The Gothic is an extremely viable mode in the history of American literature. As a genre concerned principally with distortions and aberrations, it provides a platform for writers to voice their concerns about periods of transformation and destabilized boundaries. William Faulkner, one of the leading authors of the American South, frequently employs the Gothic mode in his portrayals of the South as a traumatized region trying to cope with the echoes of the Civil War and with the disintegration of old aristocratic values, which manifests itself in the decay of institutions (such as the family) as well as a collapse of individual minds. This emphasis on the human psyche is evident especially in the novel The Sound and the Fury, whose main characters and narrators are representatives of the various extremities of the human psyche (severe mental retardation, suicidal tendencies, schizophrenia and paranoia). Faulkner's use of the Gothic mode is rather unorthodox and innovative, employing inversions and parody which can be appropriately demonstrated by the category of motion and his use of the traditional Gothic devices and character types. The traditional motion patterns - flight and pursuit, quest and purposeless wandering - that are originally connected predominantly with only one Gothic type (the...

This bachelor thesis discusses the concept of genre and the comic Gothic. It is an attempt to demonstrate the conflicts rooted in "genre" by discussing several scholars, such as Alistair Fowler and Mattias Fyhr with their works Kinds of Literature and De mörka labyrinterna respectively, and then problematise the "Gothic" as a genre and as a concept. Thus Avril Horner’s and Sue Zlosnik’s work Gothic and the Comic Turn is consulted through the discussion. The questions I ask are the following: What is a literary genre? How is the comic Gothic described by the researchers, and how does comic Gothic work in A. Lee Martinez’ novel Gil’s All Fright Diner (2005)? How can one use these questions in the classroom? The used methods in the thesis are genre analysis and close reading. I conclude that genre is a way to understand the relationship between a literary work and various conventions, such as environment and its contemporaries. Genre is also a tool for the reader to understand the traditions, history and other works the read text is related to. The comic inside the Gothic may appear and is as natural to the genre as horror and terror, since the Gothic is always close to self-parody. This can even be observed in the first Gothic novel, Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1764). Furthermore, Gil’s All Fright Diner uses both the repertoire of classic Gothic and Horner’s and Zlosnik’s findings of the comic turn in the Gothic. Finally, the question regarding the definition of literary genre can be used in the classroom to widen students’ views on both genre itself and the prose they read. The comic Gothic can be used as an example on how genre can appear in different modes. Gil’s All Fright Diner is a thankful text for classroom readings due to its comic and gothic nature, and its contemporary language, themes and styles can make it relatable to students. There is therefore a potential in the concept of genre and the comic Gothic as subjects of discussion in the classroom.

This dissertation documents how a series of cynical 1940s Hollywood films set in historical eras served as a forum for Hollywood to reconcile the complex relationship between America and its European past. While these films are rarely discussed in the ongoing discourse surrounding film noir, this study posits that they function as “noirs of the past” by transposing the pessimism and trauma surrounding World War II to the distant American and European past in a narrative and stylistic manner consistent with film noir. Film noir is a branching term to describe a group of 1940s and 50s Hollywood crime melodramas that are known for their cynical worldviews and femme fatales. Produced during the war and postwar era, film noirs primarily depict squalid urban settings that underscore the broken promise that is the American Dream. However, this project maintains that many of these noirs also critique American society through historical settings that trace present-day class and gender problems back to the European aristocracy and its excesses. Noirs of the past are universally ignored in debates surrounding historical films because they appear at first blush to have little interest in depicting historical events in a precise manner. This is for good reason: they openly resist historical accuracy by employing devices that highlight their artificiality. The noir of the past’s lack of historical verisimilitude further extends to character types, dialogue, costumes, and aesthetics that feel closer in spirit to the gloomy shadows of contemporary-set film noirs than the glossy and monumental historical films of the 1940s. Through their overlap of historical and contemporary 1940s signifiers, “noirs of the past” construct a sense of location and time that borrows from both the past and present to demonstrate the cyclical nature of events and figures across history.

In My Gothic Dissertation, I perform an intertextual analysis of Gothic fiction and modern-day graduate education in the humanities. First, looking particularly at the Female Gothic, I argue that the genre contains overlooked educational themes. I read the student-teacher relationships in Ann Radcliffe’s The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794), Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818, 1831), and Charlotte Brontë’s Villette (1853) as critiques of the insidious relationship between knowledge and power. Part literary critic and part literary journalist, I weave through these readings reports of real-life ‘horror stories’ of graduate school, arguing that the power imbalance between Ph.D. advisors and their students can be unexpectedly ‘Gothic’ as well. Drawing on research from the science of learning—developmental psychology, sociology, and pedagogical theory—I advocate for more a student-centered pedagogy in humanities Ph.D. training. Following in the footsteps of A.D. Carson and Nick Sousanis, I have produced My Gothic Dissertation in a nontraditional format—the podcast. Mixing voice, music, and sound, I dramatize scenes from the novels and incorporate analysis through my narration. The real-life “Grad School Gothic” stories are drawn from personal interviews. Much of the science of learning is drawn from personal interviews with researchers as well, though some material comes from recorded presentations that have been posted to public, online venues such as YouTube. The creative/journalistic style of reporting is heavily influenced by programs such as This American Life, Invisibilia, and Serial, with the dual aims of engaging a broad audience and expanding our modes of scholarly communication beyond the page.

Reims Cathedral holds a great deal of significance for the history of Gothic architecture, as well as the larger history of France as the coronation church. Given the historic significance of Reims, it is not surprising that much scholarship has been dedicated to the building’s sculpture, glass, and architecture. Most studies dealing with the cathedral’s architecture are based on stylistic and archaeological analysis, augmented by the use of surviving documents related to the construction. Although much fruitful work has been done in this vein, important questions about the building’s chronology and design still remain unresolved. The extent to which the design of the cathedral was established at the start of its construction, for example, continues to be disputed. The most recent monograph on the cathedral, published by Alain Villes in 2009, suggests that dramatic revisions to the overall plan and elevation were introduced during the course of its construction, going beyond the alterations to the façade designs that many previous authors have noted, but his theses remain controversial. Subsequently, Robert Bork has produced geometric models of the cathedral, which suggest that its plan was more coherent and unified. Additionally, French archaeologist Walter Berry has conducted new excavations, which further reveal additional archaeological evidence not yet taken into account by other Reims scholars. My dissertation, “Measuring the Past: The Geometry of Reims Cathedral,” examines the architectural design from a geometric perspective, augmented by archaeological, stylistic, and historic evidence. The primary contribution that my dissertation makes to art history is the development of a new, modern plan of the cathedral. I developed this plan by taking thousands of measurements using handheld devices and laser mapping, which I then incorporated into a single data set. This work allowed Bork and me to further refine the underlying geometry that created the cathedral’s layout and proportions. This new plan indicates that a master plan devised by the first architect governed the whole church, with subsequent modifications affecting its articulation rather than its overall layout. In addition to explaining how this plan was originally conceived, my dissertation also examines the anomalies and mistakes made during construction, which at times forced minor deviations from the plan. Some of these building errors and the obvious attempts to correct them give clues to the order of construction, in addition to supporting the notion that the masons repeatedly returned to the uniform scheme. This allows me to reassess the scholarship written about the cathedral and the complex history of the building project, while resolving some of the disputes over the cathedral’s construction and design.

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Thesis--Valladolid. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [445]-478).

Thesis (Ph. D.)--Oregon State University, 2007. / Printout. Includes bibliographical references (leaves 198-205). Also available on the World Wide Web.

This thesis aims to analyse the specific space of Anglo-American Gothic fiction in the 18th and 19th century. The first part of the thesis deals with various aspects of Gothic fiction from a theoretical viewpoint. It contains the two possible concepts of the "Gothic". It lists typical features of the Gothic fiction and gives a brief overview of its development. Then, a crucial typology of space according to Vseticka and Pavera is introduced, as well as Mikhail Bachtin's related term chronotope. The theoretical part concludes with the reflection of the subversive nature of the Gothic fiction and its relation to similarly unconventional approaches of psychoanalysis and gender studies. The practical part of the thesis applies the aforementioned space typology to ten works of English and American Gothic fiction from 1764-1897, with short profiles of the respective writers in each chapter.

This thesis analyses the persistence of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs in the literature of Soviet Russia between 1920 and 1940. Nineteenth-century Russian literature was characterized by the almost universal assimilation of Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs, adapted from the fiction of Western writers such as E.T.A. Hoffmann, Ann Radcliffe and Edgar Allen Poe. Writers from Pushkin to Dostoevskii, including the major Symbolists, wrote fiction combining the real with the macabre and supernatural. However, following the inauguration of the Soviet regime and the imposition of Socialist Realism as the official literary style in 1934, most critics assumed that the Gothic-fantastic had been expunged from Russian literature. In Konstantin Fedin's words, the Russian fantastic novel had "умер и закопан в могилу". This thesis argues that Fedin's dismissal was premature, and presents evidence that Gothic-fantastic themes and motifs continued to play a significant role in several genres of Soviet fiction, including science fiction, satire, comedy, adventure novels (prikliuchenskie romany), and seminal Socialist Realist classics. My dissertation identifies five categories of Gothic-fantastic themes, derived jointly from analysis of canonical Gothic novels from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries and from innovative approaches to the genre made by contemporary critics such as Fred Botting, Kelly Hurley, Diane Hoeveler, Elaine Showalter and Eric Naiman (whose book Sex in Public coined the phrase 'NEP Gothic'). Each chapter analyses one of these five Gothic themes or tropes in the context of selected Soviet Russian literary texts. The chronotope of Gothic space, epitomized in the genre as the haunted castle or house, is readdressed by Mikhail Bulgakov as the 'nekhoroshaia kvartira' of Master i Margarita and by Evgenii Zamiatin as the 'drevnyi dom' of his dystopian fantasy My. Gothic gender issues, including the subgenre of Female Gothic, arise in Nikolai Ognev's novels and Aleksandra Kollontai's stories. The Gothic obsession with dying, corpses and the afterlife re-emerges in fictions such as Daniil Kharms' 'Starukha' (whose hero is threatened by an animated corpse) and Nikolai Erdman's banned play Samoubiitsa (the story of a failed suicide). Gothic bodies (deformed or regressive human bodies) are contrasted with Stalinist cultural aspirations to somatic perfection within a utopian society. Typically Gothic monsters - vampires, ghosts, and demon lovers - are evaluated in a separate chapter. Each Gothic trope is integrated with my analysis of the relevant Soviet discourse, including early Communist attitudes to gender and the body and the philosopher Nikolai Federov's utopian belief in the possibility of universal resurrection. As my focus is thematic rather than author-centred, my field of research ranges from well-known writers (Fedor Gladkov, Bulgakov, Zamiatin) to virtual unknowns (Grigorii Grebnev and Vsevolod Valiusinskii, both early 1930s novelists), and recently rediscovered writers (Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii, Vladimir Zazubrin). Three Soviet authors who explicitly emulated the nineteenth-century Gothic-fantastic tradition in their fiction were Mikhail Bulgakov, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovskii and A.V. Chaianov. Many mainstream Soviet writers also exploited Gothic-fantastic motifs in their work. Fedor Gladkov's Socialist Realist production novel, Tsement, uses the trope of the Gothic castle to dramatise the reclamation of a derelict cement factory by the workers. Nikolai Ognev's Dnevnik Kosti Riabtseva, the diary of an imaginary Communist schoolboy, relies on ghost stories to sustain suspense. Aleksandr Beliaev, the popular science fiction writer, inserted subversive clich's from the Gothic narrative tradition in his deceptively optimistic novels. Gothic-fantastic tropes and motifs were used polemically by dissident writers to subvert the monologic message of Socialist Realism; other writers, such as Gladkov and Marietta Shaginian, exploited the same material to support Communism and attack Russia's enemies. The visceral resonance of Gothic fear lends its metaphors unique political impact. This dissertation aims at an overall survey of Gothic-fantastic narrative elements in early Soviet literature rather than a conclusive analysis of their political significance. However, in conclusion, I speculate that the survival of the Gothic-fantastic genre in the hostile soil of the Stalinist literary apparatus proves that early Soviet literature was more varied, contradictory and self-interrogative than previously assumed.