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This blog is for use by students in Anjuli Raza Kolb's "Legacies of the Gothic Novel" course at Columbia University.
Course Description
The gothic novel is a genre of 18th and 19th century fiction that concerns itself with fear, mystery, the supernatural, violence, purity, otherness, and the impact of these conceits on its largely female protagonists. Much maligned as a popular or 'low' genre at its inception, the form has nevertheless persisted in its popularity as well as crossed into 'higher' forms of modernism and postmodernism. This course will read three key texts in the gothic mode-Frankenstein, Jane Eyre, and Wuthering Heights-and follow the ways they are revisited and rewritten by contemporary American and Caribbean novelists. We will look at how these texts subvert the realist leanings of 18th century narrative prose in English-and its assumptions of enlightenment rationalism-by way of two main processes: narrative hypertrophy and feminist versions of horror. Additionally, we will take up select contemporary criticism on the gothic in literature, film, and art.
There are no prerequisites.
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Blog Archive
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2009
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June
(15)
- Guerillas/No Telephone to Heaven
- Guerillas II
- Guerillas
- Sylvia Plath reads Purdah
- Wuthering Heights III
- Wuthering Heights II/Sedgwick/Kristeva
- Wuthering Heights I
- Wide Sargasso Sea II/ Caribbean Gothic
- Wide Sargasso Sea
- Jane Eyre II
- The Other Side of A Mirror
- Jane Eyre I
- Beloved III/ Modern Medea/ Black Frankenstein
- Beloved II
- Whitman "A Boston Ballad"
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June
(15)
I was wondering about the effect of the second section of the novel. My initial reaction is that it is a cheap way to summarize what's been happening, but perhaps it plays a more important role?
ReplyDeleteHow well does Sweet Home fit Kant's definition of the sublime for Sethe and Paul D? Or is slavery in a general a better fit?
What is really the status of Beloved? How much is she/it a product of Sethe's imagination and feelings? How much does she enter physical reality?
In Black Frankenstien, Elizabeth Young says "the connection between monstrosity and the sexual exploitation of black women, as well as a resistant strategy by which...'the master is renamed monster". Thinking about the scenes where slaves are described as animals, does this idea come into play? Does this connect in other parts of the novel? if so, where?
ReplyDeleteJosh took the words right out of my mouth- is Beloved a mere figment of Sethe, Paul D, and Denver? There is a lot of evidence to support this, especially in the second part of novel. If Beloved is a fiction in the lives of Sethe, Paul D, and Denver, then what is she meant to represent? Which memory does she most accurately depict- Sethe or Denver?
In my opinion, Beloved represents the bastardization of memory and identity. that is to say, i believe she embodies all the emotional and the famiilial dismemberment that plagued slave families. As a reader, I accept the character of Beloved more willingly as I completed the novel: her descent into utter otherworldliness helped me to recognize her significance beyond euripidean similarities: the story of Beloved becomes one of all freed slaves-who wouldnt, having spent their lives toiling under such conditions, doesnt have a bloody ghost to reckon with from the pasT?
ReplyDeleteon another, note, there is one passage in Beloved that really sticks out in my mind. That is the section in which Sethe definies freedom as the ability to "desire." This is interesting, considering we Americans view freedom as an offshoot of government structrue. But by this definition, I can consider freedom, as it was beheld by former slaves, for its true implications: with freedom of the body follows freedom of mind, and our desires often overtake our practicalities to a consuming degree. What is Beloved saying about Freedom? In postbellum south? today?
I am wondering about the final pages of Beloved and the repetition of the phrase "it was not a story to pass on." What is the effect these words have on us at the end of the story? Also the words gained new significance for me as I read the prologue to Modern Medea in wi\hich the author writes that the story of Mary Garner has largely disappeared and gone untold.
ReplyDeleteyes, (about the freedom to desire mentioned before molly's post) i was thinking about that -- the freedom to desire -- the allowing for bonds of affection to grow, for love to grow thick like sethe's, even thicker as a result of freedom. it made me think about the differences between say, the affections the Frankenstein's were able to feel for their children and how slaves, especially female slaves could love. it seems that material conditions aid the construction of that desire; i think infant mortality is a given in many poor communities where children work, are productive laborers for their families. often children aren't named at birth, emotional investment is minimal because of the chance the child may not survive. the valorization of childhood as a time of wonder, leisure, freedom probably did not develop until child labor reforms were introduced, was perhaps a class-related concept? the kind of idyllic childhood, say, Victor Frankenstein had... and slave women as baby-makers, machines fueling the production of able workers, must have had to develop contingent relationships based on the exigencies of slavery. their children were maybe more likely to survive than free poor people simply because they babies were necessary commodities, future slave labor. but loving them was a risk knowing the world they were being birthed into. "My love was too thick. What he know about it? Who in the world is he willing to die for?" (239)
ReplyDeleteto josh... to me it feels like beloved is a therapeutic working-through, a way to contextualize infanticide. indeed, on pg 10 of modern medea, weisenburger says something like that.
ReplyDeleteI have been trying to digest the fact that Beloved disappears while pregnant. How does this fit in the story?
ReplyDeleteAlso, thinking about horror in the two novels we read, I have realized that I can only call Beloved truly horrific. I think it has to do with the physicality of pain Morrison’s characters endure. The suffering is almost tangible in this book; some scenes are hard to read. In contrast, Shelly’s novel seems to be much more abstract and mysterious, but not horrific at all. Shelly’s descriptions of violence and pain are very schematic, deprived of detail, while Morrison often makes readers to re-live inhuman suffering of her characters.
i agree. the psychological suffering in shelley seems like a luxury compared to the psychological and physical suffering and degradation in Beloved.
ReplyDeletethe haunting in beloved is more chilling and somehow, more productive. maybe because victor is less sympathetic? i did feel a pang of something resembling a fright when victor discovers clerval dead. and also when the monster appears in the window when victor is creating the female monster out on that island.