If all this sounds familiar, you’re right! I’ve talked about this before, but there’s a crucial difference now. I’m giving you a chance to try it for yourself! Introducing Gothic Meter, a program that takes a text and not only tells you whether it falls within the wider Gothic sphere (Gothic, horror, dark fantasy, or science fiction), but also how and why.
This is an invaluable tool for an author, for reasons that will become evident in this post.
In a nutshell, Gothic Meter is a result of my academic-level familiarity with and knowledge of the Gothic. Everything I know about the Gothic, from the role of the supernatural to ambiguity, and from the sublime to the role of time, has found its use in this program.
Let’s see how; and let’s see why you should care.
Gothic Meter, among other things, helps us see how the elements contributing to a text evolve during the narrative(more…)
Note: the following article on the modernity of Dracula is a modified excerpt (pp. 66-67, 145-147) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the relevant page on the main Home for Fiction website.
Perhaps one of the most interesting utterances in Dracula is Jonathan Harker’s “old centuries had, and have, powers of their own which mere ‘modernity’ cannot kill” (D 43). However, what Jonathan fails to realize is that the joke is on him:
Dracula awes because he is old, but within the vampire tradition, his very antiquity makes him new, detaching him from the progressive characters who track him… Jonathan Harker looks in his shaving mirror and sees no one beside him. In Jonathan’s mirror, the vampire has no more face than does Dickens’s Spirit of Christmas Future. In his blankness, his impersonality, his emphasis on sweeping new orders rather than insinuating intimacy, Dracula is the twentieth century he still haunts … [He is] less of a specter of an undead past than a harbinger of a world to come, a world that is our own. (Auerbach 1995, 63; emphasis in the original)
And so, several scholars connect Count Dracula with modernity, through the concept of the eternal now. Dracula, like other Gothic texts, presents a temporal model in which “[c]hronological time is … exploded, with time past, present and future losing their historical sequence and tending towards a suspension, an eternal present” (Jackson 1981, 47).
The modernity of Dracula often passes unnoticed, precisely because of his very antiquity(more…)
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.
In the Romantic period, a usual expression of the sublime was mountain peaks; the realization of something far bigger and older than one’s self(more…)
