Doppelganger

A recurrent motif in Gothic fiction, the doppelganger or double has
both symbolic and psychoanalytical implications. In the case of the former,
the duplication or division of a character may serve to emphasize
polemically the moral dilemmas or social disparities around which a didactic
or cautionary narrative may revolve—for example, the fate of one
who resists temptation, as opposed to one who succumbs to it; or, the
lifestyle enjoyed by a character born into privilege, set against the parallel
experience of another raised in poverty. In psychoanalysis, the motif may
emblematize the polarity of the unrestrained id against its ego and superego
counterparts. Thus, the doppelganger may become, variously, a figure
that enacts taboo desires, a seeker of arcane knowledge, or one who
pursues the drive of thanatos rather than that of eros. In both symbolic
and psychoanalytical incarnations (though these demarcations are, inevitably,
capable of definition as much by the critic as the author), the double
may be formed by duplication (where two entities effectively parallel
each other’s actions) or division (where a character is split, physically or
psychologically, into two alternating personalities). Situations such as
disguise, cross dressing, or mistaken identity may also produce contextual
implications that are analogous to doubling.

Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature

Abjection

The concept of the Abject, theorized by the French critic Julia Kristeva (1941–) in Powers of Horror (1980, trans. 1982), represents a significant advance over the binary logic of self and other that is characteristic of earlier psychoanalysis.

Conventional psychoanalytic thought proposes the oppositional integrity of subject and object, thus maintaining a number of apparently logical mental boundaries between the two. Kristeva’s theory, however, sees the subject and the object not merely as terms locked in opposition to each other, but also as discrete identities in and of themselves. This reconfiguration has an inevitably radical effect on the boundaries through which the self effectively demarcates itself from its other. In questioning the reassuring wholeness and integrity of ego-identity, abjection effectively erodes these borders, and thus proposes that the other, the taboo, the desired but dangerous, may already form part of the self.

Kristeva suggests, moreover, that there exists a tense relationship between the body and the mind, and that certain excretions and secretions from the former cause psychological distress within the latter quite simply because they are graphic reminders of how the self and the other are intimate. The body, as it were, is constantly engaged in abjecting—that is, repelling or rejecting—substances from out of its illusory wholeness. Yet those substances are, or have been until recently, part of the living tissue of the self and are intimately engaged in its survival or reproduction: their retention in certain circumstances, however, is traumatic, and in many cases pathologically dangerous in a literal or physiological sense. The classical abject excretions of the body include, in no order of precedence, blood (which has long been regarded as subject to religious and moral taboos), tears, saliva, and perspiration.

Orifices are especially significant in this context, because they are themselves abject, being both part of the body and an entry into (or out of) its integrity—they represent, in other words, the very fragility of the boundary of self in such a way that unbroken skin could never. The boundaries that separate life and death are themselves psychoanalytically abject: the moment of birth is saturated with fluids and excretions, the child itself being one of these at the moment of its emergence, neither an independent being nor an unequivocal part of the mother.

Death, too, brings dissolution and a gateway into another state of being, be it an afterlife or extinction. When the corpse decomposes, of course, the perceiver is reminded that he or she, too, is corrupt, destined to dissolution, a potential source of disgust or infection for those who themselves will, in turn, eventually perceive the dead and abject self. There is more to the abject, therefore, than a simple reflex of distaste or disgust. Dracula, for example, is particularly concerned with the dissolution of boundaries, and its specific focus on blood as an icon of individual, racial, and sexual identity makes Bram Stoker’s novel a frequent reference point in criticism.

Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press

The Uncanny

The colloquial meaning of the word uncanny—denoting that which is supernatural or merely mysterious by known standards—has been eclipsed in Gothic criticism by a specific Freudian deployment of the term. In a 1919 essay titled “Das Unheimliche” (“The Uncanny”), Sigmund

Freud (1856–1939) distinguishes between the Heimlich (literally, “the homely,” and by implication, the familiar) and the Unheimlich (literally, “the unhomely,” and usually translated from the German as “the uncanny”).

The latter is capable of inducing fear precisely because it is not known or familiar to the perceiver, though Freud extends the range of fearfulness by suggesting that unknown (and thus fearful) things may lie concealed within the most familiar of environments, institutions, and individuals.

Thus, the Unheimlich may be an ambivalent, possibly occluded but certainly frightening, aspect or component of the Heimlich.

The Unheimlich is a concept that is widely applied in modern Gothic criticism because of the genre’s historical associations with the representation of concealment and deceit, its frequent recourse to dramatic modifications in character or behavior, and its effective interposition of the supernatural or the marvelous as a functional presence in the supposedly normal world.

Arguably, the most Unheimlich institution of all is the human body— always on display and yet concealing not merely its mechanisms but its projected disorders also. The body’s uneasy oscillation between health and illness, life and death, and its liminal status as nominally part of humanity yet individual in its destiny, also align it psychoanalytically with the whole mechanism of abjection.

Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press

Victorian Age

The Sublime

Term coined by Edmund Burge, he draws a distinction between the Sublime—which is awe inspiring—and the less evocative and thought-provoking beautiful and picturesque. The Sublime instills in the mind of its beholder a sense of smallness or powerlessness—it renders the self both passive and receptive as the grandeur of sublimity floods and enhances the senses. Characteristically, sublimity is associated with monumental size: a mountain can be sublime, as can be a chasm of infinite depth; likewise, a vast, empty plain is sublime, as is an ocean, whether tempest-tossed or eerily becalmed. If extent were not enough, obscurity can equally evoke sublime emotions.

Read more here

Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press

Romanticism

The “Romantic Period” is usually taken to extend approximately from the outbreak of the French Revolution in 1789—or alternatively, from the publication of Lyrical Ballads in 1798—through the first three decades of the nineteenth century.
A movement in European art, aesthetics, literature, and philosophy, romanticism influenced popular as well as elite taste between the 1770s and the mid-19th century. A reaction to the controlled and implicitly secular and predictable world of the Enlightenment, Romantic thought drew on the energy and radicalism perceived in the early days of the French Revolution of 1789, and the lingering influence of the progressive politics exposed by the American War of Independence (1775–1783).

Romanticism is a movement premised on imagination and introspection rather than functionality and the collective mind. It values the selfconsciousness that comes with walking or thinking alone, and the wanderer who is “lonely as a cloud” in the verse of William Wordsworth has his literary parallel in the Gothic Hero who contemplates, alone and obsessively, his sins of excess, neglect, or incest. Such gloomy figures punctuate the Romantic poetry of Lord Byron in particular, but have their novelistic parallel in figures such as the monk Schedoni in The Italian by Ann Radcliffe or Heathcliff in Wuthering Heights (1847) by Emily Brontë.
The Romantic wanderer, though, may equally appreciate and be uplifted by the sublime scenery he encounters in his travels. This convention, certainly, is protracted from the Romantic and into the Gothic, where particularly in the 18th century, authors, most notably in the Female Gothic tradition, favored the spectacular geography of the European Continent. The Burkean Sublime, with its conventions of horror and (more emphatically) terror, may be associated in both Romantic and Gothic thought with an interest in the uncanny and the occult. Supernatural figures such as the ghost enjoy neither place nor function in Enlightenment thought, though they gain emblematic status as affirmations of the enduring mystery of the world even in the context of progressive modernity.

Characteristics:
1. The prevailing attitude favored innovation over traditionalism in the materials, forms, and style of literature.2. In his preface to Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth repeatedly declared that good poetry is “the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings.” According to this view, poetry is not primarily a mirror of men in action; on the contrary, its essential component is the poet’s own feelings, while the process of composition, since it is “spontaneous,” is the opposite of the artful manipulation of means to foreseen ends stressed by the neoclassic critics.
3. To a remarkable degree external nature—the landscape, together with its flora and fauna—became a persistent subject of poetry, and was described with an accuracy and sensuous nuance unprecedented in earlier writers.
4. Romantic subjects were the poets themselves or other people, they were no longer represented as part of an organized society but, typically, as solitary figures engaged in a long, and sometimes infinitely elusive, quest; often they were also social nonconformists or outcasts. Many important Romantic works had as protagonist the isolated rebel, whether for good or ill: Prometheus, Cain, the Wandering Jew, the Satanic hero-villain, or the great outlaw.
5. What seemed to a number of political liberals the infinite social promise of the French Revolution in the early 1790s fostered the sense in Romantic writers that theirs was a great age of new beginnings and high possibilities. Many writers viewed a human being as endowed with limitless aspiration toward an infinite good envisioned by the faculty of imagination.

Abrams, M., Harpham, G. (2012) A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth
Hughes, W. (2012) Historical Dictionary of Gothic Literature. Plymouth: The Scarecrow Press

Pathetic Fallacy

A phrase invented by John Ruskin in 1856 to signify any representation of inanimate natural objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations, and emotions.

The attribution of human feelings and responses to inanimate things or animals, especially in art and literature.

“Pathetic fallacy” is now used mainly as a neutral name for a procedure in which human traits are
ascribed to natural objects in a way that is less formal and more indirect than in the figure called personification.

Abrams, M., Harpham, G. (2012) A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Wadsworth

Gothic Literature

The Gothic novel, or in an alternative term, Gothic romance, is a type of prose fiction which was inaugurated by Horace Walpole’s The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story (1764)—the subtitle denotes its setting in the Middle Ages—and flourished through the early nineteenth century. Some writers followed Walpole’s example by setting their stories in the medieval period; others set them in a Catholic country, especially Italy or Spain. The locale was often a gloomy castle furnished with dungeons, subterranean passages, and sliding panels; the typical story focused on the sufferings imposed on an innocent heroine by a cruel and lustful villain, and made bountiful use of ghosts, mysterious disappearances, and other sensational and supernatural occurrences (which in a number of novels turned out to have natural explanations). The principal aim of such novels was to evoke chilling terror by exploiting mystery and a variety of horrors. Many of them are now read mainly as period pieces, but the best opened up to fiction the realm of the irrational and of the perverse impulses and nightmarish terrors that lie beneath the orderly surface of the civilized mind.

Abrams, M, Harpham, G. (2012). A Glossary of Literary Terms. Boston: Cengage Learning

The Industrial Revolution

Frankenstein

Film: Mary Shelley

If you found Mary Shelley's life intriguing, you can watch this film based on her life.

Gothic Literature

Darkness by Lord Byron

When I have fears, by John Keats

When I have Fears That I May Cease to Be

By John Keats

(written in 1818, published posthumously in 1848)

When I have fears that I may cease to be 

Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain, 

Before high-piled books, in charact’ry, 

Hold like rich garners the full ripened grain; 

When I behold, upon the night’s starred face, 

Huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, 

And think that I may never live to trace 

Their shadows with the magic hand of chance; 

And when I feel, fair creature of an hour, 

That I shall never look upon thee more, 

Never have relish in the faery power 

Of unreflecting love—then on the shore 

Of the wide world I stand alone, and think 

Till love and fame to nothingness do sink.

Poem: Metrical Feet - A lesson for a boy

Derwent Coleridge, the third child of Samuel, started learning ancient Greek before he was even seven years old. In 1807, Samuel sent his young son a letter in which he wrote: "I am greatly delighted that you are so desirous to go on with your Greek; and shall finish this letter with a short lesson of Greek"; about a month later, Samuel sent Derwent another letter in which he enclosed the poem "Metrical Feet – A Lesson for a Boy." Coleridge wrote the poem in order to help his son learn about some of the different types of "metrical feet" in ancient Greek poetry (which an also be found in English)

Metrical Feet: a lesson for a boy

By Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1806)

Trochee trips from long to short;
From long to long in solemn sort
Slow Spondee stalks, strong foot!, yet ill able
Ever to come up with Dactyl's trisyllable.
Iambics march from short to long.
With a leap and a bound the swift Anapests throng.
One syllable long, with one short at each side,
Amphibrachys hastes with a stately stride --
First and last being long, middle short, Amphimacer
Strikes his thundering hoofs like a proud high-bred Racer.

If Derwent be innocent, steady, and wise,
And delight in the things of earth, water, and skies;
Tender warmth at his heart, with these meters to show it,
WIth sound sense in his brains, may make Derwent a poet --
May crown him with fame, and must win him the love
Of his father on earth and his father above.
My dear, dear child!
Could you stand upon Skiddaw, you would not from its whole ridge
See a man who so loves you as your fond S.T. Coleridge.

Poetry: Metre and Rhyme

How to cite references

APA Citation Style

Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association, 5th edition

Follow these colour codes:
Author(s)	Date	Title of Book	Title of Article	Title of Periodical
Volume	Pages	Place of Publication	Publisher	Other Information

Book

Okuda, M., & Okuda, D. (1993). Star Trek chronology: The history
     of the future. New York: Pocket Books.

Book Article or Chapter

James, N. E. (1988). Two sides of paradise: The Eden myth according
     to Kirk and Spock. In D. Palumbo (Ed.), Spectrum of the fantastic
     (pp. 219-223). Westport, CT: Greenwood.

Website
(for more details, see the American Psychological Association's official site)

Lynch, T. (1996). DS9 trials and tribble-ations review. Retrieved
     October 8, 1997, from Psi Phi: Bradley's Science Fiction Club
     Web site: http://www.bradley.edu/campusorg/psiphi/DS9/ep/
     503r.html

How to write a Literary Essay

Assignment #1: Literary Essay P&P

Language and Culture III – Literary Essay

Choose ONE of the following tasks and develop it thoroughly in an essay.
It should include an introduction, the main body and a conclusion.
Develop the corresponding theory, and account for it quoting from the novel.

1. “Pride and Prejudice” is a novel about women who feel they have to marry to be happy. Taking Charlotte Lucas as an example, do you think the author is making a social criticism of her era’s view of marriage?
2. Define what power is according to the theory of Michel Foucault. Describe the struggle for power between two characters throughout the play.
3. Explain how social class determines the decisions that people make in “Pride and Prejudice”.
4. Explore Austen's portrayal of the women in the novel
5. Explore Austen's portrayal of the women in the novel. In what ways does she sympathize with their plight, and in what ways is she unsympathetic?
6. How are gender roles represented in the novel within Patriarchal Society?
7. How can characters' behaviour or narrative events be explained in terms of psychoanalytic concepts (Id, ego, superego)?
8. How do Elizabeth Bennet's ideas on marriage differ from social ideas? Which characters in the novel share Elizabeth's views of marriage and which characters reflect society's perspective? Expand on this theme.
9. How do Elizabeth's simplicity and independence represent an attack on the conservatism of characters like Lady Catherine De Bourgh?
10. How do the characters in the text mirror the archetypal figures? (Great Mother or nurturing Mother, Whore, destroying Crone, Lover, Destroying Angel)
11. How does “Pride and Prejudice” criticize customs of the period?
12. How is patriarchal society represented through discourse in “Pride and Prejudice”? Choose two characters from the play to illustrate your point.
13. How is the relationship between men and women portrayed?
14. In what ways does Austen show that family and community are responsible for its members?
15. What conflict can be seen between the values the novel champions and those it portrays?
16. What does the work reveal about the operations (economically, politically, socially, or psychologically) of patriarchy?
17. What elements of the text can be perceived as being masculine (active, powerful) and feminine (passive, marginalized) and how do the characters support these traditional roles?
18. Which social class does the novel “Pride and Prejudice” claim to represent?
Any other: ____________________________________________________________

Essay Writing

Introduction

Almost all students will at some time be expected to write an essay, or some other kind of argument, e.g. a review or discussion section, in a longer piece of writing. In English, an essay is a piece of argumentative writing several paragraphs long written about one topic, usually based on your reading. The aim of the essay should be deduced strictly from the wording of the title or question (See Academic Writing: Understanding the Question), and needs to be defined at the beginning. The purpose of an essay is for you to say something for yourself using the ideas of the subject, for you to present ideas you have learned in your own way. The emphasis should be on working with other people's ideas, rather than reproducing their words, but your own voice should show clearly. The ideas and people that you refer to need to made explicit by a system of referencing.

According to Linda Flower (1990, p. v), "students are reading to create a text of their own, trying to integrate information from sources with ideas of their own, and attempting to do so under the guidance of a purpose."

Organisation

Your essay should have the following sections:

1. Preliminaries: Title

2. Main Text: a) Introduction, b) Main Body, c) Conclusion.

3. End matter: References

Visit this website for more on this. 

References:

Gillet, A. (2009). Genres in academic writing: Essays. Retrieved from: http://www.uefap.com/writing/writframgenre_essay.htm [22ns September, 2017)