Conference Programme and Abstracts
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SUPERNATURAL CITIES II: GOTHIC CITIES
6-7th April 2017
Limerick School of Art and Design, Clare Street
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CONFERENCE PANELS
Panel 1: MINERVA PRESS AND THE GOTHIC CITY
Panel 2: CREATING SUPERNATURAL GOTHIC CITIES
Panel 3: MEMORY AND HAUNTING IN THE CITY
Panel 4: GRAPHIC URBAN SPATIALITIES
Panel 5: URBAN AMERICAN GOTHIC
Panel 6: URBAN GOTHIC NARRATIVES
Panel 7: GOTHIC TOURISM AND THE HETEROTOPIC CITY
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LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Alicia Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University. ‘Trapping the Gothic Imaginary in Contemporary London: Jack the Ripper and Dark Tourism’
Jack the Ripper and the Autumn of Terror is sutured within the fabric of London’s biography, perpetuating the Gothic cityscape of gaslight terror in the East End. The infamous murderer continues to be a central figure in the Gothicisation of London, maintaining an influential role in urban tourism practices from the nineteenth century to the present day. The popularity of Jack the Ripper tours as a rite of passage for tourists provides the allure of ‘authenticity’ when having a physical connection to the past through the relics of the material ruins of Victoriana. Drawing on spatial theory’s premise of walking as text, this paper will examine a particular site of dark tourism, Ripper-Vision Jack the Ripper Tour, a tour that incorporates photographs, particularly post-mortem images of victims into the narrative. The superimposition of corpse onto the place of trauma sediments the Gothic imaginary into contemporary material space. The paper will suggest that such dark tourism practices are an active form of haunting, (re)penning Jack’s bloody narrative into the streets of Whitechapel. The paper will question the threat of modernisation and the function of Gothic narratives perpetuated by Jack the Ripper tourism, and more broadly, its paramount role in heritage construction and conservation.
Ruth Heholt, Falmouth University. ‘Colonising the Dark City: Masculinizing Gothic London in Penny Dreadful’
The city streets in the recent television series Penny Dreadful (Showtime 2014-16) are almost slick with blood. Penny Dreadful employs an aesthetic of Gothic excess in its mash-up of a selection of Gothic nineteenth century novels, including Frankenstein, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mixing these with folkloric horrors of the city and set at the time of the Whitechapel murders, the city is shown to be an Other-worldly, liminal space where supernatural beasts exist alongside the daylight ‘real’ city. London in Penny Dreadful is an über-Gothic space where vampires feast, werewolves revel in blood-baths and Victor Frankenstein creates not one but three creatures. This paper argues that Penny Dreadful re-imagines the Gothic city as a masculine space where it is men who (attempt to) colonise its streets and look for power and control. This city signifies danger for women and children. Yet Penny Dreadful is not a misogynistic or patriarchal text, and the male-inflection placed upon the nightshade of the city incorporates a critique of mastery and power. The black back-alleys, the underground hovels and the Gothic mansions men occupy exile women and the vulnerable into the even more shadowy corners and the darkest of all places in the city. Penny Dreadful’s inflection of the Gothic city exudes testosterone whilst as a text it subtly undermines and critiques the city’s possession by men.
Donna Gilligan, National Museum of Ireland. ‘Commercialising the mourning process: Irish examples of mourning jewellery in the Victorian Gothic city’
During the nineteenth century, the extended display of mourning by Queen Victoria for her deceased husband Albert set in motion a new wider ritualised practice of public grief following a death. This resulted in the creation of an elaborate visual mourning process, whereby the bereaved followed codified rules on particular dress, commemoration, and social etiquette in the period following a loss. This period saw the rise in popularity and availability of the tradition of mourning jewellery, which visually commemorated the deceased through a memento which could be worn by the bereaved.
Mourning jewellery often incorporated woven elements of the deceased’s hair, as well as inscriptions, visual symbols of mememto mori, and the use of particular materials such as jet for their sombre black tones. This tradition was also common to Ireland, and Irish examples were often created in the native medium of bog oak, a popular material which turned black when exposed to air, and was well suited to carving. The examples of Irish mourning jewellery which survive today demonstrate pervading themes in their contemporary society; a fascination with death and mortality, and the importance of urban social codes, fashion, and middle-class etiquette. Through the example of the mourning jewellery, we see material and visual culture collide with the Gothic themes present in aspects of contemporary fiction and spiritualism belief, emerging from the backdrop of an urban Gothic space.
Christina Morin, University of Limerick. ‘Irish Émigré Authors, the Minerva Press, and the Gothicisation of Romantic London, 1790-1820’
Several Irish writers, many of them emigrants to London, are known to have published with the Minerva Press between 1790-1820, contributing fundamentally to the press’s position as the pre-eminent publisher of popular fiction and gothic romances in the period. At least two of these authors, namely Regina Maria Roche (c. 1764-1845) and Sarah Green (fl. 1790-1825), were among Minerva’s most prolific and well-read writers, but many other, now obscure names also found a home for their works with William Lane’s press. These include Catharine Selden (fl. 1797), Mrs. F.C. Patrick (fl. 1797), Henrietta Rouvière Mosse (d. 1834), and Anna Millikin (fl. 1793), as well as a handful of other identified writers. Together, these Irish writers produced some thirty original novels and an additional twelve editions or reprints, with further potentially Irish-authored texts yet to be identified from among the many anonymous and pseudonymous titles contained in Minerva’s lists.
This paper turns attention to Minerva’s Irish émigré authors like Roche, Mosse, and Selden, exploring the manner in which their geographical movements helped to secure Minerva’s success as a popular publisher and, in the process, effectively transform London itself into a gothic bibliographic landscape. It also considers their shared experience of migration to London as a fundamentally gothic one in which London itself was transformed into a site of horrific want and deprivation from which there appeared no escape, even as a successful Minerva novelist.
Norbert Besch, Independent Scholar.‘Those ever multiplying authors in the “pig-stye of literature in Leadenhall-Streeet”: Minerva Press writer Isabella Kelly and Gothic horror in the metropolis’
William Lane’s Minerva Press was routinely decried by literary critics for the lowbrow Gothic literature it published. Yet Lane’s renowned skills as an entrepreneur and his often liberal encouragement ensured that countless obscure women writers were adequately represented in circulating libraries all across the British Isles. Unlike myriad female practitioners who faithfully, and rather amateurishly, copied the Radcliffean formula, Scottish-born Minerva Press novelist Isabella Kelly decidedly deviated from these established patterns. In her sharp denunciation of a hypocritical society she transgressed moral boundaries and violated the code of propriety by weaving unvarnished tales that often transfer the horrors of the persecuted maiden from the gloomy castle and the somber dungeon into the sordid streets of London where the sinister count or uncouth banditti become the ruthless libertine, and the innocent and naïve heroine finds herself in the snares of the metropolis in companion with rapists and prostitutes. It is this tension between the unflagging virtue of her heroines and the lurid and revolting nature of London’s haunts of depravity which gives Kelly’s work a unique twist on the familiar and often interchangeable plots of other Minerva Press writers. In Isabella Kelly’s world Gothic horrors mercilessly intrude into the seemingly protected London home.
Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine. ‘A Vision that Haunts: Minerva’s Gothics and the “Romantic” vision of everlasting love’
While William Lane christened his press “Minerva” in 1790, Minerva’s influence on the novel market can be measured as early as the late 1780s when Lane was advertising for new manuscripts and rapidly publishing an increasing number of new novels. Most of Lane’s earliest publications are anonymous and associated with female identifiers like “by a lady.” Most are also variations on the increasingly unfashionable novel of sensibility. At the heart of these novels is the fantasy of everlasting love. This fantasy continues to haunt a wide range of authors in the Romantic era, from vanguard writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley to Minerva authors, who are typically portrayed as “rearguard.” Drawing from both statistical analysis of Romantic-era publishing records and sample novels, Neiman argues that the fantasy of everlasting love is a prime site for Minerva authors to enter into contemporary debates about women’s nature, the social order, and, most importantly, Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature. Neiman’s focus is the Gothic romance of the 1800s and 1810s, a point when Minerva’s direct influence on the novel market wanes. A series of flamboyant Gothic novels by Minerva “regulars” like Amelia Beauclerc, Ann Hatton, and Selena Davenport demonstrate that novelists are keenly aware of Minerva’s reputation for “trash.” These authors deploy new Romantic standards for literature to valorize a collaborative model of authorship that resurfaces in Romantic poetics, both as “anxiety” about prolific print culture but also, less familiarly, as a source for the poet’s new visions.
Bernice Murphy, Trinity College Dublin. ‘“It’s a Conspiracy, I know It!”: San Francisco as Paranoid Cityscape in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).’
The 1978 film adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers departs significantly from Jack Finney’s source novel by moving the setting for the alien invasion from the small-town setting to the bustling streets of San Francisco. One level therefore, it represents an important contribution to the longstanding tradition of American horror and gothic narratives in which the urban setting serves as fertile ground for paranoia and conspiracy, a tradition which encompasses texts such as Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, the 1943 classic The Seventh Victim, and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, all of which posit the existence of nefarious cults secretly thriving in present-day New York City.
As I shall argue, director Philip Kaufmann’s take on Finney’s ‘pod people’ represents a crucial contribution to the overlooked ‘California Gothic’ tradition made at a time when San Francisco was a locus for contemporary anxieties about changing sexual and social mores, as well as the rapidly curdling 1960s counterculture . 1978, the year Invasion was released, was not a good one for the city: November saw the mass-suicide/murder of over 900 members of the formerly SF based ‘People’s Temple’ cult at Jonestown, Guyana, as well as the assassinations of city mayor George Moscone and LGBT activist Harvey Milk. Though not technically a ‘supernatural’ text, it is nevertheless my contention that Kaufmann’s film, released that December, depicts the city as an inherently uncanny locale populated by dangerously self-absorbed individuals ripe for invisible ‘takeover’. It is a strikingly prescient film which captures something of the genuinely strange tenor of the times in a nuanced and ultimately heart-breaking fashion.
Dara Downey, Maynooth University. ‘“The Taffeta Booth” – Visiting the Urban Psychic in American Gothic’
A remarkable number of American gothic texts (and indeed gothic moments within otherwise optimistic or even realist texts) feature a scene which reveals much about those texts’ attitudes to race, the supernatural, and urban space – that is, a scene in which a central character visits a psychic or preternaturally gifted wise woman (or occasionally a man) who resides in a tucked-away corner of a city. From the novelisation of Stephen King’s haunted-house miniseries, Rose Red, and Karen Joy Fowler’s ultimately anti-supernatural novel Sister Noon, to the depiction of the Oracle in The Matrix, Whoopie Goldberg’s character in Ghost, and the “white witch” in The Craft, as well as a whole host of magic-shop owners, book-shop owners, dodgy suppliers of magical powers, and purveyors of Asian medicine or other forms of “exotic” lore and merchandise in everything from The X-Files and Fringe to Buffy, Angel, The Vampire Diaries, and Lost Girl, these scenes serve to crystallise a range of anxieties and desires relating to otherness and the possibilities opened up by twentieth-century urban spaces.
Again and again, the protagonist, uninitiated into or lapsed in their faith regarding ethnically coded magic, navigates the increasingly murky city streets, and then the ornate, dirty, or labyrinthine interiors where he or she is an intruder but also a welcome customer. This paper therefore examines a number of key examples of this trope, and interrogates the ways in which it suggests often complex, always problematic interactions between race or ethnicity, the supernatural, and commerce, and how these interactions are (re)configured in explicitly urban fictional environments.
Tijana Parezanović, Alfa BK University, Belgrade. ‘Muriel Spark’s Map of London and the Horror of Heterotopia’
Any attempt at providing a detailed map of a city usually proves futile since such heterogeneous spaces inevitably contain hidden places with secret functions, which effectively resist being charted. Individual discoveries of such hidden places imply and provide different contexts for transgression – a concept that remains essential, though repeatedly contested, within Gothic studies. This paper explores transgression into the spaces/places hidden within the urban landscape as presented in Muriel Spark’s novella The Girls of Slender Means, revealing the underlying horror that becomes manifest as transgression escalates. By theoretically contextualizing the issue within the framework of Foucault’s heterotopias the paper analyses post-war London on whose (metaphoric) fringes the May of Teck Club hostel dwells, inhabited by characters drawn to it but simultaneously wishing to escape and unable to do so except by further transgressing into hidden heterotopian places, conceived in this case as an “effectively enacted utopia.” One character in particular – Joanna Childe – articulates the (dis)balance of the proposed spaces. Oscillating between the changing and increasingly more violent post-war urban landscape and personal emotional projections, she amplifies the spatial divide to the extent that transgression for her becomes impossible, leaving her only with the inability to fully experience either the post-war reality or the heterotopian promise. While her death appropriately resembles a sacrificial rite necessary to affirm heterotopia, it also unveils the fact that horror (as the elicitation of dread) essentially underlies even the most promising of heterotopias.
Sam Wiseman, University of Erfurt. ‘"Finding Infinity Round the Corner": Doublings, Dualities and Suburban Strangeness in Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure'
Arthur Machen’s 1924 essay The London Adventure is often seen as a straightforwardly autobiographical text. This paper will argue, however, that the essay complicates distinctions between fiction and autobiography, creating a sense of ironic distance between text and reality. It is governed by a series of dualities: between the ‘real’ Machen and the narrator; between an imagined version of the text, and the one we are actually reading; and between the world of everyday appearances and a deeper, hidden reality. The London Adventure’s peculiar tone and structure, along with its ambiguous fictional status, allows him to explore these concerns from new angles. If the Gothic is always, in some sense, concerned with the potential or actual re-emergence of a real or imagined past, then Machen’s essay allows him to investigate this kind of relationship with his earlier work. The city described in The London Adventure contrasts the world of appearances with a deeper reality, but it is also a place in which Machen (or his narrator) is haunted by the vestiges of the fictional London constructed in texts like The Hill of Dreams (1907). Paralleled with temporal distance is the narrative’s geographical emphasis upon the city’s distant, forgotten and (seemingly) mundane suburbs; this contrasts with the typical focus upon central districts in much of Machen’s earlier work, and provides him with a different assemblage of imagery, tone and atmosphere. This paper will argue that these ironies of temporality, geography and narrative underpin The London Adventure’s subtle and humoured approach to Machen’s characteristic Gothic concerns.
Kieran Cashell, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Synecdoche, Paris: Benjamin’s prehistory of the nineteenth century’
Predicated on the eclipse of faith by reason, the orthodox metanarrative of modernity predicts the total emancipation of humanity from the supernatural. As codified by classical sociologists, the ascent of rationality, facilitated by a process of ‘demystification,’ ushers in the era of Enlightenment. Yet it is precisely this optimistic pseudo-Darwinian story of evolutionary progress that is put into question by the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer’s exposure of the mythological infrastructure of modernity argues that, although mobilised against myth and mystery, scientific rationality possesses its own in-built mythology supported by a new ideological faith in reason itself. Prior to this, Walter Benjamin, the most heretical affiliate of the School, developed a category – namely, phantasmagoria – to thematise this return of the repressed (irrationality) to the heart of the project of modernity. Alluding to a projector used in séances by nineteenth-century mediums, Benjamin philosophically amplifies this motif with reference to Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital into a full-scale psycho-social critique of industrial capitalism. This paper begins with the elaboration of a suggestion by Löwy that Benjamin’s approach can be characterised as ‘Gothic Marxism.’ Acknowledging the influence of Surrealism on his work without compromising his political commitments, this reference links Benjamin’s ‘fascination with enchantment and the marvellous’ with his fidelity to revolutionary socialism. In Das Passagen-Werk (1982) his monstrous experimental prehistory of the nineteenth century, Benjamin deliberately invokes all of the supernatural associations of phantasmagoria in order to capture the peculiar apparitional economic structure of consumer capitalism and, more significantly, to explore the weird phenomenological effects it produces in its subjects. Representing the projection of collective dream-images into commodity production and display, phantasmagoria comes to signify the enchanted zone where psychological, social and economic dimensions intersect. Of Benjamin’s apocalyptic texts Das Passagen-Werk is the most notorious, protracted, and visionary. From its original plan in 1927 as a short Surrealist study of the Parisian passages (streets roofed with glass-and-cast-iron skylights to create kaleidoscopic arcades of boutiques and half-lit magazins de nouveaute) the essay ballooned into an exponential research project that, despite thirteen years of intense labour, remained incomplete at his death in 1940. Working in the Bibliotheque nationale during the 1930s, Benjamin finessed a methodology he applied throughout his career in the attempt to excavate this lost world. Using a process referred to in the paper as “archival morphology,” he constructs an entire world from the microanalysis of its fossilised traces in the archive of the present. Focusing on the city of Paris, and further, on its interstitial architectural details, claiming that ‘the arcade is a city, a world in miniature,’ his book ultimately becomes ‘A city in a bottle.’
Zlatko Bukač, University of Zadar. ‘Hybridity as utopia in Black Panther's Wakanda’
One of the most frequent ‘’fictional’’ locations in superhero comic-books, Wakanda, symbolises the incomprehensible - the African nation, ‘’man made jungle’’, technologically advanced and unhinged from the violence of colonial past. Wakanda, within its ’’intentional isolationism’’ from the rest of the world, is a parallel and alternative space that challenges determined relations of the colonizer and the colonized outside of the realm of fantastic. Through various stories regarding its superhero Black Panther, the authors try to symbolically represent the issues of diversity and social and cultural upheavals that encapsulate American society. Within these subversive elements, hybridity (understood in the context of Homi Bhabha’s work) appears as a specific dealing with this subversive elements, offering a challenge and solution for this displacement from irrelevant space of otherness. The aim of the presentation is to point out the utopian tendencies of various authors of Black Panther comic book articulated by presenting hybridity between technology and tradition as a way of subverting well- established stereotypical notions regarding race. The paper will show how hybridity gains the function of utopia within the heterotopia that is Wakanda, as it accentuates, as noted by Fredric Jameson, ‘’a specific closure’’ on the inability of controlling the surplus of racial binary relations in fiction as well as outside of it.
Marko Lukic, University of Zadar. ‘Gazing Over Chaos – Panoptic Reflections of Gotham’
What this presentation proposes is a reevaluation of the crucial, and often neglected, issues of space/place within the Batman opus, concentrating primarily on Batman’s use of various spaces/places in order to enforce control and/or discipline. Such use of spaces/places unavoidably leads to the creation of a potentially villainous dichotomy within which the crime plaguing Gotham is being controlled by an obsessively and brutally disciplinarian Batman. Using Foucault’s discourse on the implementation of invisible control and therefore power, and its interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticum, the presentation will develop the idea of the Batcave as the actual site of control, the starting point of the Foucauldian notion of the “gaze being alert everywhere” (Foucault, Discipline 195). Symbolically made visible by the prominent brightness of the Bat-signal, but nevertheless constantly hidden from the eyes of the criminals, the Batcave assures the presence of power that “should be visible and unverifiable” (201), and therefore exerts discipline. Consequently, Gotham, Arkham Asylum, and other locations, although inherently dark in their nature, unavoidably retain their visibility, succumbing therefore to “…a real subjection… born mechanically from a fictitious relation.” (202). The presentation will also address the issue of Crime Alley as a site of inversion, a space transfigured into a tragic place, which not only represents a zone immune to the Panoptic gaze, but potentially embodies the key for the subversion of Batman’s “laboratory of power” (204).
Mads Haahr, Trinity College Dublin. ‘Gothic Game Cities: The Involuntary Exploration of Abandoned Spaces from Ant Attack to Fatal Frame 2’
The horror video game genre is broad, ranging from games that use violence and shock as the primary means to scare players to games that use a more psychological approach to horror. This paper is concerned with the use of spaces in games near the psychological end of the horror spectrum. Such games typically take place in gameworlds that consist of derelict or abandoned cities and towns, often haunted by mysterious monsters or former inhabitants. It is a common (although not ubiquitous) trope that the protagonist must go through a long and dangerous exploration of the gameworld, a journey that is arduous as well as meticulous, but also forced. Drawing upon four titles—Ant Attack (1983), Ico (2001), Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Fatal Frame 2 (2003)—this paper analysises the use of space and its significance in terms of story, aesthetics and gameplay, and shows how the different elements come together to create spaces that not only serve as gameworlds, but also as characters that serve a psychological and transformative purpose for the protagonist as well as the player.
Madelon Hoedt, University of South Wales. ‘Werewolves in Wales: Creating Cardiff Haunted House’
In Gothic Tourism, Emma McEvoy defines the eponymous term as “the act of visiting, for the purposes of leisure, a location that is presented in terms of the Gothic” (2015:3), and she notes how ubiquitous these events have become. In 2016, Cardiff Haunted House was created, joining this movement in an attempt to bring scare attractions to the Welsh capital. Yet whereas both dark and Gothic tourism often employ factual information in order to provide a cultural experience, CHH employs a mixture of fact and fiction to draw the audience into its performance. Themed around the well-known werewolf myth and presented as connected to location and community, CHH relies on the concepts of faction and fakelore rather than memory to map its story to the city of Cardiff, both through performance and the creation of additional fictional content.
The aim of the paper is to explore the event and its creation. The author acted as one of the creative directors on the project, and is thus able to combine the skills of academic and practitioner to shed a unique light on the design of a modern, immersive performance event and its connection to the city.
Bibliography:
McEvoy, Emma. 2015. Gothic Tourism. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Robert Smith, University of South Wales. ‘Creating the music for `Graveyard Voices`’
Graveyard voices was a performance project led by Prof. Richard Hand at the request of Cardiff County Council’s bereavement services. It featured as part of the AHRB’s Being Human festival in November 2015, but it is also an ongoing project that seeks, through performance, to reclaim the site and its history for the visitors and people of Cardiff. Drawing on theory around pan-Atlantic death rituals from Roach (1996) and Turner (2009) this paper looks at the problem of creating music for the performance to both frame the experience of a walk around the cemetery and highlight sections of the tour with specially created musical performances; composed, improvised and a hybrid of these. It also explores the idea of adapting the piece, both its music and spoken word sections, into a podcast version for cemetery visitors.
Tracy Fahey, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Gothicising Limerick’
This paper will outline the notion of the Gothic as a participatory art form, and examine the interplay it offers between site and story using Limerick-based case studies drawn from the practice of fine art collective Gothicise. Gothicise makes work and curates experiences using Gothic tropes and themes as a way of exploring the otherness of site, history and narrative.
This paper examines several key projects in Ireland that feature a cultural geographic approach to urban mythmaking including ghostwalk/ghosttalk, The Double Life of Catherine Street, A Haunting and Waking St. Munchin. In examining these specific socially engaged projects it looks at how the projects have worked to (re)construct ‘Other’ histories using multiple narrators. It examines the roles of story-telling and commemorative ceremonies in creating a tension between privileged text and oral narratives. This paper references social memory, cultural geography and the challenges of collaborative practice. It also explores how ideas of identity, history and narrative are challenged through this participatory process.
Sam George, University of Hertfordshire. 'Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Wyrd Case of ‘Old Stinker’ the Hull Werewolf '
The British traveller Emily Gerard accounted for the Romanian belief in werewolves by equating it with continuing fear of the wolf, ‘as long as the flesh and blood wolf continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests, so long will his spectre brother survive in the minds of the people’ (The Land Beyond the Forest, 1888). The Dictionary of English Folklore informs us that ‘there are no werewolf tales in English folklore, presumably because wolves have been extinct here for centuries’. The emergence of the Hull Werewolf (‘Old Stinker’) earlier this year reopened debates about the spectre werewolf’s relationship to the ‘flesh and blood wolf’. What is most pertinent about this latest folk panic is that ‘Old Stinker’ is thought to inhabit a landscape which accommodated some of the last wolves in England. The myth of ‘Old Stinker’ coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. This has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species. The result, is a haunted landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present, a spectred, rather than ‘a sceptred isle’.
In 1912 Elliott ‘O’ Donnell described ‘earth bound spirits of werewolves’ in remote parts of Britain. In examining Old Stinker, the Hull Werewolf, as the spectre brother of the wolf, I put forward the suggestion that he represents not only our belief in him as a wolf phantom, but our collective guilt at the extinction of an entire indigenous species of wolf. Viewed in this way (though obscured by the weirdness associated with the Yorkshire Wolds) ‘Old Stinker’ can reawaken the memory of what humans did to wolves, promote re-wilding debates, and redeem the big bad wolf, reminding us that it is often humans, not wolves or the supernatural, that we should be afraid of.
Joanna Babicka, University of Vienna. ‘“We Are the Children of the Night”: The Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig and the Gothic (Sub-)Culture in Germany’
The Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig, Germany, is one of the biggest events in the Gothic subculture. Since 1992, each year around the weekend of Whitsunday thousands of people gather in Leipzig to experience all facets of the Gothic. In contrast to other festivals focusing on music only, the WGT, however, embraces all cultural realms related to the dark and gloomy. Guests are invited to participate in tours around the city, artistic workshops, discussions and visit readings or operas. Museums feature special exhibitions and restaurants present themed culinary events.
This paper seeks to explore how the WGT combines different aspects of the Gothic (sub)culture into one event, while remaining accessible to a broad audience, and how the City of Leipzig contributes to making Leipzig Germany’s most Gothic city. Further, drawing on a cultural, sociological and historical analysis, as well as interviews with the organisers of the WGT, this paper analyzes why the Gothic subculture, in contrast to many others, has never lost its appeal and why Germany seems to be the haven of continental Europe’s Gothic culture.
Inés G. Labarta, Lancaster University. ‘Tainted Cities: A walk through Bohane and Neo Dublin’
‘Whatever is wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we’re talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in from the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and it was named for it: city of Bohane’ (Barry, 2012:3). Kevin Barry’s acclaimed novel, City of Bohane, is a Gothic, carnivalesque depiction of a fictional Irish city from a not so faraway future. In this Creative Writing paper, I will analyse the strategies that Barry uses to bring this unforgettable place to life, arguing that is the combination of both Irish and Iberian imagery what makes Bohane so unique. I will also compare Barry’s artistic choices to mine: I am writing a novella as part of my thesis that depicts the imagined city of Neo Dublin – a dying Catholic theocracy in a drowned world where Irish and Spanish people are forced to co-exist. I will conclude by stating that language – such as the obscure argot used in City of Bohane and in my project – is an effective tool to build a fictional metropolis.
6-7th April 2017
Limerick School of Art and Design, Clare Street
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CONFERENCE PANELS
Panel 1: MINERVA PRESS AND THE GOTHIC CITY
- Christina Morin, University of Limerick. ‘Irish Émigré Authors, the Minerva Press, and the Gothicisation of Romantic London, 1790-1820’
- Norbert Besch, Independent Scholar. ‘Those ever multiplying authors in the “pig-stye of literature in Leadenhall-Streeet”: Minerva Press writer Isabella Kelly and Gothic horror in the metropolis’
- Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine. ‘A Vision that Haunts: Minerva’s Gothics and the “Romantic” vision of everlasting love’
Panel 2: CREATING SUPERNATURAL GOTHIC CITIES
- Tracy Fahey, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Gothicising Limerick’
- Madelon Hoedt, University of South Wales. ‘Werewolves in Wales: Creating Cardiff Haunted House’
- Robert Smith, University of South Wales. ‘Creating the music for `Graveyard Voices`’
Panel 3: MEMORY AND HAUNTING IN THE CITY
- Donna Gilligan, National Museum of Ireland. ‘Commercialising the mourning process: Irish examples of mourning jewellery in the Victorian Gothic city’
- Sam Wiseman, University of Erfurt. ‘"Finding Infinity Round the Corner": Doublings, Dualities and Suburban Strangeness in Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure'
- Kieran Cashell, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Synecdoche, Paris: Benjamin’s prehistory of the nineteenth century’
Panel 4: GRAPHIC URBAN SPATIALITIES
- Zlatko Bukač, University of Zadar. ‘Hybridity as utopia in Black Panther's Wakanda’
- Marko Lukic, University of Zadar ‘Gazing Over Chaos – Panoptic Reflections of Gotham’
- Mads Haahr, Trinity College Dublin. ‘Gothic Game Cities: The Involuntary Exploration of Abandoned Spaces from Ant Attack to Fatal Frame 2’
Panel 5: URBAN AMERICAN GOTHIC
- Bernice Murphy, Trinity College Dublin.‘“It’s a Conspiracy, I know It!”: San Francisco as Paranoid Cityscape in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).’
- Dara Downey, Maynooth University ‘“The Taffeta Booth” – Visiting the Urban Psychic in American Gothic’
Panel 6: URBAN GOTHIC NARRATIVES
- Inés G. Labarta, Lancaster University. ‘Tainted Cities: A walk through Bohane and Neo Dublin’
- Ruth Heholt, Falmouth University. ‘Colonising the Dark City: Masculinizing Gothic London in Penny Dreadful’
- Sam George, University of Hertfordshire. ‘'Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Wyrd Case of ‘Old Stinker’ the Hull Werewolf '
Panel 7: GOTHIC TOURISM AND THE HETEROTOPIC CITY
- Alicia Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University. ‘Trapping the Gothic Imaginary in Contemporary London: Jack the Ripper and Dark Tourism’
- Joanna Babicka, University of Vienna. ‘“We Are the Children of the Night”: The Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig and the Gothic (Sub-)Culture in Germany’
- Tijana Parezanović, Alfa BK University, Belgrade, ‘Muriel Spark’s Map of London and the Horror of Heterotopia’
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LIST OF ABSTRACTS
Alicia Edwards, Manchester Metropolitan University. ‘Trapping the Gothic Imaginary in Contemporary London: Jack the Ripper and Dark Tourism’
Jack the Ripper and the Autumn of Terror is sutured within the fabric of London’s biography, perpetuating the Gothic cityscape of gaslight terror in the East End. The infamous murderer continues to be a central figure in the Gothicisation of London, maintaining an influential role in urban tourism practices from the nineteenth century to the present day. The popularity of Jack the Ripper tours as a rite of passage for tourists provides the allure of ‘authenticity’ when having a physical connection to the past through the relics of the material ruins of Victoriana. Drawing on spatial theory’s premise of walking as text, this paper will examine a particular site of dark tourism, Ripper-Vision Jack the Ripper Tour, a tour that incorporates photographs, particularly post-mortem images of victims into the narrative. The superimposition of corpse onto the place of trauma sediments the Gothic imaginary into contemporary material space. The paper will suggest that such dark tourism practices are an active form of haunting, (re)penning Jack’s bloody narrative into the streets of Whitechapel. The paper will question the threat of modernisation and the function of Gothic narratives perpetuated by Jack the Ripper tourism, and more broadly, its paramount role in heritage construction and conservation.
Ruth Heholt, Falmouth University. ‘Colonising the Dark City: Masculinizing Gothic London in Penny Dreadful’
The city streets in the recent television series Penny Dreadful (Showtime 2014-16) are almost slick with blood. Penny Dreadful employs an aesthetic of Gothic excess in its mash-up of a selection of Gothic nineteenth century novels, including Frankenstein, Dracula and The Picture of Dorian Gray. Mixing these with folkloric horrors of the city and set at the time of the Whitechapel murders, the city is shown to be an Other-worldly, liminal space where supernatural beasts exist alongside the daylight ‘real’ city. London in Penny Dreadful is an über-Gothic space where vampires feast, werewolves revel in blood-baths and Victor Frankenstein creates not one but three creatures. This paper argues that Penny Dreadful re-imagines the Gothic city as a masculine space where it is men who (attempt to) colonise its streets and look for power and control. This city signifies danger for women and children. Yet Penny Dreadful is not a misogynistic or patriarchal text, and the male-inflection placed upon the nightshade of the city incorporates a critique of mastery and power. The black back-alleys, the underground hovels and the Gothic mansions men occupy exile women and the vulnerable into the even more shadowy corners and the darkest of all places in the city. Penny Dreadful’s inflection of the Gothic city exudes testosterone whilst as a text it subtly undermines and critiques the city’s possession by men.
Donna Gilligan, National Museum of Ireland. ‘Commercialising the mourning process: Irish examples of mourning jewellery in the Victorian Gothic city’
During the nineteenth century, the extended display of mourning by Queen Victoria for her deceased husband Albert set in motion a new wider ritualised practice of public grief following a death. This resulted in the creation of an elaborate visual mourning process, whereby the bereaved followed codified rules on particular dress, commemoration, and social etiquette in the period following a loss. This period saw the rise in popularity and availability of the tradition of mourning jewellery, which visually commemorated the deceased through a memento which could be worn by the bereaved.
Mourning jewellery often incorporated woven elements of the deceased’s hair, as well as inscriptions, visual symbols of mememto mori, and the use of particular materials such as jet for their sombre black tones. This tradition was also common to Ireland, and Irish examples were often created in the native medium of bog oak, a popular material which turned black when exposed to air, and was well suited to carving. The examples of Irish mourning jewellery which survive today demonstrate pervading themes in their contemporary society; a fascination with death and mortality, and the importance of urban social codes, fashion, and middle-class etiquette. Through the example of the mourning jewellery, we see material and visual culture collide with the Gothic themes present in aspects of contemporary fiction and spiritualism belief, emerging from the backdrop of an urban Gothic space.
Christina Morin, University of Limerick. ‘Irish Émigré Authors, the Minerva Press, and the Gothicisation of Romantic London, 1790-1820’
Several Irish writers, many of them emigrants to London, are known to have published with the Minerva Press between 1790-1820, contributing fundamentally to the press’s position as the pre-eminent publisher of popular fiction and gothic romances in the period. At least two of these authors, namely Regina Maria Roche (c. 1764-1845) and Sarah Green (fl. 1790-1825), were among Minerva’s most prolific and well-read writers, but many other, now obscure names also found a home for their works with William Lane’s press. These include Catharine Selden (fl. 1797), Mrs. F.C. Patrick (fl. 1797), Henrietta Rouvière Mosse (d. 1834), and Anna Millikin (fl. 1793), as well as a handful of other identified writers. Together, these Irish writers produced some thirty original novels and an additional twelve editions or reprints, with further potentially Irish-authored texts yet to be identified from among the many anonymous and pseudonymous titles contained in Minerva’s lists.
This paper turns attention to Minerva’s Irish émigré authors like Roche, Mosse, and Selden, exploring the manner in which their geographical movements helped to secure Minerva’s success as a popular publisher and, in the process, effectively transform London itself into a gothic bibliographic landscape. It also considers their shared experience of migration to London as a fundamentally gothic one in which London itself was transformed into a site of horrific want and deprivation from which there appeared no escape, even as a successful Minerva novelist.
Norbert Besch, Independent Scholar.‘Those ever multiplying authors in the “pig-stye of literature in Leadenhall-Streeet”: Minerva Press writer Isabella Kelly and Gothic horror in the metropolis’
William Lane’s Minerva Press was routinely decried by literary critics for the lowbrow Gothic literature it published. Yet Lane’s renowned skills as an entrepreneur and his often liberal encouragement ensured that countless obscure women writers were adequately represented in circulating libraries all across the British Isles. Unlike myriad female practitioners who faithfully, and rather amateurishly, copied the Radcliffean formula, Scottish-born Minerva Press novelist Isabella Kelly decidedly deviated from these established patterns. In her sharp denunciation of a hypocritical society she transgressed moral boundaries and violated the code of propriety by weaving unvarnished tales that often transfer the horrors of the persecuted maiden from the gloomy castle and the somber dungeon into the sordid streets of London where the sinister count or uncouth banditti become the ruthless libertine, and the innocent and naïve heroine finds herself in the snares of the metropolis in companion with rapists and prostitutes. It is this tension between the unflagging virtue of her heroines and the lurid and revolting nature of London’s haunts of depravity which gives Kelly’s work a unique twist on the familiar and often interchangeable plots of other Minerva Press writers. In Isabella Kelly’s world Gothic horrors mercilessly intrude into the seemingly protected London home.
Elizabeth Neiman, University of Maine. ‘A Vision that Haunts: Minerva’s Gothics and the “Romantic” vision of everlasting love’
While William Lane christened his press “Minerva” in 1790, Minerva’s influence on the novel market can be measured as early as the late 1780s when Lane was advertising for new manuscripts and rapidly publishing an increasing number of new novels. Most of Lane’s earliest publications are anonymous and associated with female identifiers like “by a lady.” Most are also variations on the increasingly unfashionable novel of sensibility. At the heart of these novels is the fantasy of everlasting love. This fantasy continues to haunt a wide range of authors in the Romantic era, from vanguard writers like Mary Wollstonecraft and Percy Shelley to Minerva authors, who are typically portrayed as “rearguard.” Drawing from both statistical analysis of Romantic-era publishing records and sample novels, Neiman argues that the fantasy of everlasting love is a prime site for Minerva authors to enter into contemporary debates about women’s nature, the social order, and, most importantly, Romantic redefinitions of authorship and literature. Neiman’s focus is the Gothic romance of the 1800s and 1810s, a point when Minerva’s direct influence on the novel market wanes. A series of flamboyant Gothic novels by Minerva “regulars” like Amelia Beauclerc, Ann Hatton, and Selena Davenport demonstrate that novelists are keenly aware of Minerva’s reputation for “trash.” These authors deploy new Romantic standards for literature to valorize a collaborative model of authorship that resurfaces in Romantic poetics, both as “anxiety” about prolific print culture but also, less familiarly, as a source for the poet’s new visions.
Bernice Murphy, Trinity College Dublin. ‘“It’s a Conspiracy, I know It!”: San Francisco as Paranoid Cityscape in Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1978).’
The 1978 film adaptation of Invasion of the Body Snatchers departs significantly from Jack Finney’s source novel by moving the setting for the alien invasion from the small-town setting to the bustling streets of San Francisco. One level therefore, it represents an important contribution to the longstanding tradition of American horror and gothic narratives in which the urban setting serves as fertile ground for paranoia and conspiracy, a tradition which encompasses texts such as Lovecraft’s ‘The Horror at Red Hook’, the 1943 classic The Seventh Victim, and Ira Levin’s Rosemary’s Baby, all of which posit the existence of nefarious cults secretly thriving in present-day New York City.
As I shall argue, director Philip Kaufmann’s take on Finney’s ‘pod people’ represents a crucial contribution to the overlooked ‘California Gothic’ tradition made at a time when San Francisco was a locus for contemporary anxieties about changing sexual and social mores, as well as the rapidly curdling 1960s counterculture . 1978, the year Invasion was released, was not a good one for the city: November saw the mass-suicide/murder of over 900 members of the formerly SF based ‘People’s Temple’ cult at Jonestown, Guyana, as well as the assassinations of city mayor George Moscone and LGBT activist Harvey Milk. Though not technically a ‘supernatural’ text, it is nevertheless my contention that Kaufmann’s film, released that December, depicts the city as an inherently uncanny locale populated by dangerously self-absorbed individuals ripe for invisible ‘takeover’. It is a strikingly prescient film which captures something of the genuinely strange tenor of the times in a nuanced and ultimately heart-breaking fashion.
Dara Downey, Maynooth University. ‘“The Taffeta Booth” – Visiting the Urban Psychic in American Gothic’
A remarkable number of American gothic texts (and indeed gothic moments within otherwise optimistic or even realist texts) feature a scene which reveals much about those texts’ attitudes to race, the supernatural, and urban space – that is, a scene in which a central character visits a psychic or preternaturally gifted wise woman (or occasionally a man) who resides in a tucked-away corner of a city. From the novelisation of Stephen King’s haunted-house miniseries, Rose Red, and Karen Joy Fowler’s ultimately anti-supernatural novel Sister Noon, to the depiction of the Oracle in The Matrix, Whoopie Goldberg’s character in Ghost, and the “white witch” in The Craft, as well as a whole host of magic-shop owners, book-shop owners, dodgy suppliers of magical powers, and purveyors of Asian medicine or other forms of “exotic” lore and merchandise in everything from The X-Files and Fringe to Buffy, Angel, The Vampire Diaries, and Lost Girl, these scenes serve to crystallise a range of anxieties and desires relating to otherness and the possibilities opened up by twentieth-century urban spaces.
Again and again, the protagonist, uninitiated into or lapsed in their faith regarding ethnically coded magic, navigates the increasingly murky city streets, and then the ornate, dirty, or labyrinthine interiors where he or she is an intruder but also a welcome customer. This paper therefore examines a number of key examples of this trope, and interrogates the ways in which it suggests often complex, always problematic interactions between race or ethnicity, the supernatural, and commerce, and how these interactions are (re)configured in explicitly urban fictional environments.
Tijana Parezanović, Alfa BK University, Belgrade. ‘Muriel Spark’s Map of London and the Horror of Heterotopia’
Any attempt at providing a detailed map of a city usually proves futile since such heterogeneous spaces inevitably contain hidden places with secret functions, which effectively resist being charted. Individual discoveries of such hidden places imply and provide different contexts for transgression – a concept that remains essential, though repeatedly contested, within Gothic studies. This paper explores transgression into the spaces/places hidden within the urban landscape as presented in Muriel Spark’s novella The Girls of Slender Means, revealing the underlying horror that becomes manifest as transgression escalates. By theoretically contextualizing the issue within the framework of Foucault’s heterotopias the paper analyses post-war London on whose (metaphoric) fringes the May of Teck Club hostel dwells, inhabited by characters drawn to it but simultaneously wishing to escape and unable to do so except by further transgressing into hidden heterotopian places, conceived in this case as an “effectively enacted utopia.” One character in particular – Joanna Childe – articulates the (dis)balance of the proposed spaces. Oscillating between the changing and increasingly more violent post-war urban landscape and personal emotional projections, she amplifies the spatial divide to the extent that transgression for her becomes impossible, leaving her only with the inability to fully experience either the post-war reality or the heterotopian promise. While her death appropriately resembles a sacrificial rite necessary to affirm heterotopia, it also unveils the fact that horror (as the elicitation of dread) essentially underlies even the most promising of heterotopias.
Sam Wiseman, University of Erfurt. ‘"Finding Infinity Round the Corner": Doublings, Dualities and Suburban Strangeness in Arthur Machen’s The London Adventure'
Arthur Machen’s 1924 essay The London Adventure is often seen as a straightforwardly autobiographical text. This paper will argue, however, that the essay complicates distinctions between fiction and autobiography, creating a sense of ironic distance between text and reality. It is governed by a series of dualities: between the ‘real’ Machen and the narrator; between an imagined version of the text, and the one we are actually reading; and between the world of everyday appearances and a deeper, hidden reality. The London Adventure’s peculiar tone and structure, along with its ambiguous fictional status, allows him to explore these concerns from new angles. If the Gothic is always, in some sense, concerned with the potential or actual re-emergence of a real or imagined past, then Machen’s essay allows him to investigate this kind of relationship with his earlier work. The city described in The London Adventure contrasts the world of appearances with a deeper reality, but it is also a place in which Machen (or his narrator) is haunted by the vestiges of the fictional London constructed in texts like The Hill of Dreams (1907). Paralleled with temporal distance is the narrative’s geographical emphasis upon the city’s distant, forgotten and (seemingly) mundane suburbs; this contrasts with the typical focus upon central districts in much of Machen’s earlier work, and provides him with a different assemblage of imagery, tone and atmosphere. This paper will argue that these ironies of temporality, geography and narrative underpin The London Adventure’s subtle and humoured approach to Machen’s characteristic Gothic concerns.
Kieran Cashell, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Synecdoche, Paris: Benjamin’s prehistory of the nineteenth century’
Predicated on the eclipse of faith by reason, the orthodox metanarrative of modernity predicts the total emancipation of humanity from the supernatural. As codified by classical sociologists, the ascent of rationality, facilitated by a process of ‘demystification,’ ushers in the era of Enlightenment. Yet it is precisely this optimistic pseudo-Darwinian story of evolutionary progress that is put into question by the theorists of the Frankfurt School. Adorno and Horkheimer’s exposure of the mythological infrastructure of modernity argues that, although mobilised against myth and mystery, scientific rationality possesses its own in-built mythology supported by a new ideological faith in reason itself. Prior to this, Walter Benjamin, the most heretical affiliate of the School, developed a category – namely, phantasmagoria – to thematise this return of the repressed (irrationality) to the heart of the project of modernity. Alluding to a projector used in séances by nineteenth-century mediums, Benjamin philosophically amplifies this motif with reference to Marx’s analysis of commodity fetishism in Capital into a full-scale psycho-social critique of industrial capitalism. This paper begins with the elaboration of a suggestion by Löwy that Benjamin’s approach can be characterised as ‘Gothic Marxism.’ Acknowledging the influence of Surrealism on his work without compromising his political commitments, this reference links Benjamin’s ‘fascination with enchantment and the marvellous’ with his fidelity to revolutionary socialism. In Das Passagen-Werk (1982) his monstrous experimental prehistory of the nineteenth century, Benjamin deliberately invokes all of the supernatural associations of phantasmagoria in order to capture the peculiar apparitional economic structure of consumer capitalism and, more significantly, to explore the weird phenomenological effects it produces in its subjects. Representing the projection of collective dream-images into commodity production and display, phantasmagoria comes to signify the enchanted zone where psychological, social and economic dimensions intersect. Of Benjamin’s apocalyptic texts Das Passagen-Werk is the most notorious, protracted, and visionary. From its original plan in 1927 as a short Surrealist study of the Parisian passages (streets roofed with glass-and-cast-iron skylights to create kaleidoscopic arcades of boutiques and half-lit magazins de nouveaute) the essay ballooned into an exponential research project that, despite thirteen years of intense labour, remained incomplete at his death in 1940. Working in the Bibliotheque nationale during the 1930s, Benjamin finessed a methodology he applied throughout his career in the attempt to excavate this lost world. Using a process referred to in the paper as “archival morphology,” he constructs an entire world from the microanalysis of its fossilised traces in the archive of the present. Focusing on the city of Paris, and further, on its interstitial architectural details, claiming that ‘the arcade is a city, a world in miniature,’ his book ultimately becomes ‘A city in a bottle.’
Zlatko Bukač, University of Zadar. ‘Hybridity as utopia in Black Panther's Wakanda’
One of the most frequent ‘’fictional’’ locations in superhero comic-books, Wakanda, symbolises the incomprehensible - the African nation, ‘’man made jungle’’, technologically advanced and unhinged from the violence of colonial past. Wakanda, within its ’’intentional isolationism’’ from the rest of the world, is a parallel and alternative space that challenges determined relations of the colonizer and the colonized outside of the realm of fantastic. Through various stories regarding its superhero Black Panther, the authors try to symbolically represent the issues of diversity and social and cultural upheavals that encapsulate American society. Within these subversive elements, hybridity (understood in the context of Homi Bhabha’s work) appears as a specific dealing with this subversive elements, offering a challenge and solution for this displacement from irrelevant space of otherness. The aim of the presentation is to point out the utopian tendencies of various authors of Black Panther comic book articulated by presenting hybridity between technology and tradition as a way of subverting well- established stereotypical notions regarding race. The paper will show how hybridity gains the function of utopia within the heterotopia that is Wakanda, as it accentuates, as noted by Fredric Jameson, ‘’a specific closure’’ on the inability of controlling the surplus of racial binary relations in fiction as well as outside of it.
Marko Lukic, University of Zadar. ‘Gazing Over Chaos – Panoptic Reflections of Gotham’
What this presentation proposes is a reevaluation of the crucial, and often neglected, issues of space/place within the Batman opus, concentrating primarily on Batman’s use of various spaces/places in order to enforce control and/or discipline. Such use of spaces/places unavoidably leads to the creation of a potentially villainous dichotomy within which the crime plaguing Gotham is being controlled by an obsessively and brutally disciplinarian Batman. Using Foucault’s discourse on the implementation of invisible control and therefore power, and its interpretation of Bentham’s Panopticum, the presentation will develop the idea of the Batcave as the actual site of control, the starting point of the Foucauldian notion of the “gaze being alert everywhere” (Foucault, Discipline 195). Symbolically made visible by the prominent brightness of the Bat-signal, but nevertheless constantly hidden from the eyes of the criminals, the Batcave assures the presence of power that “should be visible and unverifiable” (201), and therefore exerts discipline. Consequently, Gotham, Arkham Asylum, and other locations, although inherently dark in their nature, unavoidably retain their visibility, succumbing therefore to “…a real subjection… born mechanically from a fictitious relation.” (202). The presentation will also address the issue of Crime Alley as a site of inversion, a space transfigured into a tragic place, which not only represents a zone immune to the Panoptic gaze, but potentially embodies the key for the subversion of Batman’s “laboratory of power” (204).
Mads Haahr, Trinity College Dublin. ‘Gothic Game Cities: The Involuntary Exploration of Abandoned Spaces from Ant Attack to Fatal Frame 2’
The horror video game genre is broad, ranging from games that use violence and shock as the primary means to scare players to games that use a more psychological approach to horror. This paper is concerned with the use of spaces in games near the psychological end of the horror spectrum. Such games typically take place in gameworlds that consist of derelict or abandoned cities and towns, often haunted by mysterious monsters or former inhabitants. It is a common (although not ubiquitous) trope that the protagonist must go through a long and dangerous exploration of the gameworld, a journey that is arduous as well as meticulous, but also forced. Drawing upon four titles—Ant Attack (1983), Ico (2001), Silent Hill 2 (2001) and Fatal Frame 2 (2003)—this paper analysises the use of space and its significance in terms of story, aesthetics and gameplay, and shows how the different elements come together to create spaces that not only serve as gameworlds, but also as characters that serve a psychological and transformative purpose for the protagonist as well as the player.
Madelon Hoedt, University of South Wales. ‘Werewolves in Wales: Creating Cardiff Haunted House’
In Gothic Tourism, Emma McEvoy defines the eponymous term as “the act of visiting, for the purposes of leisure, a location that is presented in terms of the Gothic” (2015:3), and she notes how ubiquitous these events have become. In 2016, Cardiff Haunted House was created, joining this movement in an attempt to bring scare attractions to the Welsh capital. Yet whereas both dark and Gothic tourism often employ factual information in order to provide a cultural experience, CHH employs a mixture of fact and fiction to draw the audience into its performance. Themed around the well-known werewolf myth and presented as connected to location and community, CHH relies on the concepts of faction and fakelore rather than memory to map its story to the city of Cardiff, both through performance and the creation of additional fictional content.
The aim of the paper is to explore the event and its creation. The author acted as one of the creative directors on the project, and is thus able to combine the skills of academic and practitioner to shed a unique light on the design of a modern, immersive performance event and its connection to the city.
Bibliography:
McEvoy, Emma. 2015. Gothic Tourism. London: Palgrave Macmillan
Robert Smith, University of South Wales. ‘Creating the music for `Graveyard Voices`’
Graveyard voices was a performance project led by Prof. Richard Hand at the request of Cardiff County Council’s bereavement services. It featured as part of the AHRB’s Being Human festival in November 2015, but it is also an ongoing project that seeks, through performance, to reclaim the site and its history for the visitors and people of Cardiff. Drawing on theory around pan-Atlantic death rituals from Roach (1996) and Turner (2009) this paper looks at the problem of creating music for the performance to both frame the experience of a walk around the cemetery and highlight sections of the tour with specially created musical performances; composed, improvised and a hybrid of these. It also explores the idea of adapting the piece, both its music and spoken word sections, into a podcast version for cemetery visitors.
Tracy Fahey, Limerick School of Art and Design. ‘Gothicising Limerick’
This paper will outline the notion of the Gothic as a participatory art form, and examine the interplay it offers between site and story using Limerick-based case studies drawn from the practice of fine art collective Gothicise. Gothicise makes work and curates experiences using Gothic tropes and themes as a way of exploring the otherness of site, history and narrative.
This paper examines several key projects in Ireland that feature a cultural geographic approach to urban mythmaking including ghostwalk/ghosttalk, The Double Life of Catherine Street, A Haunting and Waking St. Munchin. In examining these specific socially engaged projects it looks at how the projects have worked to (re)construct ‘Other’ histories using multiple narrators. It examines the roles of story-telling and commemorative ceremonies in creating a tension between privileged text and oral narratives. This paper references social memory, cultural geography and the challenges of collaborative practice. It also explores how ideas of identity, history and narrative are challenged through this participatory process.
Sam George, University of Hertfordshire. 'Wolves in the Wolds: Late Capitalism, the English Eerie, and the Wyrd Case of ‘Old Stinker’ the Hull Werewolf '
The British traveller Emily Gerard accounted for the Romanian belief in werewolves by equating it with continuing fear of the wolf, ‘as long as the flesh and blood wolf continues to haunt the Transylvanian forests, so long will his spectre brother survive in the minds of the people’ (The Land Beyond the Forest, 1888). The Dictionary of English Folklore informs us that ‘there are no werewolf tales in English folklore, presumably because wolves have been extinct here for centuries’. The emergence of the Hull Werewolf (‘Old Stinker’) earlier this year reopened debates about the spectre werewolf’s relationship to the ‘flesh and blood wolf’. What is most pertinent about this latest folk panic is that ‘Old Stinker’ is thought to inhabit a landscape which accommodated some of the last wolves in England. The myth of ‘Old Stinker’ coincides with a phase of severe environmental damage. This has not taken the form of sudden catastrophe, but rather a slow grinding away of species. The result, is a haunted landscape constituted more actively by what is missing than by what is present, a spectred, rather than ‘a sceptred isle’.
In 1912 Elliott ‘O’ Donnell described ‘earth bound spirits of werewolves’ in remote parts of Britain. In examining Old Stinker, the Hull Werewolf, as the spectre brother of the wolf, I put forward the suggestion that he represents not only our belief in him as a wolf phantom, but our collective guilt at the extinction of an entire indigenous species of wolf. Viewed in this way (though obscured by the weirdness associated with the Yorkshire Wolds) ‘Old Stinker’ can reawaken the memory of what humans did to wolves, promote re-wilding debates, and redeem the big bad wolf, reminding us that it is often humans, not wolves or the supernatural, that we should be afraid of.
Joanna Babicka, University of Vienna. ‘“We Are the Children of the Night”: The Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig and the Gothic (Sub-)Culture in Germany’
The Wave Gotik Treffen in Leipzig, Germany, is one of the biggest events in the Gothic subculture. Since 1992, each year around the weekend of Whitsunday thousands of people gather in Leipzig to experience all facets of the Gothic. In contrast to other festivals focusing on music only, the WGT, however, embraces all cultural realms related to the dark and gloomy. Guests are invited to participate in tours around the city, artistic workshops, discussions and visit readings or operas. Museums feature special exhibitions and restaurants present themed culinary events.
This paper seeks to explore how the WGT combines different aspects of the Gothic (sub)culture into one event, while remaining accessible to a broad audience, and how the City of Leipzig contributes to making Leipzig Germany’s most Gothic city. Further, drawing on a cultural, sociological and historical analysis, as well as interviews with the organisers of the WGT, this paper analyzes why the Gothic subculture, in contrast to many others, has never lost its appeal and why Germany seems to be the haven of continental Europe’s Gothic culture.
Inés G. Labarta, Lancaster University. ‘Tainted Cities: A walk through Bohane and Neo Dublin’
‘Whatever is wrong with us is coming in off that river. No argument: the taint of badness on the city’s air is a taint off that river. This is the Bohane river we’re talking about. A blackwater surge, malevolent, it roars in from the Big Nothin’ wastes and the city was spawned by it and it was named for it: city of Bohane’ (Barry, 2012:3). Kevin Barry’s acclaimed novel, City of Bohane, is a Gothic, carnivalesque depiction of a fictional Irish city from a not so faraway future. In this Creative Writing paper, I will analyse the strategies that Barry uses to bring this unforgettable place to life, arguing that is the combination of both Irish and Iberian imagery what makes Bohane so unique. I will also compare Barry’s artistic choices to mine: I am writing a novella as part of my thesis that depicts the imagined city of Neo Dublin – a dying Catholic theocracy in a drowned world where Irish and Spanish people are forced to co-exist. I will conclude by stating that language – such as the obscure argot used in City of Bohane and in my project – is an effective tool to build a fictional metropolis.