The Gothic Imagination: From Castle to Shipwreck

Cohen, Margaret

Title:

The Gothic Imagination: From Castle to Shipwreck

dc.contributor.author	Cohen, Margaret
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. College of Design	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Georgia Institute of Technology. School of Architecture	en_US
dc.contributor.corporatename	Stanford University	en_US
dc.date.accessioned	2017-05-12T14:42:59Z
dc.date.available	2017-05-12T14:42:59Z
dc.date.issued	2017-03-31
dc.description	Presented on March 31, 2017 at the 2017 Spring Symposium on Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism in the Architecture Library, Architecture West Building, College of Design at Georgia Tech.	en_US
dc.description	Session One	en_US
dc.description	Margaret Cohen teaches in the Departments of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford, where she is Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization. Her most recent book is The Novel and the Sea (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010), which was awarded the Louis R. Gottschalk Prize from the American Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies and the George and Barbara Perkins Prize from the International Society for the Study of the Narrative. Other books include Profane Illumination: Walter Benjamin and the Paris of Surrealist Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993) and The Sentimental Education of the Novel (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), which received the Modern Language Association's Aldo and Jeanne Scaglione prize in French and Francophone literature. She is currently writing a book about how the modern imagination of the remote, underwater environment has been shaped by its access through visual technologies, from the aquarium to underwater photography and film.	en_US
dc.description	Runtime: 32:36 minutes
dc.description.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.	en_US
dc.format.extent	32:36 minutes
dc.identifier.uri	http://hdl.handle.net/1853/58086
dc.language.iso	en	en_US
dc.publisher	Georgia Institute of Technology	en_US
dc.relation.ispartofseries	Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism Symposium	en_US
dc.subject	Cultural modernity	en_US
dc.subject	Maritime studies	en_US
dc.subject	Novel studies	en_US
dc.title	The Gothic Imagination: From Castle to Shipwreck	en_US
dc.type	Moving Image
dc.type.genre	Lecture
dspace.entity.type	Publication
local.contributor.corporatename	College of Design
local.relation.ispartofseries	Architecture, Phantasmagoria, and the Culture of Contemporary Capitalism Symposium
relation.isOrgUnitOfPublication	c997b6a0-7e87-4a6f-b6fc-932d776ba8d0
relation.isSeriesOfPublication	1772f006-c348-4c8d-91fe-01da38e6c249