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The Sublime in Literature: Meaning and Significance

January 20, 2020

academia, ambiguity, experiencing, Gothic, literature, sublime

The sublime in literature (and art in general) is a fascinating but complex concept. The difficulty in comprehending its ins and outs lies squarely in the fluidity of its definition.

Just as the Gothic itself – with which the sublime is heavily associated – that eludes clear-cut definitions, the sublime is not all that clear to put in a box. In a way, the sublime in literature is a way of experiencing. Yet in another way, the sublime is no more than a ghostly reflection – and so, it’s not really prescribing but rather describing.

In simple terms, the sublime in literature is every instance where we reach a threshold of ambiguity. Whenever we (vicariously, through the protagonist) experience the fuzzy passage between reason and emotion, between fear and awe, or between puzzlement and understanding, the sublime is there.

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Defining the Gothic: from Tolkien to Todorovian Ambiguity

March 13, 2019

Criticism

academia, ambiguity, criticism, fantasy, Gothic, Todorov, Tolkien

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Quite often in this blog, I refer to ambiguity as a fundamental aspect of Gothic literature. Another thing I must’ve mentioned is that defining the Gothic is no easy task, and each scholar seems to have a unique idea on how to approach the matter.

Personally, I like to focus on the aspect of ambiguity and in-betweenness. In this, I draw from Tzvetan Todorov’s definition of the fantastic, as I will explain below.

Examining the differences between the ways Todorov and J.R.R. Tolkien define the fantastic is a fruitful task, as it allows us to pinpoint the ontology of the various expressions of the fantastic. Furthermore, it provides a great theoretical framework for researching more general aspects of otherness.

defining the gothic — Defining the Gothic is no easy task.

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Children in Gothic Fiction: Dialectics of In-betweenness

June 1, 2018

Criticism

academia, ambiguity, children, criticism, Gothic, time

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Note: the following article on children in Gothic fiction s a modified excerpt (pp. 96-97) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which can be downloaded (for free) from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, see here.

Children in Gothic fiction possess extraordinary allusive power. The reason is that they personify in graspable terms the ambiguous area between past and future. Children in Gothic texts become a link that both separates and connects the old and the new.

Essentially, the Gothic child becomes a metaphor for the eternal present. It carries the past within – both literally, as the continuation of the parents’ genetic code, as well as metaphorically, as the continuation of a cultural, social, or simply family tradition – yet it is also the future. More important, still, it is a potential future, that is, it is neither determined nor materialized.

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