Gothic Thing Theory

Abstract

This chapter highlights the overwhelming insistence of Gothic tropes across twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory in general. The prevailing structure of feeling of the twenty-first century may be described as Anthropocenic anxiety as both critical discourse and popular culture draw repeatedly upon the Gothic as a means through which to express concerns about human impotence, hubris, and our future disappearance. In the critical literature, particularly that group of approaches categorized as the “nonhuman turn” including Latourean actor-network theory, affect theory, animal studies, New Materialism, and Speculative Realism, Gothic figures and tropes abound as humans become things, things acquire uncanny animacy, and we brush shoulders with Lovecraftian monsters, serial killers, zombies, and other weird creatures. In popular culture, Anthropocenic anxiety is expressed more directly through Gothic narratives of human decentering and apocalypse. This is particularly evident when considering the mainstreaming of speculative literature and media featuring narratives in which human autonomy and presumptions of mastery are challenged or the human race is threatened with extinction. Three master tropes of Gothicized discourse have proliferated across contemporary theoretical paradigms that together express a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.