Engl 409:A1 The Gothic Subject
Final Examination: take-away paper. Please hand in completed answers at 9:00 am, December 15th, in Telus 134.
Choose one of the following topics, and write an essay of 3 pages (double spaced), i.e., approximately 900-1000 words. Avoid using lengthy quotations from the writings you cite. A bibliography of works cited, if any, should follow on a separate page. Avoid repeating at length writing that occurs in one of your essays or project presentations.
1. Consider the use of landscape and the environment in Coleridge's "Frost at Midnight" and "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner." What does it suggest for the human characters, their internal states, and prospects?
2. Compare and contrast the role of desire and/or love in Keats's poems, "La Belle Dame Sans Merci" and "The Eve of St. Agnes." How far can Keats's handling of desire or love be seen to evoke Gothic implications?
3. Discuss the role of institutions, whether social, political, legal, or religious, in Radcliffe's or Lewis's novels, considering one or more of The Mysteries of Udolpho, The Italian, and/or The Monk. To what extent are the narrative predicaments of Radcliffe's and/or Lewis's novels dependent on such institutions?
4. What do you believe Dacre is saying about gender relationships in Zofloya? How effective and consistent is the novel in this respect?
5. What advantages to the Gothic mode are given to the novels of Radcliffe and Lewis by the displacement of their settings to the "foreign" in place and time?
6. "There is a burning eloquence--a sarcastic bitterness--an insidious plausibility about all Mr. Maturin's murderers and demons which well might have been spared" (London Magazine, 1821). Discuss Melmoth the Wanderer in the light of this critic's remark. Is Melmoth's "plausibility" defensible in your view?
7. What does the creature really want? Does Frankenstein furnish us with a problematics of desire in the Gothic genre, in your view?
8. Compare and contrast the multiple narrative perspectives of Melmoth the Wanderer and Frankenstein. To what extent does the technique of the novels in this respect promote their Gothic aspects?
9. To what extent do the Gothic texts you have studied in this course appear to arise from or reflect the political conflicts of the period (revolution, war, class divisions, etc.)?
10. It has been argued that Gothic fiction is a defence of Protestant England against the dangers of Catholicism. Is this valid? Discuss three or more texts in your answer.
11. Gothic writers, claims Elizabeth Napier, tend "to emphasize external and superficial manifestations of emotional behaviour over and above inner psychological states" (The Failure of the Gothic, 1987, p. 3). Is there a case to be made for the psychological insights available from Gothic fiction?
12. It has been claimed that several of the Gothic novels studied on this course raise important gender issues, even though contemporary reviewers and readers seem hardly to have noticed this. What is your judgement?
13. In discussing the Semiotic, Kristeva argues that "the chora, as rupture and articulations (rhythm), precedes evidence, verisimilitude, spatiality, and temporality." What traces of this process do you find in the Gothic fiction you have studied?
14. Drawing on two or more of the texts you have studied during the course, explain the relevance of either the sublime or the double to understanding works in the Gothic genre.
Document prepared December 3rd 2009