Title:
The Gothic Imagination: From Castle to Shipwreck
The Gothic Imagination: From Castle to Shipwreck
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Author(s)
Cohen, Margaret
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Abstract
The gothic is a term designating a style in
medieval architecture, which inspired a mode
of the imagination in the Enlightenment and
Romantic era. This mode found its fullest
expression in narrative, popularized by the
gothic novel in the British Isles, before
spreading across the continent and indeed
across the globe. My talk starts with an
overview of the gothic mode as conceived by
modernity, involved heightened sensation,
melodrama, the persistence of irrational
forces and fantasies shaped by the tortured,
claustrophobic architecture patterned on
medieval cloisters, churches, and castles. While inspired by architectures of power
from the feudal era, gothic spaces were
adapted by the modern imagination to
express haunted or otherwise uncanny
features of other types of environments. An
urban gothic proliferated in the 19th century
across the globe, peopled by the ghosts of the
marginalized and the displaced. In the
United States, Southern gothic, as well as the
suburban gothic are two examples of how the
gothic travels: in the case of the suburban gothic, to rend the façade of middle-class
banality and in the case of the Southern
gothic, to express tormented race relations
still shaping consciousness and history. The
paper ends by adding to these familiar gothic
topoi a form of environmental gothic: the
underwater gothic, enabled by the invention
of technologies to take human vision
beneath the ocean and record it with film,
which is the subject of my current research.
It shows how the vista of the shipwreck fits
the criteria for the gothic using James
Cameron’s virtuosic sequence filming the
historical wreck of The Titanic in Titanic
(1997). Under the sea as well, the gothic
confronts Enlightenment modernity with
irrational forces – staging, however, not a
form of human power but rather the menace
to modernity of the indifferent, natural
environment. This menace has an uncanny
beauty as strange natural forms recolonize
technologies that were the epitome of
modern aspiration, and give an alluring
afterlife to a tragic grave.
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Date Issued
2017-03-31
Extent
32:36 minutes
Resource Type
Moving Image
Resource Subtype
Lecture