Gothic Ghosts Research Articles

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

How Sherlock Pulled the Trick: Spiritualism and the Pseudoscientific Method

The Seriality of Stephen King’s Overlook Hotel – a Transmedial Maze

Abstract This paper investigates three different medial instances of the Overlook Hotel, a space originally hailing from Stephen King’s The Shining. Based on close readings of King’s novel, Stanley Kubrick’s adaptation and a level in the action RPG Vampire the Masquerade: Bloodlines by Troika Games, the following text argues that the Overlook is a serial figure founded on the concept of malignant space in possession of a potent, and often overwhelming, story of violence that despite attempts at its repression cannot be silenced, as in the tradition of the Gothic ghost story. This basic formula is then traced through different media – the novel, film, and video game – where it is seen as gradually shifting its focus from the fictional characters to the recipient, which represents the intersection between the particular affordances of the respective media and the figure of a spatially-bound aggressive storyteller.

History-making and its gendered voice in Wang Tao’s and Vernon Lee’s ghost stories

This article examines the establishment of women’s voice and an alternative women’s history in the ghost stories by late nineteenth-century Chinese writer Wang Tao and British writer Vernon Lee. Situating ghost stories as a Gothic mode that offers the marginalized groups, especially women, the opportunity to re-inscribe their voice and subjectivity into a fictional history through the motif of the returning ghost, this cross-cultural analysis proceeds to investigate the possible manipulation and mediation of that gendered voice in the history-making of ghost stories. Continuing the tradition of Chinese zhiguai (namely “the records of the strange”) to fashion an unofficial history of the ghost against the official history of the state, Wang’s two stories of victimized female ghosts centralize the obliterated women’s narration of their own history yet veil the mediation involved in the male historian’s history-making. Reading Lee’s ghost story “Amour Dure” as a meta-critique of the kind of history-making through ghost-making exemplified in Wang’s tales, the article argues that the haunting liminality of the ghost in Gothic ghost stories may offer a better strategy for the marginalized group to re-inscribe their presence into reality than a polarization between official and unofficial histories.

Surrealist Ghostliness by Conley Katharine

Reviewed by: Surrealist Ghostliness by Conley Katharine Jean-Michel Rabaté Conley Katharine. Surrealist Ghostliness, Lincoln, University of Nebraska Press, 2013. 320 pp. In her thought-provoking and suggestive Surrealist Ghostliness, a book moving elegantly between minute descriptions of works of art and rigorous conceptual analysis, Katharine Conley offers three main definitions of ghosts. The first definition pertains to literary history and cultural anthropology. A ghost is an "undead" character returning from the past, either because of a transgression like a murder that has to be avenged, or the non-observance of some rites, or because of an ancient family fate that condemns some dead souls to wander through the world. This is the "gothic ghost," which is familiar to us because it has traversed plays like Hamlet and Romantic literature before reaching our screens where it flourishes in countless horror stories, whether serially produced by Hollywood or by Asian film companies. The second definition is psychoanalytic, and shows us a ghost coming back from the deeper and darker recesses of a collective memory. Such a ghost reveals that the repression without which culture could not exist does not go as deep as we thought—"uncanny" returns testify to the agency of repressed drives via weird coincidences, troubling resemblances, vanishing subjects, or haunting refrains. This is the "Freudian ghost," with which the Surrealists were well acquainted. And [End Page 169] finally there is the family ghost, a literal ghost dependent upon technologies like trick photographs, Ouija boards and turning tables in darkened rooms. This is the "spiritualist ghost," a mediumistic deep throat producing superabundant words predicting the past and remembering an uncertain future. This is the ghost in whose existence we pretend not to believe and whose symptomatic apparitions are met with thrilled expectation as much as suspicion. What is impressive in Conley's book is that she is able to bring this triple definition of ghostliness to bear cogently on a corpus marked by Surrealism. The corpus also goes beyond Surrealism with more contemporary artists who have perpetuated a tradition. Thus Conley presents in great detail the work of Man Ray, Claude Cahun, Brassaï, Salvador Dalí, Lee Miller, Dorothea Tanning and Pierre Alechinsky, remaining within a canonical definition of Surrealism that begins in the 1920's and encompasses the late sixties. One can note the presence of more women than men artists, a wise reminder that Surrealism was not only a male invention, as some have claimed. Conley adds two important artists who are not often seen as fellow travellers of Surrealism, Francesca Woodman and Susan Hiller. In her general approach, Conley highlights an aspect of Surrealism that was neglected by referencing original views about Surrealism provided by philosopher Michel Foucault, a thinker rarely mentioned in that context. In 1966, Foucault had paid homage to André Breton in an interview with Claude Bonnefoy. Foucault called Breton a "French Goethe." Breton would have attempted to combine actual knowledge (with psychoanalysis, anthropology, art history, comparative religion, linguistics, etc.) with visionary poetry. However, for Foucault, Breton was not just a continuator of the German Romantics: he was not simply dreaming the night but inserting an "unbreakable kernel of night in the heart of the day."1 Breton, a "swimmer between two words" granted writing a moral function—it had to change life and keep the horizon of a Revolution in view as an absolute. Breton's stress on the Imagination nevertheless was to situate it in discourse and not just in our hearts. For Foucault, fundamentally, Breton ushered in a new conception of experience, an experience that both unified and dispersed poetic practices while erasing borders between hitherto separate domains. Conley manages to use Foucault's original insights as a connective tissue linking her close readings of visual works. Among these, special mention should be made of Francesca Woodman, whose beautiful 1976 House 3 adorns the cover: typically, it shows the artist's body half-erased, with only one leg in the real world and on the floor [End Page 170] of a dilapidated apartment, which suggests an anamorphic exchange between the house and the photographer. The vivid details of partly ruined walls full of holes and rough floorboards strewn with debris highlight...

Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction by June Pulliam (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction by June Pulliam Sara Austin (bio) Monstrous Bodies: Feminine Power in Young Adult Horror Fiction. By June Pulliam. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2014. June Pulliam’s book is, as its title suggests, a feminist project. She concludes, “Monsters are a girl’s best friend, and they have a lot to teach us” (178). What monsters teach us, according to Pulliam, is how young girls are socialized as gendered subjects (11). Horror fiction denaturalizes the female subject, turning her into the Other. This process shows how many of the supposedly natural attributes of femininity are social constructions that girls can push back against in order to regain agency. Pulliam begins by comparing texts with similar types of female bodies, including ghosts, werewolves, and witches, and then moves outward to compare female agency across the genre. Monstrous Bodies is divided into three chapters, each focused on a type of embodied horror narrative and a specific element of patriarchal domination. For each chapter, Pulliam selects between five and seven significant texts, including films, novels, and short stories ranging in date of publication from 1989 to 2013, though the majority are from early in this century. Pulliam defines a significant work as one that is owned by approximately a thousand libraries worldwide, and her chapter notes justify the exclusion of certain texts as outside of the parameters of her project (Sabrina is not a horror text, the characters in Charmed are too old, etc.). [End Page 97] For the texts she does choose, Pulliam gives extensive and detailed close readings paired with staples of feminist theory by authors such as Judith Butler, Laura Mulvey, Hélène Cixous, and Naomi Wolf. By reading the fiction alongside the theory, she is able to show supporting and contrasting examples of female agency across the breadth of a genre. The chapters interlock as previously discussed theorists reappear in later chapters, allowing Pulliam to compare ghosts, werewolves, and witches as models of adolescent female agency. Using a metric for independence that includes the ability to support oneself and freedom from the direct patriarchal dominance of a father or husband, she concludes that of these categories witches are the most agentic bodies. Based on the texts investigated here, witches are the most likely to grow into independent young women. The first chapter uses ghost stories to explore gender as a social construction. Pulliam describes novels in which the silencing of the protagonist acts as a part of normalized womanhood. In these “modern Gothic ghost stories,” ghosts who were silenced in their lifetimes help the protagonists access “repressed knowledge” to build autonomy in their own lives (49). The ghosts are silenced by death, often by murder (Phyllis Reynolds Naylor’s Jade Green, Paula Morris’s Ruined), but they regain their voices by helping the living protagonists who are silenced by oppressive fathers or patriarchal social structures. Pulliam echoes Butler’s call to “refuse what we are” and rebel against social definitions of gender, as do the protagonists in these texts (69; original emphasis). The second chapter discusses girlfighting and the Beauty Myth in reference to werewolves. Pulliam splits the texts into those that reaffirm the status quo and those that do more work toward deconstructing gender norms. The clear organization of the chapter is helpful, since the texts included represent the broadest range of both time and type, including Suzy Charnas’s short story “Boobs” (1989); the movies Ginger Snaps (2000) and Ginger Snaps 2:Unleashed and Ginger Snaps Back: The Beginning (2004); and two novels, Annette Curtis Klause’s Blood and Chocolate (1997) and Patricia Windsor’s The Blooding (1999). Since the onset of lycanthropy is dictated by menarche, the links between monstrosity and the gendered body are clear. Pulliam reads lycanthropy as a female bildungsroman in which the principal character either learns how to choose a romantic partner who will treat her as an equal, or learns individual autonomy without any romantic interest. The final chapter shows how constructivist epistemology and sisterhood, enacted through teen witches, can push back against biopower and the male gaze. Beginning with a detailed reading of the film The Craft (1996), Pulliam shows...

The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders

The Agitated Shell: Thinspiration and the Gothic Experience of Eating Disorders

Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny by Isabella van Elferen (review)

GOTHIC AND PUNK Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. By Isabella van Elferen. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. [229 p. ISBN: 9780708325124 (hardcover), $120; ISBN 9780708325131 (paperback), $35.] Bibliography, index.Isabella van Elferen's Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny, represents the first monograph-length scholarly study of Gothic music. As such, it poses and strives to answer some fundamental questions, going well beyond the traditional usage of the term gothic as a rather vague stylistic descriptor, and invoking the Freudian concept of the Uncanny-that which can be said to be eerily unfamiliar, haunted, and having an in-between, boundary-blurring existence-as constitutive of the essence of the musical gothic. While van Elferen's book is focused on music, her approach is broad, and considers and music through the various transfigurations of the Gothic (p. 3). In so doing, she pulls Gothic music out of the subcultural ghetto to which it is so often relegated, and considers the sound of the Gothic as it appears in a wide range of products.Gothic Music comprises an introduction and six chapters. The introduction rather neatly sets out the case for the book: as the author writes, [a]lthough sound and music occupy a prominent place in the manifestations of Gothic, the sonic characteristics of the genre remain obscured in Gothicist as well as musicological research (p. 1). The first five chapters then focus on Gothic music within specific media: literature, film, television, video games, and popular music. The sixth chapter, which is relatively short, serves as a conclusion by way of some pithy theoretical and philosophical meditations on the ontology and metaphysics of the Gothic and the Uncanny, drawing especially on the work of Martin Heidegger. Indeed, a good deal of this book is predicated not only on Freud's Uncanny, but also on Heideggerian ontology and its Derridean counterpoint, hauntology (one of Jacques Derrida's infamous neographisms). Hauntology is a term intended to describe the hauntedness of all being and time, of an unstable present underpinned by shaky cultural binaries and linear histories, and undermined by the spectral otherness of the past, and thus ripe for deconstruction (p. 15). Drawing on such post-structuralist notions, van Elferen asserts that storytelling and even writing itself, especially the Gothic, is inherently spectral, occupied by an array of ghostly revenants or things that return: the Gothic, in its various manifestations its readers, viewers and listeners to identify the that haunt (p. 15).Music, according to van Elferen, is especially akin to the spectral revenant by virtue of its non-signifying, non-referential nature: music does not mean anything a priori, and so is phantasmal, ephemeral, and susceptible to unlimited inscriptions of meaning (p. 27). In Gothic literature, the evocation of music and sound can be used for a variety of purposes, such as giving voice to Gothic ghosts or accompanying the distortion of time and reality (pp. 32- 33). In film, Gothic music pulls the viewer/ listener across the borders of reason . . . into the liminal space of the Gothic ghost story (p. 72), via music's own haunted and ghostly qualities: Gothic film music is Gothic insofar as it comprises disembodied sounds-haunted sounds linked to the absent presence of other ones (p. 44). Music in Gothic television-especially in Gothic serials such as Twin Peaks, X-Files, and Lost- fulfills many of the same functions as music in Gothic cinema, but van Elferen points out an added dimension in the case of television, namely the crossing over of the uncanny (the unhomely) into the private home itself, playing with notions of time and space, blurring the boundaries between source and functional music. This can make the audience feel they take part in the transgressions narrated on screen as the vectral forces of music involve them emotionally and cognitively in . …

Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing (review)

MLR, ioo.i, 2005 191 twenty-five essays, with even the unwonted pleasure of some colour plates by way of illustration. Art history, and in particular stained glass, and music, though all too briefly,occupy the place to which they are fully entitled, enhancing a gratifyingsense of purposeful interdisciplinarity. The volume is a product of what must have been a particularly stimulating conference that Joelle Prungnaud organized on behalf of the Literature Departments of Lille 3 and Clermont 2 in spring 2000. Hugo, an abiding presence, if here a contested one, is taken as read in enquiries that, after an initial comment on the remarkably minor place occupied by cathedrals in French medieval literature, range from Goethe and Chateaubriand across the nineteenth century not only to Claudel, but also into other lands to take in Kafka, Mandelstam, and even Alejo Carpentier. Though exploring Hume, as might perhaps have been foreseen, did not yield very positive results, the British contribution is generally shown to have been significant too, with studies of Ruskin, Woolf, and, all the more welcome for being less expected, Montague James. An overt homage in the title of one ofhis entertaining Gothic ghost stories is, however, the nearest the collection comes to Trollope. This is a pity,for some account of his novels would have provided a valuable complement, bringing out personal considerations that appear characteristic of deans, chapters, and the inward-looking society ofwhat are well called closes. Besides, Philip Barrett's Barchester: English Cathedral Life in the Nineteenth Century (London: SPCK, 1993) would offer support to speculations and fictional developments by providing valu? able details about what was happening in the Anglican sphere, in buildings, religious practices, and ecclesiastical organization. A certain amount of similar information would have been useful in La Cathedrale. Fascinating and varied though the flights of metaphorical fancy unquestionably are, they might have been even more inter? esting if their basis in reality had been interrogated with more determination. The Gothic, privileged above other styles for reasons that are not made entirely clear, is generally allowed to stand as a unified concept, despite art historians' insistence on a series of stages. Often glimpsed from afar with nostalgia rather than discrimination, architectural spectacle is in many instances taken to represent the totality of cathedral experience, which then blends into individual visions reflectingmore or less heterodox quasi-religious sentiment. Comparisons with what is regarded as outmoded are pressed into service, with only an occasional saving sense of irony, in praise of what is newer. In one sense, the responses are so many gestures of annexation; in another, they pay tribute to what they would displace. As is usually the case, imagery reveals what is mushrooming down there in the creative penumbra. University of East Anglia Christopher Smith Borderlines: Autobiography and Fiction in Postmodern Life Writing. By Gunnthorunn Gudmundsdottir. Amsterdam and New York: Rodopi. 2003. viii + 294 pp. ?60; 871. ISBN 90-420-1145-9. This study,often insightful, locates and investigates what itdefines as the 'borderlines' between autobiography and fiction in the past thirtyyears or so. Gunnthorunn Gud? mundsdottir compares works by French, English-language, and German-language writers based on her contention that autobiography in the West follows similar pat? terns, all of which are influenced to some degree by postmodern literary practice and theory. This sometimes has the effectof collapsing cultural boundaries to an excessive degree. It certainly elides problems oflinguistic differenceand, speaking as an ltalian ist , I was disappointed to see that ltalian writers?who have contributed much to this kind of writing?are ignored, save for a brief consideration of one work by Calvino. The study is fascinating in its consideration of overlapping features in autobiogra? phy and postmodernism: the role and treatment of memory and its necessary effects 192 Reviews on considerations of the past and how it relates to the present, issues of gender, of crossing between cultures, the presence of biography or history (for instance, the common search for the parent(s) in autobiography alongside the search for the self), and the use of other forms of representation, such as photographs. Gudmundsdottir ranges widely in her discussion (from Nabokov to Frank McCourt), but chooses to concentrate especially...

The gothic ghost as counterfeit and its haunting of romanticism: The case of “frost at midnight”

The gothic ghost as counterfeit and its haunting of romanticism: The case of “frost at midnight”

Folklore, Fear, and the Feminine: Ghosts and Old Wives' Tales inWuthering Heights

Wuthering heights is haunted, of course. But not only by the ghost of Catherine, who harries Heathcliff and terrifies Lockwood. Not only by the shades of Heathcliff and Catherine (or Laurence Olivier and Merle Oberon) who set off toward Penistone Crag. The ghosts inWuthering Heightsare not Gothic ghosts nor the ghosts from Victorian magazine ghost stories. They represent a different kind of haunting altogether — the haunting of the Victorian middle classes by fear of the people they designated as “the folk.”

The Future of southern letters

The New South-replete with shopping malls, hub airports, educated African Americans, and immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, and Haiti-is still haunted by the Gothic ghosts of its past. Does the collision between past and present account for the continued preeminence of Southern writers in America's literary culture? Bobbie Ann Mason, Ernest Gaines, Rita Mae Brown, Robert Olen Butler, Cormac McCarthy, Dorothy Allison, and Allan Gurganus are just a few of the writers who draw on a new kind of Southern background while reaching out to a broad American readership. Yet many of these writers have been accused of catering to the stereotypes they think a national audience requires. It would seem that questions of Southern identity continue to be bound up with rage against attacks on Southern culture. Jefferson Humphries and John Lowe have assembled a remarkable team of scholars and writers to examine aspects of the contemporary literature of the South. From Pulitzer Prize-winning writer Fred Hobson to esteemed scholar James Olney to poets Kate Daniels and Brenda Marie Osbey, the contributors try to define Southern culture today and ask who will be writing Southern literature tomorrow. Addressing topics such as humor, the past, black autobiography, ethnicity, and female oral traditions, the essays form a volume that is of interest to readers of Southern literature and history, creative writers, and scholars and students of Southern culture.

Gothic Ghosts at Large

Gothic Ghosts at Large