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Flashcards by Sarah Elder, updated more than 1 year ago
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| Question | Answer |
| Transgression | An act that goes against a law, rule, or code of conduct. Gothic explores fear of barbarism, of unleashing human passion beyond social constraints. Gothic’s operation as a literature of the unconscious, of transgressive desires. |
| The Sublime | An overpowering sense of the greatness and power of nature, which can be uplifting, awe-inspiring and terrifying, caused by experience of beauty, vastness or grandeur. Sublime moments lead us to consider the place of humanity in the universe, and the power exhibited in the world. |
| The Uncanny | The uncanny is a sense of fear aroused by superstitions that had previously been thought false being proved real. Freud describes it as the awakening of childhood fears or primitive beliefs held by ancestors that, having been rationally proved impossible, are brought up again in an uncanny incident. Another key concept of Freud’s uncanny is the blurring of the lines between human and inhuman, in objects like robots and puppets. The concept deals mainly with the idea of the familiar becoming unfamiliar, doubles, or repetitions of the same thing, and the lifelike qualities of inanimate objects, such as dolls or houses. All of these things tend to relate to the idea of things that we, as human beings, assumed we knew becoming unknown to us or foreign and thus becoming frightening. |
| The Grotesque | The grotesque simultaneously disgusts and arouses . The reader becomes piqued by the grotesque's positive side, and continues reading to see if the character can conquer their darker side. cess of alienation. |
| The Other | The gothic anxiety about the monstrous “Other” is fore-grounded when the apparent simplicity of the self/other relationship as a clear binary breaks down into something more complex under close examination. The self experiences immense fear, not only towards the failure of containment of the “other”, but also in having identified latent similarities between itself and its evil twin. |
| Incarceration | A claustrophobic sense of enclosure and entrapment, geographically, existentially and socially. Isolation and introversion. Locked doors, prisons, clandestine Victoriana, bedrooms, boudoirs, secrets and lies, confinement of repression and denial. Domestic interiors become prisons. Borders and boundaries. Price of liberty/freedom = external vigilance. Classification, compartmentalising of knowledge. |
| Paranoia | A mental disorder characterized by systematized delusions and the projection of personal conflicts, which are ascribed to the supposed hostility of others, sometimes progressing to disturbances of consciousness and aggressive acts believed to be performed in self-defense or as a mission. Used to describe a mode of narrative in Gothic literature, certain critics align it with the 'male' Gothic 'horror'. |
| Gynophobia | Extreme or irrational fear of women. |
| The Occult | Mystical, supernatural, or magical powers, practices, or phenomena . Using natural or white magic, an occultist may divine the workings of the universe; or may influence the course of events to personal ends through black or malefic magic. |
| Metamorphosis | 1. A transformation, as by magic or sorcery, 2. A marked change in appearance, character, condition, or function. |
| Chiaroscuro | A literary device that displays the juxtaposition of light and shade. |
| Alienation | A state of depersonalization or loss of identity in which the self seems unreal, thought to be caused by difficulties in relating to society and the resulting prolonged inhibition of emotion. The genre’s interest in identity and subjectivity, but of an alienated self, set apart from society. |
| Claustrophobia | Use of small spaces in Gothic literature can represent helplessness, forthcoming calamity, entrapment, “emotional repression,” and “premature burial.” All of these negative associations with claustrophobia add to the motifs of insecurity, uncertainty, suspense, foreshadowing, and tragic fate that are often present in Gothic literature. |
| Subterranean | Underground - "subterranean passages" add to the sense of claustrophobic confinement |
| Liminality | Liminality is a significant element of Gothic literature, and comes from the Latin word 'limen', meaning 'threshold'. And, as the translation suggests, it refers to someone or something being on a boundary between two things - often two extremes. It's like a transitory, 'in-between' state between two things. Manuel Aguirre (Liminal Terror: The Poetics of Gothic Space), a literary critic, cites liminality as a defining feature of Gothic literature. |
| Voyeurism | The compulsion to seek sexual gratification by secretively looking at sexual objects or acts. The Gothic explores acts that are deemed "immoral" |
| Melodrama | A melodrama is a dramatic work that exaggerates plot and characters in order to appeal to the emotions, often with strongly stereotyped characters. |
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