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Structure
Chronological?
Flashbacks?
Cyclical narrative?
Perspective?
Shifts of focus onto what?
Do we move at all through a time frame?
When is new information revealed
Does the writer use juxtaposition?
Sudden or gradual introduction to a new character
In then out or out then in
Does the writer combine external actions with internal thoughts?
Are some points developed/focused?
Where are they key sentences positioned?
Analysis
narrative voice
setting
imagery
tone
language techniques
sentence moods/types
phonology
Definition
heterodiegetic
not comparable) (literature, film) Of or relating to a narrator that does not take part in the plot.
Definition
Digetic narrator
a narrator who participates in the story, and possesses an active role.
Definition
Enumeratio
the device refers to making a point with long detail.
Definition
Prolepsis/ analepsis
Prolepsis, flashforwards.
Analepsis, flashbackwards.
Definition
Epizeuxis
repeats one word for emphasis.
Definition
hermeneutic code and proairetic code
Ronald Bathes 'hermeneutic code', evoking mystery, and 'proairetic code', building action and suspense.
Narrative voice
Third person
third person
heterodiegetic
provokes a sense of mystery as the reader must create bonds with the characters in the novel as opposed to a narrator.
foreboding as the supernatural activity from the story is not seen by the reader from a single character's point of view, but more of an overhead narrator; the reader gains a larger view of the story with a more enigmatic interpretation as we do not know who this narrator is.
Omniscient -> more eerie and unattainably larger than life.
The unknown narrator is a familiar pattern from the gothic narrative and in this case portrays the [insert character] as isolated and detached from the world, as we as the readers are detached from the characters themselves.
Narrative voice
First person
First-person narration allows the reader to watch the story develop as the protagonist experiences it, which is effective in creating fear and emotion within the reader
The reader is left feeling uncertain of the events which are being relayed to the narrator → Evokes the pity of the reader
Gothic literature thrives on feelings of anxiety and weariness.
Typical of the gothic → particularly Victorian ghost stories
Used to be ambiguous → Charles Dickens “No. 1 Branch Line: The Signal-Man”
Used so reader is given an in-depth experience of the happenings in which the protagonists are experiencing and in turn, a deeper take into the horror and terror in which the authors are trying to portray → Edward Bulwer Lytton’s “The Haunted and the Haunters”
heightens the emotional experience of the reader as our emotions are based on their experiences (vicarious attachment) [can create an unreliable narrator]
Narrative voice
Unreliable narrator
The reader is not meant to take the narrator at face value. They may be deliberately lying or their words may be influenced by unconscious bias or delusions.
The Turn of the Screw by Henry James → 1898
Tool can be used in the service of horror to build an unnerving sense of uncertainty in the mind of the reader.
Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart”
Narrator begins by insisting to the reader that he is not mad, which only serves to convince you that he is The unreliability of the narrator is glaringly obvious and serves to reinforce the reader’s perception of his insanity.
Structure
Progression of the sentence structure builds tension and fear, which are both Gothic tropes, as it reflects a naturalistic style of thought.
This is exemplified through the extract starting with long clauses embedded in complex sentences
The repetitive nature of the short sentences build tension through introducing deliberate dramatic pauses that break up the natural rhythm of the sentences → makes readers stop and reflect upon the action
Repetition of clauses
Discontinuities/delays in the narrative →builds inner tension
Shifts in voice → creates confusion
Sentence lengths (short vs long for different effects)
Convoluted or simple discourse (dialogue)
Definition
Complex sentences
A complex sentence is made up of a main clause and a subordinate clause connected to each other with a subordinating conjunction
eg Because my pizza was cold, I put it in the microwave.
Chiasmus
'when the going gets tough, the tough gets going'
Voyeurism
voyeuristic on the taboo acts being explored in the text. I mentioned how this narrative form allowed for a chiaroscuro (clear contrast in light and dark) setting to be built, which is intrinsically Gothic
metonym
A word that is used to stand for something else that it has attributes of or is associated with.
calling your car your "ride" or declaring that lobster mac and cheese is your favorite "dish".
('heart' was used to describe intense emotions a few times I think)
dichotomy
I described how the 'lofty' girl, in her perverse sexual aggression (I linked to taboo, her use of imperatives) was similar to the femme-fatale/vampiric archetype.
Indirect speech
'Yes, it was a corpse' was striking because it presented itself seemingly as free indirect speech but was assigned to no character; I then went on to talk about the effect of this as establishing a connection with the reader, but also presents a sense of ambiguity and reader distrust of the narrative authority.
Early gothic
1700s/ 18th century
Artistic and philosophical shift away from scientific rationalism with its emphasis on reason, rather than feeling/emotion
Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe,
Terror, excess, supernatural, imprisonment, Satanic bargaining, castles, forests, destruction, disruption, immorality, dread, irrational violence, women under threat, tyranny, patriarchal oppression, sexuality, corruption, medieval Catholicism, ghosts, demons
Romantic Era Gothic
Late 1700s-early 1800s
A way of exploring accepted boundaries and social conventions
Mary Shelley,
Charles Maturin
The sublime, sensibility, prioritising of emotion over reason, tyranny, position of women, horror, terror, awe, vengeance, violence, justice, injustice, multiple narrators, boundaries and limits, dreams
Human institutions and restrictions seen as source of evil; emphasis on emotion over reason; imagination as powerful force; emphasis on the self and individual experience
Mid 1700s onwards-Scientific experiments such as Galvanism, exploring the origins of life
Internal vs external
Women under threat
“Occupies the Romantic Gothic sub-genre”
Victorian Gothic
1800s/19th century
aspects of Gothic incorporated into domestic novel and detective fiction
Brontë Sisters, Charles Dickens, Edgar Allen Poe
Civilisation and savagery, opposites, transformation, otherness, anxiety, class, race and gender difference, psychological complexity, origins, sensationalism, doubles
Fin de Siecle
1880s - early 1900s
End of century texts responding to emerging evolutionary, social and medical theories
Oscar Wilde, Bram Stoker
Doubling, degeneration, decadence, amorality, mutation, psychological landscapes, doubt, scepticism, criminology, fantasy, the New Woman, duality, perversity, the monstrous, fear of immigration
American gothic
1900s-present
Southern Gothic emerges as a genre - using Gothic to explore personal and social trauma arising from the legacy of slavery and civil war
Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner
rationality versus the irrational, puritanism, guilt, the uncanny (das unheimliche), ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters.
Puritan imagery, particularly that of Hell
The dark and nightmarish visions the Puritan culture of condemnation, reinforced by shame and guilt,
abhuman - evolution
Social context link of how American Gothic extracted the dark potentials latent in the individual suggested by Romanticism
Modern British Gothic
1900s - present
Often a response to social and cultural contexts, and sometimes subversive
Daphne du Maurier, Angela Carter,
Dislocation, persecution, confinement, grotesque, subversion, transgression, role-reversal, gender, adolescence, Oedipal conflict, instability, anxiety, otherness, dystopia
Imperial Gothic
late nineteenth-century
Imperial Gothic saw the revival of Gothic tropes such as inexplicable curses, demonic possession and ghostly visitations - inspired by the social anxiety of society transgressing into barbarism, a lapse into fears of Occultism and Spiritualism.
Notes
Metaphors + personification etc. → atmosphere of dread
Visibility + darkness → obscurity of danger
Stressing the physicality of the environment with violent/powerful imagery
Manifestation of the character's feelings
The setting becomes a metonymy/reflection of inner thoughts
Everything mirrors something => rhetoric of binaries/contrasts
Setting is alive
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
When Dorian is running away, the setting is personified
e.g. the shadows, the moon
Dracula by Bram Stoker
the sea is personified
the lately gassy sea was like a roaring devouring monster
Sublime
sublime setting relates to the figures of the women and establishes a sense of the different spheres of society, the tamed and the untamed. I compared it with Frankenstein and The Castle of Otranto. 'Allusions to prostitition'
Entrapment
evoking feelings of claustrophobia within the reader and making them feel helpless and surrounded by the setting.
make readers feel overwhelmed and unsettled → Wuthering Heights in which the narrator stumbles lost through a snow filled landscape and with them the reader feels both trapped and overwhelmed by the scenario created by the setting.
links to Freud’s theory of the unconscious and the combined fear and desire to access unknown parts of oneself that was commonly exploited from the beginning of Gothic literature as it strove to go against the Enlightenment and explain what could not be explained.
Castle
This and the theme of entrapment are further highlighted through the setting of a castle, another typical Gothic setting that is used for the reminder of archaic and aristocratic societies.
setting isolated and evoke feelings of helplessness within the reader that this corrupted and hopeless setting is so far from civilisation, and therefore so far from any help with the inevitable danger
Gothic Sublimity
The Gothic Sublimity creates an image of awe, an awful sense of beauty. Creating terror in opening the mind to its own hidden and irrational powers.
Gothic Paradoxes
A paradox in literature refers to the use of concepts or ideas that are contradictory to one another, yet, when placed together hold significant value on several levels.
'The apparent delight with which we dwell upon objects of pure terror' (Aikin) in talks of the heart's paradox.
Coleridge's willing suspension of disbelief
Suspension of disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the avoidance of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality
The Woman in Black by Susan Hill - when the narrator feels the presence of someone in the house, he thinks that it might be someone living in the nursery
Beloved by Toni Morrison - there is both a supernatural and prosaic explanation of the presence of an abusive ghost in the house
The Numinous Dread
Defined by Rudolph Otto, the numinous dread exudes 'absolute unapproachability, power and urgency, and a force which is most easily perceived as the wrath of God'.
Relatable to Wells' 'The Red Room' (1896) as "the shadows seemed to take another step" personifying the setting and building the presence of MYSTERIUM DREMENDUM.
taboo
taboo and linked the extreme and disturbing nature of the acts being quasi-supernatural (almost) in the dramatic psychological states they represent, which I linked to Faulkner's 'A Rose for Emily'
I linked this to how there was a semantic field of the supernatural prevalent throughout the extract, but no literal instances of it.
Opposite Taboos
Refers to key concepts within the Gothic such as: sanity/madness; wild/domesticated; male/female; living/dead; past/present; reason/passion; dark/light; good/evil.
In the Gothic genre these are often put under pressure any may be shown to collapse, showing they are not quite so rigidly different as we might have believed.
Dreams
Waking up from a dream = reminiscent of Johnathan’s Harpers travel to Castle Dracula
Uncertainty is conveyed throughout the gothic genre through the the binary opposition of dreams vs reality
Rationalising dreams = must have seen something supernatural
Casts doubts in the reliability of the narrator
Night creates the foundation of a deeply eerie atmosphere
Carmilla’ by Lefanu the dream Laura has signifies entrapment in as she cannot escape the dream symbolising the unconscious and the supernatural element that prevails throughout Gothic Literature.
Freud → dreams represent repressed desire and emotions that gradually build and form an expression of wish fulfilment.
The Monk by Gregory Lewis
Anotinia's mother came to the chamber because she saw her daughter calling out for her to save her in a dream
the abject
Refers to that which was once human but is no longer. It threatens us because we recognise in it our own mortality.
To confront a human corpse, something that should be alive but isn't, for example, is to confront the reality that we are capable of dying ourselves.
This repulsion from death, excrement and rot threatens the subject and the natural order of things.
Uncanny
Defined in Freudian terms as a sense of fear and familiarity
Persona recognises their terror but struggles to define its origin
'The Uncanny' locates a strangeness in the ordinary - coined by Sigmund Freud's 1919 essay on the subject.
Death and decay
Provokes sentiments of repulsion. When juxtaposed with beauty and youth could allude to the societal of human mortality → key element of the gothic = tap into contemporary repressed anxieties of the culture
first established with Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764 in order to explore universal themes of death and corruption that remain prominent anxieties within both ancient and 20th century societies
Darkness
Often linked to gothic obscurity
Failing light sources are indicative of the genre
Aligns itself with the tension of the extract
Suggestive of an unseen threat → potential danger
Prevents the reader from visualising the piece properly/ clearly → further implements threat of the unknown
The Picture of Dorian Grey by Oscar Wilde
when he is trying to run away from the murder, he gets to a street where 'the gas lamps grew fewer and the streets more narrow'
Woman in Black - the woman in black turns the lights off and the protagonist is alone in the darkness with the cries of the child and the presence of the woman
Light
Often juxtaposed with obscurity → revealing chiarroscuro
Light can be alluded to religion → “heaven”
Obsurity
blurring of boundaries and the subversion of life and death is another trope seen frequently in Gothic fiction, used to emphasise the obscurity in the extract and continue to unsettle the reader as they are forced to watch death unfold throughout the passage while they are helpless to stop it
Can provide a contrast to the 19th century obsession of knowledge (only use if written during the Victorian gothic.
Often juxtaposed with light imagery → revealing chiaroscuro
Obscurity is a key element of the experience of the sublime. It includes both physical and mental obscurity - darkness, fogginess, confusion and things not seen or understood clearly.
Bifurcated Ideology
The possibility of contradictory moral behaviour, used in the Gothic to format characters of a distrustful nature. Relatable to Lewis' 'The Monk' (1796) features Ambrosio, a monk who defies Christianity as he commits crimes of rape and necromancy.
the Monk is commonly described as 'lustful' and enchanted by Antonia's body \n - around his brutish desire to rape her
The Revenant
The revenant is a term used to describe the past, 'what comes back'. This might, for example, be an evil deed from the past for which retribution is now sought (the sins of the father) or a fear which we thought we had banished.
The relevant includes ghosts, hauntings and the return of the unwanted, perhaps repressed, elements from the past.
Religion
A prominent theme in the gothic as it examines the purpose and limitations of humanity, along with the suggestion of an ‘anti-christ’ → alluding to the idea of encroaching evil and uncertainty
The Italian by Ann Radcliffe -
presence of the Holy Inquisition
The Monk by Gregory Lewis
explores the corruption of religion in his society
satanic titillation, takes place in a monastery
use of religious setting heightens the tension between good and evil - often identifies the evil character with the devil
Knowledge
The conquest for knowledge is often a long and complex journey and can be a form of terra incognita → entering an unexplored terrain, possibly resulting in psychological awakening
Long complex sentences to describe setting and dark atmosphere can reflect the journey to enlightenment as it is a tiresome journey
Terror vs Horror → Radcliffian
Terror
The Gothic as a 'bifurcation into sentimental terror narratives and German-influenced tales of horror' (Wright). Radlciffean Terror characterised by Ann Radcliffe at the end of the eighteenth century, focused on building tension and an atmosphere of obscurity
Used by Ann Radcliffe, it is primarily concerned with a greater psychological and intellectual response
Reflects the powerlessness of individuals in the face of more dominant forces - Common sources include grotesque, light/dark motifs, sublime settings etc. Horror
Horror
Gothic's Horror uses images of the macabre, the taboo, evoking repulsion. 'Terror was an ubiquitous signifier for Gothic by the end of the eighteenth century' (Wright).
Deals with alarmingly concrete imagery \n - A more physical response \n - Lurking force (personification) \n - Characters' inability to communicate their emotions \n - Loss of control
Tropes
Byronic Hero / villain,
A proud, passionate and socially defiant rebel who harbors remorse over some past moral transgression. Polidori's (1819) 'The Vampyre' uses Lord Ruthven as a reflection on this archetype, portraying a cynical man, a monster.
Faustian Archetype
A man that surrenders moral integrity in a bid to achieve power and pursue ambitions. Relatable to Beckford's 'The History of Caliph Vathek' (1782), where "Carathis [was] to obtain favour with the Powers of Darkness".
Promethean Hero / Villain, Satanic Hero / Villain, The, Outsider, Aristocratic, The Ingenue Femme Fatale, Monstrous feminine, Madwoman in the Attic, Mad Scientist Sinister Servant, victim → vulnerable and easily intimidated
Protagonist
some degree of tragic stature, of high social rank,
somehow foreshadowed by doom, a tendency to be influenced by past events,
sharply contrasting qualities within the character, the possession of considerable powers,
a striking physical presence, a strongly sexual element, driven by some all-consuming passion,
a connection with the exotic, an occasional association with what is bestial or non-human
In Faulkner's "A Rose for Emily,"
Being a victim of male-dominated society and the conflict between the South and the North, Emily suffers from Stockholm syndrome and is tortured to death. On Emily's funeral, a rose for pity is sent to Emily.
Carmilla
I talked about how her beauty was perverted by being compared to that of the corpse, and how her characterisation was sensual yet disturbing, the inverse of Patmore's 'Angel of The House'.
I talked about how she was a juxtaposition to Edith, whom the reader may feel pathos for in her vulnerability.
Carmilla → Sheridan Le Fanu
femme fatale
"She interested and won me, she was so beautiful and so indescribably engaging" --> seductive
Walpole's 'The Castle of Otranto' (1764)
The origin of Gothic Literature: initially playing with the realism of his story, Walpole demonstrated Gothic Horror, using 'subterraneous passages', images of the macabre and the taboo to evoke a perpetuous sense of repulsion.
Hills' 'The Woman in Black' (1983)
'Mad with grief and mad with anger and a desire for revenge.' The effect of the supernatural on the psyche, as well as themes of madness, cathartic characterisation - Gothic sublimity.
Doyle's 'Dead Man Talking' (2015)
Uses the modern Gothic themes of dislocation and instability with the narrator, Pat, saying 'There was no way I was dead, I had gone to the toilet [...]'; Doyle using satire to mock his narrator's ignorance.
Fuseli's 'The Nightmare' (1781) Painting
Gothic painting that many of writers allude to in order to reference themes of madness, dreams and the supernatural.
Patmore Angel of the House
The Angel was passive and powerless, meek, charming, graceful, sympathetic, self-sacrificing, pious, and above all--pure
Nicola Onyett
"Women who had been seduced or were living a life of sin [...] had passed the point of no return"
Note
Flashcard