a study blog or something

Required reading 

Confessions by St Augustine (extract): Found here:  (Book 4 - http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/augconf/aug04.htm)

Confessions by Jean-Jacques Rousseau (extract)

Reality Hunger by David Shields (extract)

Recommended reading

Shannon Keating, “Am I Writing About My Life, Or Selling Myself Out?” https://www.buzzfeednews.com/article/shannonkeating/personal-writing-social-media-influencers-caroline-calloway

Sarah Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion – introduction’: available in PDF on Blackboard and online via Google Books: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=QT8YAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA1&source=gbs_toc_r&cad=2#v=onepage&q&f=false

Marshall Berman, ‘Goethe’s Faust: The Tragedy of Development’ and ‘First Metamorphosis: The Dreamer’ from All that is Solid Melts into Air (on Blackboard)

‘But Enough About Me’ : what does the popularity of memoir tell us about ourselves?’ by Daniel Mendelsohn, New Yorker https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2010/01/25/but-enough-about-me-2

Class 2: The stylised self in the world. Aesthetics of the insertion of the self in the story. Style and world view

Required reading 

The White Album by Joan Didion (PDF provided)

Extract from The Birth of New Journalism by Tom Wolfe (PDF provided).

Recommended reading

'Gonzos for the 21st Century', http://www.nytimes.com/2005/03/20/books/review/the-new-new-journalism-gonzos-for-the-21st-century.html

Tom Wolfe, The Birth of New Journalism: An EyeWitness Report: http://nymag.com/news/media/47353/index6.html

Martin Amis on Joan Didion’s style: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v02/n02/martin-amis/joan-didions-style

Class 3: The writer’s subjectivity and physical space. Melding Interior/Exterior worlds.

Required reading

A Field Guide to Getting Lost by Rebecca Solnit.

Recommended reading

Anne Carson – Plainwater (extract provided)

Anne Carson – The Autobiography of Red

Fernando Pessoa – The Book of Disquiet (extract provided)

Ian Sinclair – Lights Out For the Territory (extract – chapter 8 Word doc provided)

Italo Calvino – Invisible Cities

Olivia Laing – The Lonely City – extract on blackboard

Review of Lights Out for the Territory: http://www.nytimes.com/books/99/08/29/reviews/990829.29hoffmat.html

Class 4: Writing Nature/Nature of Writing.

Required reading

'In History' by Jamaica Kincaid - PDF supplied

'Findings' by Kathleen Jamie - extract provided

'Landmarks' by Robert Macfarlane - extract provided

'A Claxton Diary' by Mark Cocker - extracts provided

Recommended reading

'The Kusi' by Jean McNeil

'Soil Turned to Song and Dance' - the TLS on Mark Cocker's nature writing: https://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/mark-cocker-naturalism/?utm_medium=Social&utm_source=Twitter#Echobox=1574952085

'The Thoreau of the Suburbs' - feature article on Annie Dillard

'The New Nature Writing' by Jos Smith - extract provided

'The Anthropocene Lyric: an affective geography of poetry, person, place' by Tom Bristow (book)

Class 5: The self, anxiety and history – the non-novels of Sebald.

Required reading

The Emigrants by WG Sebald

Recommended reading

Reviews/literary criticism of Sebald:

André Aciman: https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1998/12/03/out-of-novemberland/

Cynthia Ozick – The Posthumous Sublime (on The Emigrants) on Blackboard

André Aciman: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/w-g-sebald-and-the-emigrants

Jonathan Coe: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v19/n06/jonathan-coe/tact

http://www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/30/reviews/970330.30wolfft.html

http://www.theliteraryreview.org/book-review/a-review-of-the-emigrants-by-w-g-sebald/

Class 6: Politics, alienation and self-displacement in South African and South American writing

Required reading

Summertime by JM Coetzee

Resistance (extract provided) by Julián Fuks

Recommended reading

Roland Barthes – The Death of the Author (on Blackboard)

Donald Powers, ‘Beyond the Death of the Author: Summertime and J. M. Coetzee’s Afterlives’, Life Writing, 2016. (on Blackboard)

Review: JM Coetzee, a Disembodied Man - https://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/27/books/review/Dee-t.html?pagewanted=all

Damon Galgut’s In a Strange Room - Galgut is a South African writer of the next generation. I've given an extract of this book, which is made up of three long novellas, here. 'The Lover' is the middle section in Galgut's trio of novellas.

Class 7: Walking and writing the city in fiction and non-fiction.

Required reading

Teju Cole – Open City

Recommended reading

Walter Benjamin – Berlin Chronicle (extract), One Way Street (extract) and Naples.

Joanna Walsh - Hotel (PDF provided)

Lauren Elkin – Flâneuse

Review of Open City: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2011/aug/17/open-city-teju-cole-review

James Wood on Teju Cole: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2011/02/28/the-arrival-of-enigmas

Class 8: Irony - Unreliable and self-critique as narrative drama.

Required reading

10:04 by Ben Lerner.

Recommended reading

Ben Lerner: Leaving the Atocha Station

Review of Leaving the Atocha Station https://www.lrb.co.uk/v34/n16/sheila-heti/i-hadnt-even-seen-the-alhambra

Jenny Offil - Dept of Speculation

Sheila Heti - How Should a Person Be?

Zadie Smith – Two Paths for the Novel (from Changing My Mind) on Blackboard

Zinzi Clemmons - What We Lose

Colebrook, Clare. Irony. New Critical Idiom.  Routledge, 2004

Alejandro Zambra – Multiple Choice (extract on Blackboard)

Class 9: Contemporary autofiction - two texts.

Required reading

Rachel Cusk – Outline

Amit Chaudhuri - Friend of My Youth

Recommended reading

Rachel Cusk  – Transit (extract on Blackboard)

Rachel Cusk, Kudos

Marcel Proust - A la recherche de temps perdu

VS Naipaul - The Enigma of Arrival

Geoff Dyer – Out of Sheer Rage

‘Rachel Cusk Gut-Renovates the Novel’ – profile in The New Yorker: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/08/07/rachel-cusk-gut-renovates-the-novel

Class 10. Shame and the self in auto-fiction. Domesticity. The Japanese I-novel.

Required reading

Karl Ove Knaussgard - My Struggle (in whole if you can buy the book, or in extract) provided here. My Struggle: book two, a man in love, introduced by James Wood: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-birthday-party

Recommended reading

Extract from Yuko Tsushima's Territory of Light (to be uploaded soon).

Rowan Hisayo Buchanan, ‘The Careful Craft of Writing Female Subjectivity’ https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2019/03/territory-light-yuko-tsushimas-vital-i-novel/585832/

Amit Chaudhuri ‘I am Ramu’: https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/i-am-ramu/

Review of Final volume of Knausgaard: https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/aug/29/the-end-karl-ove-knausgaard

'How Writing My Struggle Undid Knausgaard': https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/11/knausgaard-devours-himself/570847/

'Each Cornflake' - Review of Knausgaard by Ben Lerner in the LRB: https://www.lrb.co.uk/v36/n10/ben-lerner/each-cornflake

Class 11: The aesthetics and politics of the sexual self

Required reading

The Argonauts by Maggie Nelson

Recommended reading

Chris Kraus – I love Dick (extract on Blackboard)

Emilie Pine - Notes to Self

Catherine Millet – The Sexual Life of Catherine M. (extract on Blackboard)

Hélène Cixous – ‘The Laugh of the Medusa’ http://lavachequilit.typepad.com/files/cixous-read.pdf

‘Virgins or Whores – Feminist Critiques of Sexuality’, in Veronique Mottier, A Short Introduction to Sexuality (on Blackboard)

Henry Miller – The Tropic of Cancer

Sarah Ahmed – ‘The Performativity of Disgust’ from The Cultural Politics of Emotion (PDF here)

Chris Kraus ‘The New Universal’ https://sydneyreviewofbooks.com/new-universal/

Vivian Gornick http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/vivian-gornick-good-feminist-solnit-rhode-cobble-gordon-henry

Kathy Acker – Blood and Guts in High School

Class 12:  Using 'real' people in fiction.

Required reading

Megan Bradbury – Everyone is Watching

Zachary Lazar –  I Pity the Poor Immigrant 

Recommended reading

Zachary Lazar – Sway

James Wood in The New Yorker on Lazar – The Punished Land: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/06/23/the-punished-land

Tobias Wolf

Talks about his own fallibilities and insecurities

Mimicry, persuasive speech

Having a subjective opinion; the anecdotes that he tells us and the assumptions that he makes help to build a relationship with the reader

Rooms, physicality

Nod to close third-person narration

Mixed-media (eyewitness reports)

Joan Didion

Mixed-media (psych reports)

No conventional narrative

She doesn’t tie all the threads together as she progresses

Defies the idea that you aren’t meant to see the presence of the journalist

Montage of things; she wants to see if they are connected, but she can’t work out how

“I’ve never felt anything I didn’t see first”

Visual language

Detachment – observational – outsider/insertion of self – theme of performance/persona/the curated self

Reveal the essential via the seemingly inessential

What do you gain from writing about facts as fiction?

To read:

The three authors we will be studying this week are all writing about place in different ways. How do they frame or narrate the places that appear in the texts they’re looking at?

Italo Calvino

A sense of immersion through vivid, immediate, accessible language

Italian post-modern novelist known for his wild, philosophical imagination

Kublai Khan is melancholy, and has lost faith in his empire. He loves the stories of Venice because these are as much a meditation on mood as they are on physical place; bringing out what has been hidden or invisible, imbuing these landscapes with memory and desire. This suggests a longevity that the individual parts of the city do not possess. 

All of them are in the present tense, implying an ongoing nature, a resistance to change.

The cities are sometimes men, sometimes women. Observations of girls and women in the city – if cities are feminised in this way, maybe being a tourist and entering this city is a kind of violation. Two males effectively objectifying a woman. 

Khan lives vicariously through Polo. One is an explorer, the other a warrior and emperor.

Cyclical in nature – there’s the implication that there has been change in the past, and we can recognise that the cycle continues even while the actual place does not

Human equivalence, pulling the king down to the level of a tourist

Universal potentiality of experience

Hieroglyph of a city – signs, semiotics

The benign nature of landscape is challenged by climate change

Langley

English poet who also taught art history, tension between visual and verbal, meticulous attention to detail

Geoff Dyer

Known for blending genres, travel writing mixed with essay, art, criticism and fiction

Here, we have the question of the dead woman. Was she really dead? Is his perception of her recovery hindered by his inability to visualise multitudes?

The old woman serves as a living site of location; she represents Miami, a totemic emblem.

Conversational tone immediately invites us in

Themes for this week

The tide, rhythms

Liminal place; site, juncture between one thing and another. A place of natural tension, and the idea of edges/tone shift is locatable in the self too

Two physical worlds coming together

Objectivity of description becomes undone in the poetics of the language used

Individuation means that the concern is solely on how something affects the individual

Jorie Graham

diving deep into the experience of the shore

carries you along

powerfully descriptive

fragmented, random

W. S. Graham is inventive with syntax, Jorie with linearity and structure

All is flux, nothing is stationary

W. S. Graham 

a Scottish-born avant-garde poet, moved to Cornwall after WW2 to live in a leaky caravan, made money from fishing and digging potatoes

Coast as threshold, page as threshold, life in extremis

The hardness of spoken Scottish informs the written poem

Lyrical, moves in cadence with his voice

Passivity in the speaker, a lot of examples of him blurring what’s happening by switching the syntax: “My need reads in light more specially gendered and ambitioned by all eyes that wide have been me once”

Archaic, moving back to Old English

He’s being “written by” the landscape, a vehicle for moments and feelings that imprint themselves upon him

The sea implies the potentiality of death

Where does nature stop and non-nature begin?

A Field Guide to Getting Lost

Final chapter very disjointed

Writing about art can often be bland because you don’t have the visual aspects

Buddhist theory, embracing change

Conception of the self; self as something that has to dissolve and be reformed

Functions as a commentary on the process of writing

Meandering, digressive

Psychogeography: interior melding with the exterior

Making the familiar seem unfamiliar

Good Country People

Writing where we’re seeing the key themes of judgement, knowledge and assertiveness early on

Introduction to bland, philosophical platitudes

“Before the Freemans she had averaged one tenant family a year” – more a reflection of the Hopewells than anything else

Third person – but the voice we’re hearing is Mrs Hopewell’s, her voice, her judgement

Once you name something, do you become that thing?

“It was as if Mrs Freeman’s beady steel-pointed eyes had penetrated far enough behind her face to reach some secret fact” – Mrs Freeman is the one violating her, seeing through to her core

Hulga and her mother are more similar than you might think, in that they consider themselves superior to everyone else

Elasticity of third person

“She saw it as a name for her highest creative act” / “[She] scowled and reddened as if her privacy had been intruded upon” – she sees herself as an ugly thing, but doesn’t want other people to see it

Hulga has a good mind but a weak heart

“She looked at nice young men as if she could smell their stupidity” – mixing her sensory information

Complicated philosophical language vs. folksy platitudes, a binary

Neither the mother or the daughter respect one another’s vocations. Even though they are quite similar, they see one another as opposites

Bible salesman gets their names wrong, perpetuating the theme of misinterpretation and false judgement/mistaken identity

“I can’t be rude to anyone” – hypocrisy

Real genuine folks! Heavy focus on honesty, genuineness, authenticity, morality

They are the ones who think they are in control, but the Salesman is in fact the deceiver, getting what he wants right out of the gate, insinuating himself into their lives

He and Hulga are sick in the same way (in every sense)

Does the interior match the exterior? The physical is linked with the inside, then subverted

Ironic foreshadowing: she fantasises about doing to him what he ultimately does to her

Her anger when she thinks she has been tricked – does not spell out that she has feelings for him, but only implies it

Another binary: mind and heart, atheism and belief, good country people and trash

“No one ever touched [the leg] but her. She took care of it as someone else would his soul, in private and with his own eyes almost turned away” – talisman, physical thing, it means something in a powerful, symbolic sense

We are told that the leg makes her “different”, “special”

Surrendering to him completely, like losing her own life, handing herself over to another power. He has converted her to his power

Loss of her leg = loss of her belief in her own ability to understand the world

Nobody has any redeeming factors

The Bible salesman is the only one who actually manages to understand someone else’s worldview/get inside their head

Mrs Freeman does understand, but has made herself ignorant so she can stay on this property. She is the only free character in the story

Our intentions don’t matter to anyone else

Reunion

Station serves as both the beginning and the end

“Daddy” contrasts with the actual progression of the character’s growth

Packs in a lot in a very short space

Little interiority

Light-Skinned Girls and Kelly Rowlands

Limitations of the first person

All judgement from the narrator about Cecilia – we feel we know her well, but we are confined to seeing her through the lens of the narrator

Sense that these characters had a life beyond the page

Almost read like a personal essay

Informative without being preachy

“I might as well have been talking to a white boy”

“We might have been invisible to everyone else, but we weren’t invisible to each other”

Idea that there’s a bigger world than what we are seeing

Section of her taking the photographs; she wants to take natural photographs where people are “as beautiful or as unbeautiful” as they really are

Pressure of constantly having to be reading, judging, interpreting, thinking (due to racism)

General Notes

Knausgaard is the opposite of overprotective: exposes everything, using his own family, radical vulnerability, meticulous documentation of suffering

Munro: brutal compassion. Not the same as protectiveness

Too much time between moments – the unreality of life

The decisions that she makes and conceals: builds up a persona and then shows us what’s under it, something that is not calculable but that we feel pleased to have revealed to us. Subtle layers manifest in her response to events

Takes characters into situations without it feeling like she’s punishing them

Avoid moralising niceness

Relatable, vulnerable, dislikeable – challenge the concept of a likeable character

Keeps character development as a forward momentum (sense of certainty marks the change in Doree’s character)

The Swimmer

 Surrealism, time becoming confused, indistinct

Single motif/thread (the pools) running through the whole thing

An odyssey

Time is a physical presence, a threat, a pressure that he is unable to get out of – he is drowning in time, being swept away. It represents an irresistible force

Unreliability of memory

Protagonist wants to be seen as a legendary figure, but he might be just a pathetic drunk (conflict of the story coming from the character)

This is how you create plot: character presenting themselves as one thing when they’re really another. From here, the story almost generates itself.

Unity of effect: intentional with our images. He is drowning himself in liquid (drink)

 Bullet in the Brain

Life flashing before the eyes – a single moment isolated and held in the balance

Unsympathetic narrator is made sympathetic through his death; we look into the core of him and are shown his innocence, his humanity

Compresses and expands time all at once

Character unravelling

Cinematic idea of the freeze frame/montage sequence

 The Intoxicated Years

Defiance leading to violence, the boundary between teenage rebellion and something darker, animalistic. Women as monstrous, teenage girls as frightening

About social relations and how they break down

Isolation, fear of adults and most of all of adult men

Solipsism, the narrowing of the world to just those three girls (blood sacrifice?)

Three is a significant number

The insignificance of death

Time as madness

Islands

Extraordinarily vivid descriptions

Undertone of rot, beautiful things decaying, a maggot in the apple

Loss of innocence

 General Notes

Links between time and memory

If you are unable to perceive time, is that a kind of death?

Cuts – cut and jump, timelines crossing

Inescapability of history

Episodic

Memories stand out as singular events, not a linear flow

Experience is atemporal

Reader’s experience of time versus narrative time

How time works as a structure

Repeating a phrase to build effect and lead up to the final line, a change in the pattern

Franz Kafka says that a short story is a cage in search of a bird. 

Tzvetan Todorov says that the thing about a short story is that it’s so short it doesn’t allow us the time to forget that it’s only literature and not actually life.

Nadine Gordimer says that short stories are about the present moment, like the brief flash of a number of fireflies here and there in the dark.

Elizabeth Bowen says that the short story has the advantage over the novel of a special kind of concentration, and that it creates narrative every time absolutely on its own terms.

Eudora Welty says that short stories often problematise their own best interests and that this is what makes them interesting.

Henry James says that the short story, being so condensed, can give a particularised perspective on both complexity and continuity.

Jorge Luis Borges says that short stories can be the perfect form for novelists too lazy to write anything longer than fifteen pages.

Ernest Hemingway says that short stories are made by their own change and movement, and that even when a story seems static and you can’t make out any movement in it at all, it is probably changing and moving regardless, just unseen by you.

William Carlos Williams says that the short story, which acts like the flare of a match struck in the dark, is the only real form for describing the briefness, the brokenness and the simultaneous wholeness of people’s lives.

Walter Benjamin says that short stories are stronger than the real, lived moment, because they can go on releasing the real, lived moment long after the real, lived moment is dead.

Cynthia Ozick says that the difference between a short story and a novel is that the novel is a book whose journey, if it’s a good working novel, actually alters a reader, whereas a short story is more like the talismanic gift given to the protagonist of a fairy tale—something complete, powerful, whose power may yet not be understood, which can be held in the hands or tucked into the pocket and taken through the forest on the dark journey.

Grace Paley says that she has written only short stories in her life because art is too long and life is too short, and that short stories are, by nature, about life, and that life is itself always found in dialogue and argument.

True Short Story

Fitted everything that all the other pieces were tackling into one story

Indefinite ending

Moral side, political side

Essayistic quality

Summarised the point of view of other short story writers

Line between short stories and creative nonfiction 

Polyphonic, echoing stories that have gone before it

On Saturday Afternoon

Dark humour, weirdly matter-of-fact

Narrator’s perspective and voice: dialectical

Ending suggests that the narrator is more affected than he lets on

One bad joke, solidified by the ending

Reframes depressing thoughts

Power shift comes when the copper is introduced; we begin rooting for the suicidal guy to kill himself (?!) because it’s a strike back against corrupt authority, personified through the police officer

Parallels between policeman and violent father

Element of surprise, talking about something dark in an unexpected way

Redemptive moment; not a tragedy

Emergency

High-stakes situation with incompetent narrators

Absurdity, humour

Swept away along with the protagonists’ increasing non-sobriety

Narrator is passive, FH is set up as Georgie’s superior but their relationship is then subverted

Fragmentation of the structure: staccato followed by flow

Episodic

The “voice of reason” is actually the screw-up, while the person who succeeds at what he does is constantly high and chaotic

Georgie is being guided by some kind of higher power

All the Other Jobs

Shift between first and second half

Drawing attention to author’s naivety – unnecessary, their lack of self-awareness provides the basis for much of the story’s humour

Author studied philosophy at Cambridge; her other work does not contain dialogue

Terrain – her body becomes the explored landscape, stasis is the setting of intrigue

Focus on skin, body, flesh

We receive next to no information about the narrator

 Smote

Displays a “lack of hospitality” towards the reader

Spoken word/ half-rhymes and rhythms

Density, lack of clarity

Abstract art, almost a prose poem

Walter Benjamin

Novel is “novel”, isolated, individualist, tries to contain entirety

Short story is “traditional”, “immediate”, “social”

Additional notes

We are fascinated by things that are out of balance

Tension between two varying forces compels us to keep looking, keep reading. Is something going to smash?

In order to show you where your desire is, it is enough to forbid it to you

A discrete moment of truth, displayed as if by a camera flash (Camera Lucida)

The story as storage, containing potential energy which it preserves and concentrates

Epical story: hidden, suspended element, revelation re-illuminates all that has preceded it

Lyrical story: recurring image or symbol standing in for something inexpressible

Artifice story: intertwining of two seemingly incompatible ingredients (for example, Metamorphosis)

Read Antigonick (Anne Carson)

Read When A Man Falls from the Sky (Lesley Nneka Arimah)

Obsession can be a good way of creating momentum

Give the character a goal, a need, a desire

quotes

"An intelligible continuum of aims, emotions, and valuations links lesbianism with the other forms of women's attention to women: the bone of mother and daughter, for instance, the bond of sister and sister, women's friendship, "networking," and the active struggles of feminism.”

“From the vantage point of our own society, it has apparently been impossible to imagine a form of patriarchy that was not homophobic.”

"Our society could not cease to be homophobic and have its economic and political structures remain unchanged.”

“In any erotic rivalry, the bond that links the two rivals is as intense and potent as the bond that links either of the rivals to the beloved: the bonds of "rivalry" and "love," differently as they are experienced, are equally powerful and in many senses equivalent.”

notes

“male homosocial desire” - a way of discussing the structure of male/male relationships, whether erotic, sensual, platonic or romantic

how does sexuality affect power dynamics?

opposition between homosocial and homosexual relationships is much less distinct for women than it is for men

there is a unity between “women supporting the interests of women” and “women loving women”. there is no such unity between “men supporting the interests of men” and “men loving men”.

the apparent simplicity of women’s close relationships with one another is in stark contrast to the way men relate to one another

a lot of male-male bonds revolve around oppressing and dominating women

the patriarchy may structurally include homophobia, but it does not require homophobia to function

even in classical greek culture, when homosexuality was widely accepted, patriarchal values were still in place; one man took the role of the passive, “feminine” figure, whilst the other was more masculine and controlling. such relationships had a mentorship aspect to them, which often revolved around dominating slaves of both sexes and women of any class. (''women and slaves belonged and lived together" -hannah arendt)

summary

discussions of race in america have historically been characterised by silence and evasion

ignoring race is thought to be a “liberal” gesture

the line between claiming that everyone is equal and that race does not “matter”, and erasing/refusing to acknowledge black people’s very real struggles, is blurred

racism should be understood not only through its effects on its victims, but through its effects on those who perpetuate it

many prominent literary critics have never actually read a single work of african-american literature

in poe’s “the narrative of arthur gordon pym”, a mysterious white form rises from the water and kills the native character, nu-nu. this impenetrable whiteness is visible throughout the canon of american literature, and is usually set in conjunction with black people who are “dead, impotent, or under complete control”.

the contrast between white and black in this instance represents the flight from the old world to the new - a departure from poverty, social ostracism and death, and a move towards a bright future (the american dream).

however, “the desire for freedom is preceded by oppression”. to have wealth, one must also have poverty; to have law, one must acknowledge the existence of corruption. america is founded on duality, fear, and the haunting influence of the past/the genocide of the natives.

for this reason, there is a strong link between the 19th-century american sensibility and the gothic romance genre as a whole. recording and fictionalising horror was an attempt to speak the unspeakable, to put it out into the world as a cautionary tale.

this repressed darkness and sense of the “not-me” become typified in the image of a black person - hence the long-standing association of darkness with evil. 

gothic fiction possessed fabulism, violence, romance, terror - in short, “the opportunity to quiet deep insecurities”. 

slave narratives were a “publication boom” in the 19th century. despite this, and despite the many discussions surrounding the issues of slavery and abolition, the “master narrative” - the narrative of the legislator that spoke for black people, or of them - remained intact. white people used imaginative encounters with african people as a means of thinking about themselves.

in short: american writers are happy to use blackness as a metaphor, or as a means for self-exploration, but they either avoid explicitly talking about race or use the topic of race as a way of speaking over black people.

african idioms are also appropriated to describe difference or indicate modernity. deliberate misspellings are used to defamiliarise it, or to reinforce class divide/power imbalance. notable examples include the aforementioned poe story and “huckleberry finn”. 

in “huckleberry finn”, jim’s love for huck may be read as the white man’s yearning for forgiveness from the people he has enslaved. (a slave-owner’s common response to rebellions on his plantation was apparently not anger, but confusion and hurt at their “ingratitude”.) jim also assumes that the whites are “superior and adult”. in this sense, the novel can be seen as a wish-fulfilment fantasy: the black man is endlessly caring, subservient, and loyal, and his freedom/self-actualisation is deferred indefinitely, or simply not spoken of at all.

the constant torment and humiliation that jim endures is played for laughs, and responded to with boundless tolerance, boundless love. the notion of jim being freed would tear the book loose from its mooring, as it is impossible for huck to be “free” without the contrast of slavery to provide context to that freedom. here, we see again the ways in which white writers use slavery as a baseline against which certain positive qualities may be measured.

the previously mentioned image of blank whiteness appears everywhere: in “the snows of kilimanjaro”, in “to have and have not”, in “henderson the rain king”, in “the confessions of nat turner”, and so on. from this, we may assume that whilst blackness may represent a myriad of things - rebellion, forgiveness, fear, desire, evil, protection, etc. - whiteness can never be anything other than a mute and stifling nothingness.

key quotes

“Africanism is the vehicle by which the American self knows itself as not enslaved, but free; not repulsive, but desirable; not history-less, but historical; not damned, but innocent; not a blind accident of evolution, but a progressive fulfilment of destiny.”

“The act of enforcing racelessness... is in fact a racial act.”

“A criticism that needs to insist that literature is not only 'universal’ but also ‘race-free’ risks lobotomising that literature, and damaging both the art and the artist.”

glossary

heteroglot: a passage narrated by a single speaker, but containing two or more different kinds of speech

cervantic: describing low subjects with high language

recondite: little-known

aleatory: random

imbrication: overlapping

key quotes

“A recurrent problem of our fiction has been the need of our novelists to find a mode of projecting their conflicts which would contain all the dusky horror of gothic romance and yet be palatable to discriminating readers, palatable first of all to themselves.”

“If he permitted himself a certain relish in the contemplation of those ruins, this was because they were safely cast down, and he could indulge in nostalgia without risk. If he was terrified of them, dreamed supernatural enemies lurking in their shadows, it was because he suspected that the past, even dead, especially dead, could continue to work harm.”

“Tthe Devil lived on in the imagination after the death of God, men who would not have gone to church celebrating black masses or finding in the tale of terror some vestigial religious awe. Children of an age which had killed kings and bishops, cast down the holy places of their fathers, found it hard to convince themselves that specters did not walk with rattling chains, or that ancestral pictures did not bleed.”

“Anyone who, in full consciousness, surrenders the hope of heaven (what everyone says heaven is) for the endurance of hell (what everyone knows hell to be) has entered into a pact with Satan; and the very act, therefore, of writing a gothic novel rather than a sentimental one, of devoting a fiction to terror rather than love, is itself a Faustian commitment. The gothic novel was not fully itself until it had discovered and made its center the diabolic bargain.”

“Gothicism is the Satanism of those to whom (officially at least) Satan has become a figure of speech, hell a figment invented by the timid to scare the more timid, and thus to keep all men from enjoying the limitless freedom just opening before them.”

"The spirit of Voltaire broods over the haunted castle; and ghosts squeak eerily that they do not exist.”

“The tale of terror in a thousand forms, as the story of slavery and black revolt, of Indian warfare, of urban violence, of quiet despair in the world of the freak and the invert and the maimed, persists as a reigning genre among minor novelists, too...  Until the gothic was discovered, the serious American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the gothic cannot die.”

“The naturalized Faust legend becomes in the United States a way of denying hell in the act of seeming to accept it.”

summary

the difficulty of gothic writing is managing the balance between allegory and shock value

acceptable horror writing “elevates” itself through symbolism, but in trying to be respectable it cannot help but acknowledge its roots and its ties to the genres of pulp fiction, gore, slasher, trash, etc. 

trying to chart the course of literary history is an error, because it assumes a destination and places good and valid works of fiction in the category of “stepping stones” on the way to a better conclusion

there is a lack of truly “obscene” american authors; edgar allen poe comes the closest, but we have no stand-out figures like the marquis de sade or john cleland. american horror fiction is written for “boys”; it is sexless, even while it tries its best to shock

gothic horror symbolism relies heavily on the isolation of the protagonist - physical, spiritual, emotional, and so on

this leads to a paradox wherein solitude, though associated with freedom, is seen as frightening and undesirable; and yet the gothic narrative attacks institutions that inhibit freedom or mitigate solitude

the “maiden in flight” image represents the uprooted soul of the artist, searching for an escape or a purpose

the girl on the run and the monster pursuing her represent different versions of the same problem: they are both looking for something, seeking a means to an end

the derelict castle or abbey represents symbols of authority in ruin, outdated values and institutions, and the fear of anarchy

ghosts have a similar function, representing echoes of the past that linger on after death

symbolism of the dungeon: a gaping hole beneath the main structure, the maternal vs. the paternal, a wound

lower and upper levels of the castle represent the conflict between the id (the dark basement where evil lurks) and the superego (the carefully constructed building on top of it)

cliche of gothic fiction wherein the female equals christ and the male satan. (alternatively: the wicked female associated with lilith, jezebel, sexualised violence). the gothic follows the tradition of the sentimental, which is why they share this puritanical theme.

the “lonely jailor” or “ungodlike man” is another common staple: heathcliff, rochester, ahab, and various others fit this archetype. it is often known as the “lovelace archetype”.

the gothic hero-villain can also fit the mode of the faust figure, or the “wandering jew”; examples include cartaphilius and don juan, as well as faust himself. this archetypes, formed in light of the consciousness of the unconscious, can be promethean or satanic, but are united in three primary qualities: their status as former villains of the orthodox mind, their hunt for an existence without limitation (hedonism), and their self-damnation.

damnation: an abandonment of social ties, a rejection of family, wealth, social status and recognition, a commitment to the unconscious, a plunge into insanity, and an acceptance of personal (possibly eternal) torment. in this sense, a gothic novel is not truly gothic until it has made a faustian bargain: until, in short, it has committed itself to horror, unpleasantness, and lack of redemption. it is defined by its substitution of love for terror.

the gothic novel flirts with death and keeps its reader on the edge; it delights in excess; the abominable is made “the touchstone of effective art”. horror, to remain horror, must be so bad as to be unspeakable.

horror may also be seen as a pathological symptom rather than a form of art. some argue that it represents a need to feel in a world that becomes increasingly callous; “sensational” writing is called so because it provokes sensation. in this sense it may be linked to movements such as dadaism and surrealism.

it makes the past an essential component of fiction, tracing its echoes into the modern day; gothic novels are inherently historical as they examine something that is long-dead or irrevocably changed

however, a lot of gothic novelists are contemptuous of the past, seeing it as corrupt. they also deride the very supernatural events that are depicted in their work, claiming that they are mocking an age of superstition that ought to be over by now.

american gothic then faced a problem: the gothic is, as previously mentioned, founded on the past - and america has no past. elements such as the ruined castle, ancient evil, and long-dead conflict are rendered moot.

American Horror Story

Books

Young Goodman Brown by Nathaniel Hawthorne

Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs

A Good Man is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor

A View of the Woods by Flannery O’Connor

Zone One by Colson Whitehead,

The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman

The Husband Stitch by Carmen Maria Machado

The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson

Black Hole by Charles Burns

Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi, trans. Jonathan Wright

Other Media

The VVitch by Robert Eggers

The Texas Chainsaw Massacre by Tobe Hooper

S-Town

Reeling and Writhing

Books

Leda and the Swan by W. B. Yeats

Dracula by Bram Stoker

The Bloody Chamber by Angela Carter

Bluebeard by Charles Perrault

Matthew 1, 18-25

Luke 1, 26-38

Game Theory 

Books

Studying Videogames by Julian Mcdougall and Wayne O’Brien

Video Game Design: Principles and Practices from the Ground Up by Michael Salmond

Video Games and Storytelling: Reading Games and Playing Books by Souvik Mukherjee

Understanding Digital Culture by Vincent Miller

MMOs from the Inside Out: The History, Design, Fun and Art of Massively-multiplayer Online Role-playing Games by Richard A. Bartle

Violence in Video Games by Diane Marczely Gimpel

Guns, Grenades, and Grunts: First-Person Shooter Game by Gerald A. Voorhees and Joshua Call

Theory of Fun for Game Design by Raph Koster

The Video Game Theory Reader 2 by Bernard Perron and Mark J.P. Wolf 

The Uncanny by Sigmund Freud

Ready Player One by Ernest Cline

The Last Wish by Andrzej Sapkowski

Other Media

Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games by Anita Sarkeesian

American Horror Story

Books

Selected Tales by Edgar Allen Poe (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, “The Masque of the Red Death"; "The Imp of the Perverse"; "William Wilson"; "The Man of the Crowd"; "The Black Cat"; "The Fall of the House of Usher"; "Hop-Frog"; "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether").  

Love and Death in the American Novel by Leslie A. Fiedler

Playing in the Dark by Toni Morrison

Magical Negro (Wikipedia article)

Romancing the Shadow by J. Gerald Kennedy

Behind a Mask by Louisa May Alcott

Edgar Huntly; Or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker by Charles Brockden Brown

Horror at Red Hook by H. P. Lovecraft

Call of Cthulhu by H. P. Lovecraft 

Case of Charles Dexter Ward by H. P. Lovecraft

The Ballad of Black Tom by Victor Lavalle

Benito Cereno by Herman Melville

Absalom, Absalom! by William Faulkner

Exquisite Corpse by Poppy Z. Brite

Other Media

The Red Road (2014-15), seasons 1+2

Plague Mass by Diamanda Galas

Night of the Living Dead by George Romero

Reeling and Writhing

Books

The Shield of Achilles by W. H. Auden

Book XVIII of The Iliad by Homer

Books X and VIII of Metamorphoses by Ovid

Orpheus, Eurydike, Hermes by Rilke

Baucis and Philemon by Swift

Pygmalion by Bernard Shaw

Polycrates' Ring by Freidrich Schiller

The Queen of Lydia by C. H. Sisson

Genesis

The Four Gospels

Daniel

Book IX of Paradise Lost by Milton

To Belshazzar by Byron

Belsazar by Heine

The Marriage Plot 

Books

Mary, a fiction: and, The wrongs of woman, or, Maria by Mary Wollstonecraft

Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen

Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë

The Making of a Marchioness by Frances Hodgson Burnett

Gaudy Night by Dorothy L. Sayers

A Summer Bird-cage by Margaret Drabble

A Man in Love by Karl Ove Knausgård