Gothic Epistemology - 746 Words

Criticism on the Gothic novel has been plentiful, yet such work tends to view the Gothic novel within the constraints of genre rather than investigating its wider influence in the nineteenth century. â€Å"Gothic Archives† will track this influence, arguing that the Gothic novel indicates changing attitudes toward reading, and especially toward reading history, in the nineteenth century. Gothic novels such as Melmoth the Wanderer (1820), and the meta-Gothic of The Antiquary (1816) presume that authentic historical experience is difficult, if not impossible, to represent accurately, emphasizing in their plots the misunderstandings that result from attempts to read and write historical experience. It follows that the Gothic novel typically stages†¦show more content†¦Far from being limited to the Gothic novel, however, â€Å"Gothic Archives† contends that this approach to—and suspicion of—representing history is distinguishable in other nineteenth c entury texts not generally thought of as Gothic. Texts such as Carlyle’s The French Revolution (1837) and Ruskin’s The Stones of Venice (1851-53) demonstrate the same anxiety described above, attempting to reconstruct authentic historical experience by interpreting relics. Significantly, these histories, like the Gothic novel, attempt to surmount the problem of historical distance (and the representational slippage which, for the Gothic, distance makes inevitable) through the invocation of extreme emotional states. In its attempt to reconstruct the whole from its parts, the Gothic novel’s popularity in the nineteenth century can also be usefully paralleled to a contemporary intellectual development: the nascent discipline of literary studies. This project will argue that the current enterprise of literary criticism is historically indebted to Gothic ways of thinking, and seeks to trace that influence across the nineteenth century. In so doing, â€Å"Gothic Archives† advances a link between the Gothic histories of Carlyle and Ruskin and the work that modern literary critics do. That is to say: by comprehending the mutual influence of fiction upon criticism andShow MoreRelatedThe Conscious Good Of Unconscious Evil Essay1296 Words   |  6 Pagestruth of humanities frigid evil. This evil he alluded to justified his bad actions with questioning his reality that filled him with self awareness. Only through this connection and hopelessness of the story, do we actually understand this s outhern gothic tale; a tale that brings salvific truth through death and horrid realty, through life. Grandmas ignorant selfishness and naivety shows the conscious false imagery humanity has built themselves up to be. She tries to sway her son from taking a tripRead MoreEssay on Social Construction of Child and Childhood1406 Words   |  6 Pagessocially. In his research (1962) he also analyses the way of living children and their relations to society from iconography, paintings, furniture, pictures and clothes belongs to time that they lived in. As Little Eros in Greek art, The Infant Jesus in Gothic period or a nine aged wearing as an adult in the 17th century, there are plenty of appearances of child at the history. It is hard to inference one universal definition of child conjunction with various aspects which leads us to ask what thoseRead MoreThe Conscious Good Of Unconscious Evil Essay1636 Words   |  7 Pagestruth of humanities frigid evil. This evil he alluded to justified his bad actions with questioning his reality that filled him with self awareness. Only through this connection and hopelessness of the story, do we actually understand this southern gothic tale; a tale that brings salvific truth through death and horrid realty, through life. Grandmas ignorant selfishness and naivety shows the conscious false imagery humanity has built themselves up to be. She tries to sway her son from taking a tripRead MoreEssay on Classicism Versus Romanticism in Tom Stoppards Arcadia2221 Words   |  9 Pagestwo different ages- the early nineteenth century and the present modern world, matched, juxtaposed together bringing in a rare combination of the different facets of Classicism and Romanticism. The two timelines talk about sex, literature, love, epistemology, landscaping, the Second Law of Thermodynamics and the romance. Stoppard’s intellect looms large over the plot of the play and is efficiently presented in the form of this play. It is a two-act play containing seven scenes. The characters belongingRead MoreIwc1 Literature, Arts and Humanities Essay10028 Words   |  41 PagesArchitecture A term describing an individual with broad knowledge and versatile talents spanning many intellectual and artistic disciplines. Renaissance man The branch of formal philosophy concerned with the nature and limits of human knowledge. Epistemology The combination of thesis and antithesis in the Hegelian dialectical process whereby a new higher level of truth is produced. Synthesis The Hero is an example of a mythic: Archetype The interplay of ____ and ___ determines weather an architectural