Gothic Critics/Soundbites

Question 1

Ann Radcliffe on Terror/Horror

Answer 1

Terror - “expands the soul and awakens the faculties to a high degree of life”

Horror - “freezes and nearly annihilates”

Question 2

Angela Carter

1974

Answer 2

“We live in Gothic times”

Question 3

Stephan King

Answer 3

” We make up horrors to help us cope with the real ones”

Question 4

Sarah Perry

2018

Answer 4

“The Gothic is a sensation, like hunger or desire; you’ll know it when you feel it”

Question 5

Hugh Blair on the Sublime

1796

Answer 5

“produces a sort of internal evaluation and expansion of the mind above its ordinary state”

Question 6

Fred Botting

Answer 6

“Gothic presents a recasting of the nature of social and domestic fears’

Question 7

Fred Botting

Answer 7

(Gothic protagonist) “usually male, the individual is outcast, part victim, part villain”

Question 8

Fred Botting

Answer 8

“Gothic becomes a fiction of unconscious desire, a release of repressed energies and anti-social fantasies”

Question 9

Fred Botting

2002

Answer 9

“In Gothic times, margins may become the norm”

Question 10

Fred Botting

Answer 10

“Gothic signifies a writing of excess”

Question 11

Makinen

1992

Answer 11

“Women alienated from themselves within the male gaze”

Question 12

David Punter on the Gothic lens

1996

Answer 12

” the Gothic is a distorting lens, a magnifying lens… nonetheless a reality which cannot be apprehended in any other way”

Question 13

Mustafa Suleyman

2023

Answer 13

“If you’re not frightened you haven’t been paying attention” (AI)

Question 14

Sigmund Freud on the Uncanny

Answer 14

“Uncanny is in reality nothing new or alien, but something which is familiar and old-established in the mind and which has become alienated from it only through the process of repression.”

Question 15

John Berger ‘Ways of Seeing’

1972

Answer 15

“men gaze at women with the assumption they can do something to or for them, whereas women view themselves at being looked at”

Question 16

Sue Chaplin

Answer 16

“women’s inability to defend themselves against forms of abuse…permitted by the patriarchal systems of power”

Question 17

David Punter

2003

Answer 17

“The creature’s own narrative suggests that Frankenstein’s main sin is not his act of creation but his failure to take responsibility for what he produces”

Question 18

David Punter

2003

Answer 18

“As soon as science begins to disturb notions of the human, it becomes a particular interest to the Gothic writer”

Question 19

Jeff Vandermeer

Answer 19

“fairy-tales clothe themselves in stereotypes and archetypes”

Question 20

Susan Ferraro

1990

Answer 20

‘Rice’s vampires are […] lonely, prisoners of circumstance, compulsive sinners, full of self-loathing and doubt. ‘

Question 21

fabulist

Answer 21

“Fabulist fiction tends to privilege internal and interpersonal conflict over large-scale, action-heavy plots; its elements of unreality follow a kind of magical thinking.”

Answer 22

In the Gothic, transgressive behaviour is not necessarily evil

Answer 23

In the Gothic, women have no control over their destiny