted” version of the Canadian identity, one that lent the Canadian locale a “feel” of authenticity because it had been rendered “(un)homely” (that is, both familiar and unfamiliar at the same time).” (p.xvii)

‘“The white Canadian looks at the Indian. The Indian is Other and therefore alien. But the Indian is indigenous and therefore cannot be alien. So the Canadian must be alien. But how can the Canadian be alien within Canada? –Terry Coldie, Fear and Temptation’ (Brian Johnson, p.25).

“Since 2001,,…much important work has been done on the Gothic in English-Canadian literature, including Justin Edwards’s Gothic Canada: Reading the Spectre of a National Literature (2005) and a 2006 special issue of University of Toronto Quarterly, guest edited by Marlene Goldman and Joanne Saul. Most relevant to this essay is Jodey Castricano’s ‘Learning to Talk with Ghosts: Canadian Gothic and the Poetics of Haunting in Eden Robinson’s Monkey Beach,’” (Jennifer Andrews, p.206).

✓Gothic Literature by Sue Chaplin

“Recent work in Gothic criticism has argued that the Gothic ought not to be defined in terms of its emotional or aesthetic effect, or even regarded as a literary ‘genre’ at all (that is to say, as a class of texts conforming to particular conventions of content and/or style). Rather, it should be considered a ‘mode’ of writing that responds in certain diverse yet recognisable ways to the conflicts and anxieties of its historical moment and that is characterised especially by its capacity to represent individual and societal traumas” (p.4)

“These Gothic interventions into other genres of literature are discussed in Part Three…and it will be seen that during this period the mutable quality of the Gothic became, paradoxically, one of its characteristics features; ‘paradoxically’ because the very quality of mutability is what makes it so difficult to ‘characterise’ the Gothic, to identify its defining qualities as a literary category.” (p.20)

Painting: The Passage of St Gothard by Salvator Rosa

Byron’s poems Giaour and Manfred

Angela Carter’s The Bloody Chamber

Jamaica Kincaid’s The Autobiography of My Mother

“Gothic tends to foreground what other forms of writing (the realist novel, for example) often seek to conceal: that its narratives are not necessarily trustworthy; that literary conventions bear a slippery relationship to the ‘truths’ they mean to communicate.” (p.182)

“In [Jane Eyre and ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’], women are portrayed as susceptible to madness, but their mental trauma is not depicted as somehow innate to their femininity; rather, it is related to and emanates from social situations that render the female protagonist vulnerable, alienated and desperate.” (p.213)

Articles

• Canadian Gothic: Creating New Ghosts: Settlers in a strange land need their own ephemera, it seems by Yvette Nolan (book review)
• (Un)Frozen Hearts: Wendigoes, Gothic Tropes, and Indigenous Knowledge in Drew Hayden Taylor’s The Night Wanderer: A Graphic Novel by Siobhan M. Carlson
• Gothic vs. Horror Literature: A Study of Genres
• The eco, the gothic, and the ecogothic: literature and photography