it is now recording yes go ahead uh just i just wanted to know if are we
going to have the corrections before christmas it's just it's just uh just
to know uh yes i can almost guarantee okay okay i guess you know i like a
little anxious about what is going to happen because it was so different
and i just wanted to know you know because it was a little bit hard maybe
you know it took me a lot of time to do it and i it's because of that right
well um i was yesterday just for fun i was putting the questions for the
third year peg into chat chat gpt um and the answers it provided were
pretty good yes yes they were not not bad at all um so i mean they would
certainly have passed um without any question but they would have probably
got quite a good mark um i have technology to to check um if something is
done by um artificial intelligence um but uh i think it's it's not 100
perfect um probably more in the sense that it gives false positives rather
than false negatives uh i put the chat gpt uh answer to the question about
um uh heart of darkness the third year question um into uh tune it in and
it said it was 100 artificial intelligence so that was a good sign it got
it identified it um but it's really complicated and um much i mean in my
other university where everybody is 18 19 20 21 of course it there's far
more of a problem than here where we are all of a much more dignified age
um so we're less likely to use it but i might say i've never used chat
right dpt never it's never used it it's um it's interesting um how i mean
it could be interesting for all sorts of things um i mean i actually use it
to write exams um like grammar exams and like that um so i mean it is the
future and you have to know how it works certainly if you're a teacher um
so yeah i mean it's it's terrifying in one sense but quite interesting in
another um one of my colleagues at my other university sent me a video
about the latest thing i think from google which is competition competition
for chat gpt and in the video somebody put a piece of paper in front of the
camera of their video of their computer and the machine said that's a piece
of paper and then they drew a squiggly line and the machine said that's a
squiggly line and then they added some more lines and the machine said that
looks like a bird um and then they drew a squiggly line to represent water
and the machine said uh if that looks like a duck swimming um so i mean you
know the machine was as fast as a human being would be in terms of
identifying a human basically symbolic picture of something so terrifying
but still um this is the future this is the world we have created um so we
will see what happens but basically the whole of academia all universities
everywhere are a little bit hysterical about these things and i'm just
starting my my phd my doctorate and i've done a lot of the work already but
apparently it's relatively simple not in one single go but to use chat gpt
a lot for people's doctoral thesis so hello um that's that's another
question i don't know if the people i am competing against are going to be
doing that or not but anyway is useful is useful to study for the exam for
example sure sure sure no i mean it's well i'll tell you one thing um you
can um hook even you can put a plug in to chat gpt where it works by voice
and that actually means that you can have a conversation class in english
So you say something to the machine like, I want to talk about the history
of PISA, for example. And so the machine will start the conversation and
you just keep going until you get bored. I mean, in terms of the machine,
you can ask, you know, is that the right pronunciation and things like
that? And the machine will give you a conversation chance. It's crazy. I
didn't know, though, that thing. Thank you for the information. I haven't
actually used that myself because I don't have a direct need for it. But,
for example, I use the thing which is called Natural Reader, which you can
stick any text into. So you could take my notes and stick that into Natural
Reader. And you can choose between sort of different voices, British,
American, Canadian, Australian, children, adolescents, adults. Men, women,
whatever. You choose the voice you want and stick in the text you want, and
it reads it to you. I was trying to think of a way to use the PISA and
choose my knowledge. I can be invasive or... No, no, sure, sure. now and
the the quality of the voices that they create has improved enormously in
the last five years incredibly um because before it was very very robotic
and now it's like yes that's a machine but it's still pretty human-like
machine so um that's it's curious anyway what we're interested in today is
the gothic which is surprisingly related to that topic but we will get
there so in many ways the gothic is going to dominate the rest of the
academic year if we understand it in its broadest sense of an interest in
the psychological the uncanny the liminal and defamiliarization so let's
have a look at what those words mean what right okay so what um What the
neoclassical literature has tried to do is try to basically place
literature in a public context. So what can sometimes be called material
realism, in the sense that everything that happens is what happens between
people, not within people. So there's two radically different views of the
world. If you are big into the Enlightenment and materialism and these
types of things, the only thing that matters is how people interact and
descriptions of things, exterior things. From a different point of view,
both from a more modernist point of view, but also something that appears
in things like morality plays, etc. What's most important is what happens
in your brain, what happens in your head and your mind. And our experience
of the world is fundamentally subjective. So exactly the same situation, as
you know, in exactly the same situation, you have four witnesses, you
separate them, you get them to describe what happens. And you'll get the
four completely different types of situation. There is that famous film by
a Kiri Kurosawa, I can't remember, Raman, is it called? No, I can't
remember. Anyway, there's a film in which... ... somebody has been killed
and there are all sorts of witnesses and they all give completely different
descriptions of what's happened and the person watching the film is based
on a book written in the 1920s in japan um uh never knows what is the
actual truth basically there is the idea that there is no objective truth
about what happened but anyway so that's that psychological experience of
events um is um is there um if you like before the gothic and one of the
ways i think quite a useful way of understanding it is that the
neoclassical writers try to eliminate that from the equation there's all of
course it's very messy and it's not rational the mind the mind is met
there's a mess and it's it's unrational so um the gothic writers say no
that's an important part of our experience and of course it is an important
part of our experience so the psychological becomes important the uncanny
what does uncanny mean uncanny is an absolute buzzword um as you know in um
in uh the exams not in the pecs but in the exams you get um words that you
have to define and uncanny would be a very good example u-n-c-a-n-n-y what
does uncanny mean where do we who Who invented the concept of Uncanny?
Uncanny is the English translation. Well, uncanny is actually a Scots word
originally. But it's the English translation of Unheimlich. Unheimlich.
Sorry, Unheimlich. Who invented the concept of Unheimlich? You have a clue
in my language. No? Freud. It's a Freudian concept. And literally,
Unheimlich means unhomely. But what we would normally translate that as is
unfamiliar. So it's something which is out of our normal experience. And
another way of saying that would be defamiliarized. So it doesn't really
translate very easily into Spanish. But the nearest I've got, is
inquietantemente extranjero, something like that. But that idea of the
uncanny is very, very important here. The liminal. What do I mean by the
liminal? What's the liminal? What are the limes for the Roman in the Roman
Empire? Yeah, it is not an alien thing. Not exactly. A limes was the, the
borders of the Roman Empire. So the border areas, the marches, we would
say, in English. And so... ... And I don't know why we actually tend to use
the word, well, okay, we'll come back to subliminal. But liminal means that
is something which is on the border between two things. So you will have
noticed for the last year or so, I am obsessed by the concept of boundary
blurrers. Boundary blurrers are anomalies which occupy a grey area between
two categories. And they tend to be of great interest to literature because
if you have characters who occupy those liminal spaces, they help you to
have a clearer idea of your categories. Probably the best example we have
are the Zanies in Volpone. If you remember in Volpone, there was a dwarf,
an Aphrodite and a eunuch. And Volpone. Of course, not in any modern
politically correct sense, but in early modern English thinking. So
remember, we're talking about the 17th century, not in modern thinking. But
a dwarf is halfway between a child and an adult. They're in a sort of
liminal space in that sense. Of course, they're not really, but that is the
way of thinking. An Aphrodite is to a large extent halfway between that
binary category of male and female. And the same we can say about a eunuch.
So those three figures are quite curious figures. Why would Johnston choose
them? Well, because they are, if you like. outside the social norms because
of their nature, their defining nature. And so the uncanny refers to a
disturbance in what is familiar or a familiarity in what is strange or new.
So a typical element of the uncanny is déjà vu. You understand déjà vu?
I don't understand déjà vu. You see something that you didn't even
remember. Right. But typically we understand something that you think you
remember, but you know you couldn't at the end. So that is another way of
defamiliarizing. Because, again, apart from anything else, once you have
that sensation, that suggests you cannot fully trust your mind. And that
not fully trusting. Your mind is an incredibly important concept in the
Gothic. The idea that we're not in complete control. Another very, very
important concept of the uncanny is animism. Lots of magic words today.
What's animism? I don't know. Sorry, Walter. Yes. um exactly exactly but
anonymism is when you think that objects have experience so um the idea is
objects coming to to life or acquiring human characteristics of course um
that can be everything from sort of walt disney and the lion king or
something like that and lions and hyenas who talk um to uh the sort of
thing you get in gulliver's travels as well um but um to the extent that
character can be applied to the natural world um and even in inanimate
world uh that's questions the limits of humanity what it means to be human
etc etc etc um and the opposite of animism is a questioning of identity and
we see that whenever people lose their essential humanity and there are
different ways of losing your essential humanity you can go mad yeah if
somebody's mad then they're not human in the way that we would normally
consider them being human of course they are human in terms of their ranks
etc but they're ranks etc but they're not human in terms of their ranks etc
but they're not human in our ability to not human in our ability to
interact with them uh trance yeah if you're in some type of trance or
altered state then um you are then then you're not fully human or you're
not human in that moment death-like states, okay, so in a situation where
somebody is dead, or is seemingly dead, or any type of stasis. Do you
understand stasis? Right, okay. What I'm referring to is situations without
progress. So, for example, we will deal with a poem by Tennyson next year,
which is called Mariana, and it's about a woman who is in the house waiting
for her lover to come. The character Mariana comes from Shakespeare's play
Measure for Measure. But she is in this situation, and every day is like
the previous day, and it's like she's trapped in time. She's just waiting,
and waiting with a little bit of decline, a little bit of disintegration,
if you like. But that situation where time does not progress is stasis.
Another situation we're going to see next year is Keats, John Keats. He has
a conversation with the characters depicted on an urn, like a bottle, there
are. pictures there's a relief on the on the bottle of different classical
scenes that are greek and of course um a lot of the scenes are scenes of
lovers and things like this but because they're in spaces because they're
trapped in time they will never know the fullness of love they'll never
know real life because they're trapped at that moment etc and so all sorts
of questions about the difference between mindfulness to use a very
fashionable word and living life and declining and dying and the sort of
real life that we live all of those questions come into um spaces um
there's also a level of spaces in um the lady of shallot which is another
poem that we're going to see um next year so uh those are very important um
um so the question identity can be questioned um by gender boundary blurs
if we have as humanity has had for a long time very static and rigid ideas
about gender then anybody like the the zanies in volpone that we mentioned
who are indeterminate between genders um is uh is uncanny in one sense
telepathy telepathy is less obvious but if somebody can transmit messages
to your mind then you're not fully in control of your mind and we start to
have situations of telepathy in things like jane eyre yeah there's a moment
in jane eyre when rochester when Jane Eyre hears Rochester calling out to
her. Rochester is 300 miles away. That's not that he has a telephone or
walkie-talkie or anything. There is a telepathic connection there.
After-death experiences. So ghosts begin to become really important again.
And ghosts, if you like, are the ultimate boundary blurrers. Because
probably the most important binary system in our mindset, even more
important than, say, male and female, is alive and dead. You can't get more
important a binary contrast than that. So any boundary blurrers that cross
that, that's boundary, that cross, that's limes, if you like, are hugely
important. And, of course, the idea of a ghost or living and dead is
identity, non-identity. So if somebody can communicate from the state of
non-identity, calls into question everything, if you like. So ghosts are
really, really important. And also what becomes increasingly important is
the concept of doppelgänger. Was ist doppelgänger? You do learn a lot of
German in your English class. Did I spell it right? Doppelgänger. right
well doppel in German means double and ganger means goer that doesn't help
very much so your doppelganger is your doble somebody who is apparently
identical to you who looks very much like you and according to lots of sort
of mystical theories everybody has a doppelganger somewhere around
typically if you meet your doppelganger you're probably going to die so
it's a bad thing but the that becomes hugely important probably most
obviously in the case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde but there are other
references to doppelgangers earlier than that for example in William
Godwin's novel Caleb Williams the two characters are sort of doppelgangers
with each other and in many many ways Frankenstein and Frankenstein's
creature or Frankenstein's monster are doppelgangers they're different
aspects of the same person so yes finally another aspect of the uncanny is
the inability to express feeling and experience what is beyond language and
is therefore unnameable so again if you are a doppelganger neo-classical
writer, if you're an Augustan writer if you have sufficient skill at
writing, you can express any idea you like anything is expressible in
words, if you have good enough control of the language that of course goes
against people like Shakespeare like Webster, like all sorts of Jacobean
writers who are very much of the idea that you can reach a point where
ideas are so extreme that they cannot be expressed and so you have sort of
howl, howl howl, or King Lear saying no, no, no etc, etc these types of
things Macbeth has a moment where he says never, never, never never, never,
never wonderful I've lost the word Prokofiev and Samson this is what I'm
trying to say trochite, pentameter yes so that sort of thing is important
what is the first work of gothic fiction? The Castle of Otranto that is the
official answer wrong yeah that is the typical answer It's, there are
actually better or other candidates. We have, for example, Thomas Leyland
wrote Longsword in 1762, just before, a couple of years before the castle
of Lutranta. And Somlet wrote Ferdinand Count, Count Fathom in 1753. So
that's a decade earlier. But you could really argue that Thomas Lodge's
novella, A Marguerite of America in 1596 is gothic. Yeah. There are
elements of gothic and we will talk about that. It's not, I mean, one of
the defining characteristics I think that we will give for gothic fantasy
is that it's prose rather than poetry. Now, of course, you could have a
gothic poem like The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe is clearly gothic in every
sense, and it is a poem. But conventionally, we'd be talking about that.
But the important thing anyway is not that there is an initial work. It's
this impression that we have that Walpole invents the gothic, suddenly
falls fully grown. Yeah. In the 1760s, 1764 is it or something like that,
in the 1760s, there are a number of antecedents which have as much right to
be called Gothic as anything else. The, probably the most important source
of the Gothic is what we might call a theatrical Gothic, Jacobean
theatrical Gothic. Essentially, I'm talking about revenge tragedy. So in
things like Macbeth, in things like... To some extent, King Lear, in those
types of, excuse me, I'm thinking about something else. Well, anyway, in
those types of Black Hamlet, where we have Hamlet as a ghost, etc., etc.,
there's all sort of dark, bright new castle type situation, blah, blah,
blah. We have a lot of the elements of the Gothic. The only difference is
that it is in black. It is in black verse, and it is theatrical. But the
idea that the Gothic begins in the 1860s should be challenged if we think
in terms of the two of its salient features, ghosts and the uncanny. If you
think about it, we have had... threatening, unnatural or supernatural
beings throughout literary history. In Beowulf we have a monster in Sir
Gawain and the Green Knight as you mentioned we have an apparition possibly
a monster something supernatural anyway somebody who is a boundary blurrer
between living and dead because he can have his head cut off in Le Morte
d'Arthur there are monsters in the Spanish tragedy we have ghosts watching
the events of humans etc etc in Dr Faustus which we haven't studied but
there are ghosts, there are demons there are all sorts of things like that
the Duchess of Malfoy there are ghost like figures etc etc so I think it is
much more useful to think in terms of the attempt of the neoclassical or
the Augustan authors to try to expand the gothic elements from literature
and then the gothic writers bring those elements back rather than it being
a fundamentally new thing because it's part of human experience. By the way
I said that we could argue that the first piece of gothic fiction was
Thomas Lodge's A Marguerite of America from 1596 who is Thomas Lodge? what
did he write that you have heard of no you didn't have to read the play but
you did have to read the chapter in Eges of as you like it and the original
story from which Shakespeare took as you like it was written by Thomas
Lodge it was a novella called Rosalind and that's where Shakespeare got the
story from ok if we're thinking in terms of the uncanny and
defamiliarisation um well all the way through literature but above all in
Chaucer and in Shakespeare we have seen an interest in the difference
between appearance and reality and that difference between appearance and
reality is an aspect of defamiliarisation um the uncanny also relates to
any type of coincidence yeah coincidences of course do actually happen but
um uh they tend to be um they tend to happen in key moments in literature
and that is in itself quite uncanny um any type of personification In
literature, it's very, very common for people to be writing poetry to the
West Wind or to stones and rivers and all sorts of things. That
personification, that is uncanny. We've talked about boundary blowers all
the way through the course. And we could also talk about pathetic fallacy.
What is pathetic fallacy? Yeah. Pathetic fallacy is, first sounds bad. And
it was a word used by the art critic John Ruskin to describe a phenomenon
that we find throughout all world literature, which is that the natural
world and especially the weather tends to reflect, the mood of human
beings. So if you think of Hollywood movies, it's always raining in a
funeral. Funerals in Hollywood, all these people with umbrellas, lots of
umbrellas, et cetera, et cetera. That is pathetic fallacy. That means that
the weather conditions accompany the mood of the people. But if you think
it through, it actually suggests that there is something in the natural
world that can feel sympathy for human beings. Thank you. So it's an
element of personification. Whether you want that to be some type of
omniscient God or mother nature or something like that, any of those
concepts are a type of personification and therefore a type of uncanny. And
as I say, there is this, the way that Ruskin uses the word, he's quite
disdainful. But most people, most literary critics now fully accept that is
a part of human experience, if you like. Generally speaking, I think
because of confirmation bias, if it's a beautiful sunny day and we have a
funeral, just to go back to funerals. We probably don't notice, but we
notice more when the weather, for example, coincides with our emotions. So
on the other side of that, of course, is that everybody in films falls in
love on a wonderful sunny day, et cetera, et cetera. And as I said, that
happens in literature from every culture in the world. So it is a very,
very accepted feature of our psychological understanding. And in any case,
literature is fundamentally a vicarious experience. Do you understand what
I mean by vicarious? So you're talking in Spanish? So, if we have this idea
that we are homo fictus, the fundamental, the defining characteristic of
our species is that we tell each other stories. That is, if you like, our
super power. Spiders can make webs, tigers have big ferocious teeth,
crocodiles are very good at swimming up to you without you noticing them,
etc., etc. Our superpower is telling stories to each other. And that is
hugely important because that means that we have the ability to experience
confronting a tiger, for example, without the danger. If you have to fall
off a horse to understand that falling off a horse is dangerous, that is a
serious limitation because you may well break some bones, you could easily
break your back or your neck or anything else falling off a horse. If you
can be told about falling off a horse, you can learn. You can learn. You
can develop your knowledge in a useful way without actually taking risks.
So we are fundamentally programmed to enjoy that process of hearing stories
about other people's experience, of going through the idea of imagining
what it must be like to live like somebody else. Now, that being in
somebody else's mind is by its very nature uncanny. So we can say that
uncanniness is actually just part of literature. Literature really only
exists if there is uncanniness. And we also have to be much wider and more
inclusive in the way that we understand what ghosts are. You could have a
very sort of simplistic, childish concept of ghosts, sort of American
Halloween type ghosts of things in white blankets. Fundamentally, what a
ghost is, is something that is not a ghost. Something is some unspeakable
secret that has been repressed indefinitely. And what is that repressed
secret having an influence on now, on the present? So something from the
past, which you have not been able to process, coming into the present and
re-emerging and influencing and affecting the present. So E.M. Forster, who
wrote, Howard's End and Abidatium Con Vistas, and Where Angels Fear to
Tread and all of those types of things, and Passage to India, which you
will study next year, said, once in the world of fiction, what difference
is there between an apparition and a mortgage, certainly. Once you're
talking about a world of fiction, the world of fantasy, the world of the
novel, a mortgage is something from the past, a decision on the past which
has its influence on your presence, in the hypotheca, it's fundamentally
the same as a ghost. So we've got to understand ghosts in that sort of
broad category. It's not just actual people who have died. It's something
that we have repressed or something from the past which is influencing in
the present. And in many, many ways, that actually has a lot to do with the
whole process of literature. Writers are haunted by their literary
predecessors. Anybody who writes is writing, well, in one sense, looking
over their shoulder at the dead writers in their past and what they've done
and has to write bearing those people in mind. Those ghosts, if you like,
are looking over their shoulders. Writers are mostly the voices of the dead
and always the voices of the past talking to us in an uncanny way. There is
nothing, if you like, natural about a book. A book is, a dead person, maybe
Mary Wollstonecraft, maybe Thomas Gray or whoever, talking to us directly.
That's weird. If you think about it, that's weird. We're absolutely used to
it. But how can we have somebody who has such completely different life
experiences living in a society before TikTok, you can imagine this, before
the telephone, before television, before newspapers, before whatever,
talking directly to us? That's a very weird thing to be happening. And the
way the literature emerges from the past, demanding to be re-read and
reinterpreted repeatedly, parallels the behaviour of ghosts. So, if you
read a book and 20 years later you read it again, your experience is
fundamentally different. Now, you have to believe perhaps your experience
is fundamentally different because you remember things differently and you
remember things wrong. Not that somebody's changed the book. You assume
that the book has stayed the same. But that, again, calls into question our
concept of the brain. We have the concept of the brain as this perfect
recording machine. And the reality is, according to modern psychologists,
that the brain is much more like a Wikipedia page. In the sense that, it's
written for the first time and then things come in and change it. And what
we refer back to in our brains is the last version of what's been changed.
I'm sure everyone's aware of those situations where you can put ideas into
people's heads and create false memories. Very, very, very easy to create
false memories in somebody's head. If somebody's seen a car crash and you
say to them do you remember all of the broken glass on the ground? And do
you remember the tree that the car crashed into? Etc, etc. Those things
will influence the way they remember what they saw in the future much more
than the original memory. And so that repetition and that influencing of
the present by the past is fundamentally an aspect of literature and of
ghosts. And you may think well, that's something of the past and now we're
fully accustomed to books. In fact modern times and Derrida pointed this
out are full of films and television and emails and answer phones and
podcasts and all sorts of things. So the number of voices from the past
which talk to us in the present have increased massively. And again, I'm
sure we've all had the experience of for example, watching a film a second
time or a third time or a fourth time and suddenly I don't remember that
scene. Maybe you went out to make a coffee or something. But your memories
of things are always imperfect and that is another ghostly or uncanny
aspect. The ghost is undeniably in the machine. So And of course, I mean,
we very, very, very easily transfer human characteristics to machines. Most
people end up dealing with, we were talking earlier about chat GPT, and
they will ask polite questions. They will say please, and et cetera, thank
you, and things like this when talking to chat GPT. And it's more pleasant
to deal with chat GPT doing that, saying could you please tell me blah,
blah, blah, than saying give me da, da, da. It's just a nicer way of
dealing, of working, if you like. Have you heard of a thing called replica
on CA? Has anybody online heard of, David, have you heard of replica? I
will write it. Replica is probably the most. Most terrifying thing you
could imagine. I came across this in January when I saw a news report on
CNN where there was a report about a woman who had, in California
somewhere, of course, a woman who had given up dating men after six months
of using replica. Replica basically is a. A piece of software which can be
free or you can pay for an advanced version, and you create a very basic
boyfriend or girlfriend or whatever on replica. And you interact with this
algorithm and it develops its own personality according to what happens in
your interaction. And there are people, I mean, there are people who are
finding that this is more satisfying than interacting with human beings and
are just having their romantic relationships being fully on this. You have
people using this as a way of getting over serious personal problems,
divorces, things like that. There are some absolutely bizarre cases of
people actually, the machine becoming quite aggressive because, I mean,
it's a little bit the case of garbage in garbage. If you throw a lot of
your problems into the machine, the machine comes back at you. And there
was even one case of a woman who found, who was so intimidated by her
machine that she was able to finally, with a group of friends, to kill her
replica instead of just turning the bloody thing off. I mean, she describes
it as killing it. There's in the New York Magazine, there's a fascinating
article about the way that this all works. And it says... So humanity is
going to go through a rough period of time in the near future, if this is
anything to go by. I mean, it's really, really terrifying. But there are at
least, I think it's two million or four million Americans who are regular
users of this now. And what America does, we do five years later. So
there's no point sort of laughing at the Americans because we will be doing
this very soon as well. But, I mean, it is incredibly easy for us to
project onto machines human characteristics. And we all do it with pets. My
wife and I do it with our cats. We pretend our cats understand infinitely
more than they really do, of course. So that type of uncanniness is part of
our daily experience. But, yeah, I mean, if anybody wants the reference,
I'm happy. Just like me. An email or write me in the forum and I'll send
you the link for the article because really weird stuff, weird stuff. OK,
so how are we doing? We have another. Right. So what are the central
contribution, contributory influences to the Gothic? What have we mentioned
so far? Where does the Gothic come from? Well, I mentioned revenge
tragedies. Yeah. Thank you. Things like Macbeth and King Lear and stuff
like that. British folklore. So just, you know, ghost stories, ballads,
that sort of thing. All types of ballads where reality is less in control.
Yeah. medieval romance yeah you mentioned uh cigar and the green knight and
we can mention all sorts of other things um where we have like ghost
stories and that type of thing um the major works people like spencer and
the elizabethans the graveyard poets who are interested in isolation and
things like this um that that interest in isolation we could also if you
like uh draw a line with um our friends uh daniel defoe um daniel defoe is
fascinated by the human being in isolation in robinson crusoe in more
flanders etc that is also an aspect um the sentimental novel so um sort of
uh the fundamental part of gothic literature is young women fighting for
their lives and i think it's important to note that all of you love with
the wrong person um and that of course is part of the sentimental novel and
the german tradition um uh what's it called order is called uh the the
german uh tradition of thunder and uh what is it anyway um something like
that um but there's a lot of a lot of the germanic uh influence there as
well so am i suggesting that horace walpole is not important is horace more
important or not horace Walpole, the author of While we can question the
idea of whether it really is the first Gothic novel he certainly was the
first person to coin the expression so in the in the second edition of the
Castle of Otranta the subtitle was Gothic Fantasy I think generally
speaking it's probably best to try to avoid using the word Gothic novel
Gothic novel is attractive because of the assonance but in many sense it's
not a full novel, it's not a novel in the sense that we were using the word
novel previously in the sense of cause and effect and a fully overarching
story, it's much closer to the previous tradition of romance so it's better
to use Gothic fantasy or Gothic romance than the word Gothic novel also
Walpole was very important, hugely important in Britain because he
basically invented neo-Gothic architecture and architecture throughout the
19th century in Britain is the neo-Gothic and part of the Victorian
medievalism really. And that all comes from the house that Walpole built
himself at Strawberry Hill in Richmond between Pickenham and Richmond. You
can still go and see his house if you're interested. What is the sublime
and why was it suddenly so important? What is the sublime and why was it
suddenly so important? Well, who introduces the concept of the sublime to
talk about literature? There is a Roman writer of the Christian era called
Longinus. Who wrote a book, which I believe is called Of the Sublime. And
basically it talks about how we love to have images and descriptions of
things which are terrifying or very powerful. And the classic case in the
Roman period and very easily understandable. image of the sublime is
Vesuvius in eruption. In the Roman period as in the 18th century, Vesuvius
was quite active and so volcanoes are impressive and wondrous and exciting
as is sort of the night sky and this type of thing and comets and all of
these types of things. So whenever nature impresses us with her power those
are typically examples of the sublime. Things that we cannot fully
comprehend if you like. But the sublime suddenly became important at the
time when Walpole was writing this and some letters and well actually no,
more attractive, controllable, and what is sublime, which is like
impressive and terrifying and blah, blah, blah. And so terror, he said, was
the ruling principle of the sublime. Terror is productive of the strongest
emotions which the mind is capable of feeling. Indeed, no passion so
effectively robs the mind of all its powers, acting and reason as fear. So,
a standard situation in which we lose control of our minds is when we are
terrified. People freeze when they're terrified. However, at a certain
distance, and of course through a book it's at a certain distance, terror
may be delightful. Obviously, if you are on the edge of a volcano or living
in... Pompeii in 78 AD, the volcano is simply terrifying and there's
nothing more to be said about it. If you're watching a film about Pompeii,
if you're watching Vesuvius erupt from a safe distance, etc., it's sort of
mesmerizing, but there is pleasure in that because of the distance, because
of the space. And the same thing happens, as I say, when you read the book.
The passion caused by the sublime is astonishment, and astonishment hurries
us on by an irresistible force. It's sort of mesmerizing, as I said.
Emptiness, darkness, solitude and silence provoke fear. However, failing
lights, confused noises are even more terrible than total darkness or total
silence. If you can sort of see there's something there, but you can't
distinguish what it is, that's much more terrifying than total darkness.
Now we have to ask ourselves whether there is a male Gothic and a female
Gothic. And there are some basis for arguing that there is. If so, the
female Gothic would be exemplified by Anne Ratcliffe. It deals with
explained supernatural and focuses on the persecution of a powerless,
motherless young heroine by patriarchal powers ending in marriage and
closure. Yep, same. The greatest modern manifestation of the Gothic is, of
course, Scooby-Doo. And if you think of any episode of Scooby-Doo,
Scooby-Doo always ends with whoever's been making ghosts appear being found
out and saying, you pesky kids, if you hadn't intervened, then I would have
got away with it, et cetera, et cetera. But the idea with Anne Ratcliffe...
The idea with Anne Ratcliffe is that everything ultimately can be explained
away. She suggests that we perceive ghosts, we perceive strange lights, we
perceive this, that and the other, but ultimately there is an explanation
for things. And, of course, we have this sort of virginal orphaned young
woman who is threatened by powerful evil men, which is a constant in
Radcliffe's Gothic. The male Gothic exemplified by Matthew Lewis views
female sexuality as monstrous and other horror, and ends in the death of
its protagonist. Radcliffe would call her type of Gothic terror, and
Lewis's type of Gothic horror. So the focus on gore and sexual depravity
and this type of thing is very much more part of the male Gothic, if you
like. What can be said about the Gothic villain? The Gothic villain.
Villain. ... Often he has a curse. It's usually a he. He's usually some
type of murderous tyrant and he has scary eyes. He almost always has scary
eyes. Usually the villain is an aristocrat. Mm-hmm. Wow. Why is the villain
initially announced to come? okay but I mean why not okay maybe to
criticise in the later half of the 18th century what can we say about the
aristocracy, what can we say about the aristocracy now, what is the purpose
of the aristocracy in modern Spanish society in the 21st century they're
absolutely no use at all complete waste of space there's something from the
past which has an influence on the present they have some type of power
from the past where they have some type of influence in the present but
they shouldn't have according to all of our modern values there's no real
place for the aristocracy if we could argue you can make a legitimate
argument that royalty does work for the country you could also make an
argument that not enough to be worthwhile but that's a different argument
you can't make that argument for the aristocracy, the aristocracy serve no
purpose at all, they're a waste of space but there's something from the
past influencing the present so there is that sense of ghost they are a
throwback from the past which is invading the modern space And that's also
true, maybe slightly less true, but that's also true in the 18th century.
What can be said about the Gothic heroine? She turns to be quite passive.
She turns to be passive because she is out of her familial context and out
of her familiar context. So she's not with her family. She's isolated. And
she is not used to the environment in which she is in. So, I mean, in one
sense, it's a sort of justified level of passiveness. She is innocent. She
tends to be virginal, but she also tends to be inquisitive. What does this
leader do? Et cetera, et cetera. Okay. Bye-bye, Claudia. He has a tendency
to faint. Okay, fainting. Of course, losing consciousness has an uncanny
element to it and frequently needs to be rescued. Okay, so there's quite a
high level of argument about whether Gothic literature is always
reactionary or whether there are some elements in which it is sort of
questioning the... standard values of the time um in the sense that young
women uh in classical gothic gothic literature always tend to have to be
rescued by a man of course that is quite um reactionary she's usually an
orphan as well what can we say about the gothic setting where do gothic
stories take place far away good isolated settings good anything else in
castles and that type of buildings yes so in old buildings especially in
castles in old stately homes in foreign countries what is the advantage of
a castle or a stately home maybe because are something for the from the
past that's true they are buildings from the past that's what you were
saying yes when Parcels and stately homes have hidden rooms. You think of
the mad woman in the attic in Jane Eyre. They have secret passages, secret
wings, dungeons, crypts. There are all sorts of spaces which have not been
explored and are dangerous to explore. What do they represent? What do they
symbolise? Hell? Possibly. I think above all they symbolise secrets and
secret recesses of the mind. So places in the mind where it is dangerous to
go and secrets which haven't been fulfilled and can be revealed. If you
think of something like the legend of Bluebeard, Bluebeard gets married and
tells his wife that she has free reign of the house except don't go into
that room. So of course when he's away on business or being a pirate or
whatever he does she goes into the room and finds all the dead bodies of
his previous wives in the room. So the idea of secret rooms, secret
passages is that. secrets uh in somebody's past which can come back and
influence the present um what was i going to say i was going to say
something fascinating i can't remember okay um doesn't matter so uh yeah
dungeons underground passages attics and crypts suggest claustrophobia also
uh and represent the hidden recesses of the mind um how is the supernatural
reflected in the gothic well the supernatural um is usually presented as a
rebellion of the imagination against the tyranny of reason remember we just
had a century of the enlightenment we just had a century of um
neo-classical or vast When do gothic fantasies take place? Sometimes, but
they can be sort of, I mean, if you have a story like Dracula, for example,
it's a sort of medieval context, but it's modern people going to a medieval
context. The important thing is that it takes place in a period of
transition. So it's a period where the old coexists with the new. Now, on
one level, that is like door stupid. All societies are periods of
transition. We are in a moment of transition. 50 years ago, we were in a
moment of transition, and 100 years ago, we were in a moment of all. That's
true of all societies, but you can emphasize that or not. And in this case,
what we have is the past coming back to invade the present with a
vengeance. So you have, I mean, that can be in a very literal sense, like
the freeing up of Dracul and Dracula, and this vampire traveling from.
medieval europe and unmodernized europe in transylvania in romania and
coming to england coming to land in whitby etc etc and threatening modern
society which is meant to be rationally controlled and etc etc um or it can
be people obviously um going back to the past um or to the societies which
are um not modern but there is there has to be that threat of something old
something very old against something which is modern um and one way of
understanding that ancient ancient superstition threatening modern society
is through a nationalist lens so gothic stories generally tell it takes
place in foreign countries and specifically in catholic countries for
people in 18th century england catholicism represents the superstition of
the past that what their ancestors a couple of hundred years earlier had
believed in um one of the aspects if you like uh one of the aspects that
makes protestantism or anakinism much less fun than catholicism and is the
fact that it takes all of the magic out yeah there's no magic in
anglicanism it's all very sensible and reasonable blah blah blah blah um
but so if if there is a supposedly a threat and i mean there were still
people who thought that there was some type of um catholic threat to um to
england's survival i mean it's less and less um serious argument but it's a
little bit like americans who are still worried about communism obviously
communism does not threaten uh america in any meaningful way um but uh you
know any mention of it could still be a threat and uh that is the threat if
you like from something that was a real threat in the past carrying over
into the present um in the case of the pathetic fallacy um in what way is
gothic literature bourgeois and nationalist in what way is gothic
literature bourgeois and nationalist well there's there are aristocrats um
but they're about the bad guys yes so i mean it's very much a literature
written for bourgeois values in the sense that um the bad guys are the
aristocrats and sometimes the peasants i mean if you think of um the
peasants in uh in dracula um they are to some extent in frankenstein as
well um the uncultured peasants are also a threatening force the mob if you
like um so gothicism was associated It was associated, especially by the
Whigs, with the Anglo-Saxons, Englishness, democracy, Shakespeare, revenge
tragedy, and Milton. I mean, the whole sort of situation with Satan in
Paradise Lost is pretty gothic. So, Gothicism tended to be anti-French,
xenophobic, anti-Catholic, and anti-aristocratic. However, at the same
time, it was an expression of anxiety about the emerging world of
capitalism, alienation, science, and gothicness. If you reduce everything
down to its financial values, as capitalism tends to do, that can be highly
alienating and highly isolating. And so... So, nationalism in Britain in
the late 18th and 19th century very much took the place of religion. And
Gothicism can be seen within that. Where does the Gothic get its trope of
lawless society from? No? Revenge tragedy. For revenge tragedy... ...to
make sense, there has to be a lawless society. If you have a system
where... If you live in a country where the legal system works properly...
somebody does something terrible to you or your family and you go and
denounce them to the police and the police get in touch with the charges
there is a process and that solves the problem that process has to not work
for you to want to take revenge if you um if you have a if somebody um does
you wrong and you just decide well i'm going to kill their dog or something
like this you know that is not an appealing characteristic in a modern
society yeah you should go you should at least try to um solve your
problems in the legal system first so it's important that that legal system
does not work that non-functional legal system is of course very medieval
um so uh that is the relationship uh there as you like um what can we what
can we said about gothic diction where do these ideas come from um well the
gothic tends to uh have protestant ideas about rhetoric so being very good
at rhetoric being very convincing in speech is something that should make
you suspicious in um from a from a protestant uh point of view the
protestant values plain speaking speaking in a simple direct clear
non-ambiguous way um And so, and that is also tends to combine with
linguistic xenophobia. So a preference for English words over longer
polysyllabic words from Latin and French and Spanish and Italian, etc, etc.
So, clearness of speech, etc, etc. Anyway, we will have, we'll basically be
looking at Gothic elements of everything else that we see for the rest of
the year. And almost to some extent in the rest of the course in at least
British literature, because while there doesn't tend to be really great
literature in the Gothic tradition, it's hugely influential on the great
literature. We would not have Dickens without the Gothic. We would not have
the Bronte sisters without the Gothic, etc. So, and of course, hugely
influential on cinema and everything else. So this. These concepts, while
it might not be worth studying specific Gothic works, part of this is all
Frankenstein, which is lots of fun. The, it is hugely influential. So we do
have to be aware of it. Okay, so next week, we will be talking about women.
Especially women authors of the 18th century. I think. And then in the two
classes in January, we will dedicate both classes to Frankincense because
there's lots to see. OK. Good to see you, David. Good to see you, Vanessa.
Even if I didn't see you. See you next week. Bye bye. Thank you. Bye.
You're welcome.