Gothic Mash-Ups: Hybridity, Appropriation, and Intertextuality in Gothic Storytelling, 2022
If, as this book contends, gothic texts tend towards the “mashing up” of elements from previous c... more If, as this book contends, gothic texts tend towards the “mashing up” of elements from previous cultural texts, the stories of Edgar Allan Poe double down on this tendency. In the entry for Poe in The Handbook of the Gothic Benjamin Fisher (2009, p.67) notes that the author’s earliest reviewers decried his fiction as existing in a “passé mode”, suggesting we might consider his work as a pastiche of a mode that already tended towards pastiche. In apparent contradiction to its focus upon “unity of effect”, Marshall Brown (2005, p.20) uses Poe’s 1846 essay ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ to evidence the author’s principal method of creation as being one of blending heterogeneous elements, an approach which he also locates in work by Henry James and Mary Shelley.
Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first “classic novel” to be adapted into hypertext – mashed up with by L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by Shelley Jackson using Eastgate System’s hypertext creation software ‘Storyspace’ and released as Patchwork Girl in 1995. Hypertext is a form of electronic literature navigated by the reader via links between nodes. As such it possesses a (sometimes limited) degree of interaction and tends towards the non-linear and associative, rather than purely sequential. Poe’s self-reflexivity, use of pastiche, and the lack of closure to many of his stories, make them uniquely suited to the form of hypertext and could, it will be argued, be considered proto-hypertext themselves.
Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure was submitted to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in October 2016. This hypertext game, produced with the software Twine, attempted to adapt, truncate and mash together over sixty of Poe’s short stories into a single branching hypertext form. As such, while large portions of the game consist of sections of pastiches written by the present author, Evermore must be considered partially authored by Poe himself, from whose writings the majority of the game was directly adapted.
Michael Joyce (1996) and Astrid Ensslin (2007) take the position that hypertexts like Evermore are only truly authored in the process of their reading. The reader of hypertext is not a full participant in what they read – as per a player of videogames – but neither are they a completely passive reader. Rather, they are closer to a reader-writer, with a hand in shaping the narrative which they explore often intuitively and semi-randomly. Recent tools for authoring hypertext, such as Twine, emphasize the visual structure of hypertext. As such, the experience of making such interactive fiction becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the experience of consuming it. If the reader of hypertext is a reader-writer, then the creator of hypertext is a writer-reader.
From this critical position, a post-mortem of Evermore’s production elucidates the hypertextual potentialities within Poe’s own work, which exhibits aspects of the mash-up even before being further mashed-up by the writer(s) and reader(s) of the game.
Bookmarks Related papers MentionsView impact
Uploads
Courses
Videos
You can play 'Evermore' here:
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2016/Evermore/index.html
Book Monograph
Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects.
In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers.
Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.
Book Chapters
Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first “classic novel” to be adapted into hypertext – mashed up with by L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by Shelley Jackson using Eastgate System’s hypertext creation software ‘Storyspace’ and released as Patchwork Girl in 1995. Hypertext is a form of electronic literature navigated by the reader via links between nodes. As such it possesses a (sometimes limited) degree of interaction and tends towards the non-linear and associative, rather than purely sequential. Poe’s self-reflexivity, use of pastiche, and the lack of closure to many of his stories, make them uniquely suited to the form of hypertext and could, it will be argued, be considered proto-hypertext themselves.
Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure was submitted to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in October 2016. This hypertext game, produced with the software Twine, attempted to adapt, truncate and mash together over sixty of Poe’s short stories into a single branching hypertext form. As such, while large portions of the game consist of sections of pastiches written by the present author, Evermore must be considered partially authored by Poe himself, from whose writings the majority of the game was directly adapted.
Michael Joyce (1996) and Astrid Ensslin (2007) take the position that hypertexts like Evermore are only truly authored in the process of their reading. The reader of hypertext is not a full participant in what they read – as per a player of videogames – but neither are they a completely passive reader. Rather, they are closer to a reader-writer, with a hand in shaping the narrative which they explore often intuitively and semi-randomly. Recent tools for authoring hypertext, such as Twine, emphasize the visual structure of hypertext. As such, the experience of making such interactive fiction becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the experience of consuming it. If the reader of hypertext is a reader-writer, then the creator of hypertext is a writer-reader.
From this critical position, a post-mortem of Evermore’s production elucidates the hypertextual potentialities within Poe’s own work, which exhibits aspects of the mash-up even before being further mashed-up by the writer(s) and reader(s) of the game.
Journal Articles
This paper will argue, after Foucault, that, divested of political power as a girl and a child, Celia establishes a phantastical heterotopia that sits radically outside of the hegemonic power structures of conservative Australia. This opens a radical potential for a judicial approach that reflects a child's experiential understanding of the world. Tragically Celia's imitation modelling ensures her replication of the retributive model of punishment of her adult milieu (both in its treatment of communists and rabbits), albeit with a degree of public spectacle repressed by the private space of the adult penal system. More optimistically, Celia's stagings also contain elements of restorative justice. The paper will conclude with a consideration of how a penal model based upon restorative justice for under 18s would better serve children's development and rehabilitation.
Conference Papers
Days before Fox's confession, The Residents released their 1997 project Disfigured Night for the first time on CD. The album's narrative conforms to the archetype of the 'hero's journey' , following the psychological and spiritual transformation of a developmentally disabled child, Billy, through a traumatic process of self individuation. Billy begins his journey unable to differentiate his own phenomenological experiences from those of strangers. By the end of his journey he has achieved a form of self-actualisation, ironically affirmed by his recitation of Michael Jackson's single 'We Are the World'. Through its emphasis upon the psycho-spiritual dimensions of the monomyth, Disfigured Night returns Joseph Campbell's narratology to its genesis in Jungian archetypes. This paper will demonstrate that The Residents' playful approach to identity reached a critical apex with Disfigured Night, laying the foundations for their final disavowal of anonymity.
Unpublished Dissertation
PowerPoint Talks
This sense of a grimly inevitable cascading of ecological and climate-related horror leading – in both teleological and eschatological terms – to the near-term extinction of all life on Earth (often referred to as the “Doomer” or “Doomist” perspective) is played out with feverish, near-mechanical rigour by Kazuo Umezu in his shōnen horror manga The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen. With their dioramic splash pages of nightmarishly sublime apocalyptic wastelands, as well as their emphasis upon mass-scale ecological degradation, both series can be (un)comfortably classified within the eco-gothic genre. The Drifting Classroom stages scenes of mass flooding, starvation, pandemic disease, killing for resources, torture and abuse, all involving very young children. Fourteen – even more phantasmagoric – includes animal hybrid chimeras, geomagnetic reversal, air pollution that strips all oxygen from the atmosphere, mass sexual depravity and – most significantly – the character of Chicken George, the embodiment of collective non-human animal consciousness, variably protagonist and antagonist of the series.
Eco-anxiety represents an irresolvable paradox for a cognitive-behaviourist approach to psychology which holds that chronic anxiety is a maladaptive response to stress. Catastrophising is no longer catastrophising if a catastrophe is actually unfolding. We are thus confronted with a limitation of therapeutic methods rooted in this approach, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), currently the form of therapy mostly commonly offered by the NHS and most campus student services. However, psychoanalysis – especially through the concept of the “pure war” state (Borg, 2003) – offers an alternative way of engaging with the “post-apocalyptic unconscious” (ibid). The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen can be read as exemplifications of an unconscious grappling with anxiety since they exist resolutely within the pre-Oedipal imaginary. Nathan Chazan (2020) expresses this simply: “Umezu's commitment to a childish point of view is uncompromising”. Both comics stage a manically vacillating dialectic between, on the one side, a fantasy of infinite plenitude in which castration does not exist (Castrillón, 2017) and, on the other side, a schizophrenic state of pure war, in which psychic survival is paradoxically assured through the belief that absolute disintegration has always already occurred (Borg, 2003).
---
PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Dark Economies' conference, Falmouth University, 21 - 23 July 2021.
---
PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Revolution & Evolution' conference, University of Essex, 10 - 11 July 2014.
Interviews
Book Reviews
Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. ix + 243, 10 illus., ISBN
101474475159 (hb), £75.00.
You can play 'Evermore' here:
http://mirror.ifarchive.org/if-archive/games/competition2016/Evermore/index.html
Stop-motion is a highly embodied form of animation and The Art of Czech Animation develops a new materialist approach to studying these films. Instead of imposing top-down Film Theory onto its case studies, the book's analysis is built up from close readings of the films themselves, with particular attention given to their non-human objects.
In a time of environmental crisis, the unique way Czech animated films use allegory to de-centre the human world and give a voice to non-human aspects of the natural world points us towards a means by which culture can increase ecological awareness in viewers.
Such a refutation of a human-centred view of the world was contrary to communist orthodoxy and it remains so under late-stage consumer-capitalism. As such, these films do not only offer beautiful examples of allegory, but stand as models of political dissent. The Art of Czech Animation is a unique endeavour of film philosophy to provide a materialist appraisal of a heretofore neglected strand of Central-Eastern European cinema.
Shelley’s 1818 novel Frankenstein was the first “classic novel” to be adapted into hypertext – mashed up with by L. Frank Baum’s The Patchwork Girl of Oz (1913) by Shelley Jackson using Eastgate System’s hypertext creation software ‘Storyspace’ and released as Patchwork Girl in 1995. Hypertext is a form of electronic literature navigated by the reader via links between nodes. As such it possesses a (sometimes limited) degree of interaction and tends towards the non-linear and associative, rather than purely sequential. Poe’s self-reflexivity, use of pastiche, and the lack of closure to many of his stories, make them uniquely suited to the form of hypertext and could, it will be argued, be considered proto-hypertext themselves.
Evermore: A Choose Your Own Edgar Allan Poe Adventure was submitted to the 22nd Annual Interactive Fiction Competition in October 2016. This hypertext game, produced with the software Twine, attempted to adapt, truncate and mash together over sixty of Poe’s short stories into a single branching hypertext form. As such, while large portions of the game consist of sections of pastiches written by the present author, Evermore must be considered partially authored by Poe himself, from whose writings the majority of the game was directly adapted.
Michael Joyce (1996) and Astrid Ensslin (2007) take the position that hypertexts like Evermore are only truly authored in the process of their reading. The reader of hypertext is not a full participant in what they read – as per a player of videogames – but neither are they a completely passive reader. Rather, they are closer to a reader-writer, with a hand in shaping the narrative which they explore often intuitively and semi-randomly. Recent tools for authoring hypertext, such as Twine, emphasize the visual structure of hypertext. As such, the experience of making such interactive fiction becomes increasingly hard to distinguish from the experience of consuming it. If the reader of hypertext is a reader-writer, then the creator of hypertext is a writer-reader.
From this critical position, a post-mortem of Evermore’s production elucidates the hypertextual potentialities within Poe’s own work, which exhibits aspects of the mash-up even before being further mashed-up by the writer(s) and reader(s) of the game.
This paper will argue, after Foucault, that, divested of political power as a girl and a child, Celia establishes a phantastical heterotopia that sits radically outside of the hegemonic power structures of conservative Australia. This opens a radical potential for a judicial approach that reflects a child's experiential understanding of the world. Tragically Celia's imitation modelling ensures her replication of the retributive model of punishment of her adult milieu (both in its treatment of communists and rabbits), albeit with a degree of public spectacle repressed by the private space of the adult penal system. More optimistically, Celia's stagings also contain elements of restorative justice. The paper will conclude with a consideration of how a penal model based upon restorative justice for under 18s would better serve children's development and rehabilitation.
Days before Fox's confession, The Residents released their 1997 project Disfigured Night for the first time on CD. The album's narrative conforms to the archetype of the 'hero's journey' , following the psychological and spiritual transformation of a developmentally disabled child, Billy, through a traumatic process of self individuation. Billy begins his journey unable to differentiate his own phenomenological experiences from those of strangers. By the end of his journey he has achieved a form of self-actualisation, ironically affirmed by his recitation of Michael Jackson's single 'We Are the World'. Through its emphasis upon the psycho-spiritual dimensions of the monomyth, Disfigured Night returns Joseph Campbell's narratology to its genesis in Jungian archetypes. This paper will demonstrate that The Residents' playful approach to identity reached a critical apex with Disfigured Night, laying the foundations for their final disavowal of anonymity.
This sense of a grimly inevitable cascading of ecological and climate-related horror leading – in both teleological and eschatological terms – to the near-term extinction of all life on Earth (often referred to as the “Doomer” or “Doomist” perspective) is played out with feverish, near-mechanical rigour by Kazuo Umezu in his shōnen horror manga The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen. With their dioramic splash pages of nightmarishly sublime apocalyptic wastelands, as well as their emphasis upon mass-scale ecological degradation, both series can be (un)comfortably classified within the eco-gothic genre. The Drifting Classroom stages scenes of mass flooding, starvation, pandemic disease, killing for resources, torture and abuse, all involving very young children. Fourteen – even more phantasmagoric – includes animal hybrid chimeras, geomagnetic reversal, air pollution that strips all oxygen from the atmosphere, mass sexual depravity and – most significantly – the character of Chicken George, the embodiment of collective non-human animal consciousness, variably protagonist and antagonist of the series.
Eco-anxiety represents an irresolvable paradox for a cognitive-behaviourist approach to psychology which holds that chronic anxiety is a maladaptive response to stress. Catastrophising is no longer catastrophising if a catastrophe is actually unfolding. We are thus confronted with a limitation of therapeutic methods rooted in this approach, such as cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT), currently the form of therapy mostly commonly offered by the NHS and most campus student services. However, psychoanalysis – especially through the concept of the “pure war” state (Borg, 2003) – offers an alternative way of engaging with the “post-apocalyptic unconscious” (ibid). The Drifting Classroom and Fourteen can be read as exemplifications of an unconscious grappling with anxiety since they exist resolutely within the pre-Oedipal imaginary. Nathan Chazan (2020) expresses this simply: “Umezu's commitment to a childish point of view is uncompromising”. Both comics stage a manically vacillating dialectic between, on the one side, a fantasy of infinite plenitude in which castration does not exist (Castrillón, 2017) and, on the other side, a schizophrenic state of pure war, in which psychic survival is paradoxically assured through the belief that absolute disintegration has always already occurred (Borg, 2003).
---
PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Dark Economies' conference, Falmouth University, 21 - 23 July 2021.
---
PowerPoint for paper delivered at 'Revolution & Evolution' conference, University of Essex, 10 - 11 July 2014.
Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python (Edinburgh:
Edinburgh University Press, 2020), pp. ix + 243, 10 illus., ISBN
101474475159 (hb), £75.00.