"the legacies of the past and its burdens on the present
the radically provisional or divided nature of the self
the construction of peoples or individuals as monstrous or 'other'
the preoccupation with bodies that are modified, grotesque or diseased...
Gothic has become so pervasive precisely because it is so apposite to the representation of contemporary concerns...
we should perhaps be careful of assuming that the Gothic simply reflects social anxieties in a straightforward manner - as a genre deliberately intended to provoke horror and unease, it plays to audience expectations and therefor is rather too self-conscious to illuminate our most secret fears..."
"There is no 'original' Gothic; it is always already a revival of something else."
Catherine Spooner
- Gothic as 'the passionate overthrow of reason' coming from 5th century Goths' overthrow of Rome
- Gothic as a retrospective architectural term for medieval structures embellished with pointed arches, grotesque angles, gargoyles, stiff elongated figures and elaborate detail... ignoring the clean lines and proportional curves of Classical styles.
"[A Gothic text should comprise] a fearful sense of inheritance in time with a claustrophobic sense of enclosure in space, these two dimensions reinforcing one another to produce an impression of sickening descent into disintegration..."
Chris Baldick
(etymological/historical tensions between definitions: gothic as transcendent spiritualism or corporeal horror?)
:Gothic text: past as a site of terror, injustice that must be resolved, evil that must exorcised. 'the past chokes the present, prevents progress...'
:Gothic (Revival) architecture: the past is imbued and invested with nostalgia and idealism.
Perhaps it is only secure cultures that produce Gothic texts...
it is only a society that has stopped believing in ghosts that is able to turn them into the stuff of entertainment.
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