Gothic fiction

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  Claire Kahane - Terror in Our Time: Ian mcewan and the Modern Gothic

  Gothic fiction is a popular genre meant to evoke terror using methods that are usually considered disreputable. Yet our finest writers use Gothic elements to represent the anxieties of their time. Ian mcewan's fiction, for example, often includes a terrifying scene that propels the story forward. How do we understand his recurrent use of such scenes? Why does it appeal to us? We'll closely examine some early stories, a novel and its film version, and his post-9/11 masterpiece, Saturday. Recommended reading: The stories Homemade, Butterflies, and Disguises in First Love, Last Rites, and the novels The Comfort of Strangers and Saturday, by Ian mcewan; Matthew Arnold's Dover Beach. Claire Kahane is professor emerita of English at SUNY-Buffalo, a graduate of the San Francisco Psychoanalytic Institute, and a past visiting professor in the English department at UC Berkeley. A psychoanalytic critic, she has published works on modern American and British fiction, trauma, and Holocaust literature. Last year, she organized a public seminar at Berkeley on psychoanalysis and war. Tuesdays, January 27-March 3 (6 classes) 1:30-3:30 pm Location: University Hall, 2199 Addison Street, Room 41C Click here to view a clip of the instructor's presentation ===================================== Recommended reading for "Terror in our Time: Ian mcewan and the Modern Gothic": * "The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction" (read online at Amazon) * "The Gothic Mirror in The Mother Tongue" by Claire ...

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  Gothic Novels - Part One

  Gothic fiction (sometimes referred to as Gothic horror) is a genre of literature that combines elements of both horror and romance. As a genre, it is generally believed to have been invented by the English author Horace Walpole, with his 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto. The effect of Gothic fiction depends on a pleasing sort of terror, an extension of Romantic literacy pleasures that were relatively new at the time of Walpole's novel. Melodrama and parody (including self-parody) were other long-standing features of the Gothic initiated by Walpole. Gothic literature is intimately associated with the Gothic Revival architecture of the same era. In a way similar to the gothic revivalists' rejection of the clarity and rationalism of the neoclassical style of the Enlightened Establishment, the literary Gothic embodies an appreciation of the joys of extreme emotion, the thrills of fearfulness and awe inherent in the sublime, and a quest for atmosphere. The ruins of gothic buildings gave rise to multiple linked emotions by representing the inevitable decay and collapse of human creations—thus the urge to add fake ruins as eyecatchers in English landscape parks. English Gothic writers often associated medieval buildings with what they saw as a dark and terrifying period, characterized by harsh laws enforced by torture, and with mysterious, fantastic, and superstitious rituals. In literature such Anti-Catholicism had a European dimension featuring Roman Catholic excesses such as ...

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