Confirmed
keynote scholars so far: Enrique Ajuria Ibarra, Xavier Aldana Reyes,
Kyle Bishop, Kevin Corstorphine, Justin Edwards, Anya Heise-von der
Lippe, Michael Howarth, Evert J. van Leeuwen, Elizabeth Parker +
Michelle Poland, Julia Round, Christy Tidwell, Jeffrey Weinstock, Maisha
L. Wester.
Please, check this page for updates on keynote talks and panels.
Defining the Gothic has proven to be a difficult and elusive task for
scholars, possibly as this literary current often pervades cross-genre
narratives and media, embracing many topics related to the very essence
of human nature. Indeed, the nature of whatever it may mean to be human
seems to be at the core of William Veeder’s definition the Gothic as a
healing mechanism found in societies that “inflict terrible wounds upon
themselves,” especially in order “to help heal the damage caused by our
embrace of modernity” (1998: 21). This wide definition of the Gothic
acknowledges the pervasiveness of the genre and its ramifications when
it comes to reacting—“healing and transforming” (1998: 21)—to the perils
of societal structures and thus confronting the manifold disruptions of
social and moral codes, as well as the actual and imagined fears
intrinsic to the cyclical crises our societies face. The advent of
modernity represented a major concern in the post-revolutionary United
States. Inspired by the literary genre that emerged in 18th century
England and its subsequent evolutions, Gothic fiction became a suitable
means for exploring the newfound anxieties relating to the specific
configurations of the colonial societies and their challenges as new
communities. Drawing on European gothic tropes and arguably starting
with Charles Brockden Brown’s tales, American Gothic fiction has been
popular throughout the centuries up to the present day. Furthermore,
many popular culture products engage—in more or less overt ways—with
gothic elements in the attempt to confront myriads of conflicts,
anxieties, and epochal concerns that have marked our societies.
The struggle between dictated social conventions and the repressed,
multifaceted self—liable to fragmented identity and ambiguity—has been
central to Gothic narratives. Hidden moral, social, and scientific
aspirations emerge, often accompanied by the tension toward a liberation
of repressed desires and the fear of the consequences of such
liberation. Moreover, the creation of taboos and moral codes set
hierarchical boundaries for society to theoretically function without
disruption. Gothic characters and dynamics blur such boundaries, thus
facing social and psychological dilemmas peculiar to contemporary
contexts, and strugglingagainst uncertainty, mistaken self-conceptions
and perceptions of reality, contradictory behaviors, feelings of guilt,
and exasperation. Terror might lie in altered psychological states, be
intrinsic to an incomprehensible or unacceptable alien outsider, or
haunt the places where a character would naturally feel safe.
Gothic modes have also been characterized by the notions of
disturbance and indulgence, or by a peculiar sense of irony and
self-consciousness. An underlying presence of the supernatural and the
unspeakable quality of many anxieties facilitate revelations that often
remain implicit to a complex narrative structure. Gothic narratives are
populated by devil figures and dreamlike sequences that blur the line
between the conscious and the unconscious. The conflicts permeated by
gothic modes tackle the unresolved battle between good and evil, the
tension between the body and the psyche, the passage from childhood to
adulthood, and the transgression of social and moral codes. The gothic
panoply includes spatial tropes (isolated places, Medieval monasteries,
caves, graveyards, ruins, family houses, etc.); claustrophobic urban
settings or overwhelming wilderness; scientific experiments
that challenge divinity and defy the boundaries of
knowledge; allegoricalnon-human entities; anxieties toward the future
and technocratic realities; and ambivalent stances toward the past that
oscillate between fear and attraction, and are fueled by the instability
of memories.
In recent years, many popular culture artifacts outside of the usual
terrain of horror and the Gothic have exploited Gothic modes to reveal
the terrors of everyday life. Sophisticated narratives have employed
gothic modes to take on disruption, questioning reality, as well as
challenging the boundaries of conformity and raising issues
related to xenophobia, death, social anxieties, alienation,
displacement, and self-consciousness. Because of the versatility and
diversity of gothic modes and their—more or less subtle—exploitation
across media and popular culture products, we call for contributions
fitting the thematic lines described below.
This is a call for presentations that will be organized thematically
in different sessions, as detailed below. However, the analysis of any
type of popular culture products across media is welcome. We invite
presentations on gothic modes in film, (web)tv series, comics
and graphic novels, video games, animation, products aimed at children
and young adults, genre fiction, and theatrical performances.
Each session will be composed of a talk with a keynote speaker (30
min. approximately) followed by panels, each organized as a sequence of
short presentations (each 12-15 min. maximum) and a moderated discussion
among participants. Scholars at any stage of their career are welcome,
and the panels will be organized accordingly.
Panels will be pre-recorded in their entirety: the presenters and
moderators will agree on a date for the pre-recording, with a limited
public composed of PopMeC editors. The session will be post-produced
and uploaded to the PopMeC YouTube channel and social media platforms,
according to the series’ calendar (to be defined, starting early
April with an introductory session and streaming a new session every
week). The participation in the sessions is free of charge.
PopMeC accepts presentation proposals (300-350 words approx.) about any aspect related to the call. The proposals will be peer-reviewed and selected on a rolling basis by our editorial team and external collaborators, who will get back to you as soon as possible. Please, send your proposal to popmec.call@gmail.com,
attaching your text, inclusive of a short bio (100-120 words), name,
affiliation, and email contact in a single file (.doc, .docx, .odt).
Organizing committee: Anna Marta Marini (PopMeC
chief editor), Mónica Fernández (board editor), and associate editors
Laura Álvarez, Paula Barba, Trang Dang, Michael Fuchs, Sofía
Martinicorena.
THEMATIC SESSIONS:
- THE HOUSE AS GOTHIC LOCUS + THE UNCANNY AND THE US FAMILY
Ever since the publication of Edgar Allan Poe’s
short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” in 1839, the house as a
locus of all sorts of personal, sexual and spatial tensions has been a
preeminent site for the Gothic in US popular culture. In a country that
had purportedly left the aristocracy of the Old World and its decaying
ruins behind, the ordinary site of the family house became the favored
space where gothic narratives and modes could be channeled, giving rise
to a long-standing tradition that explores the perils lurking in the
realm of the familiar. Gothic modes have been exploited to tackle the
spatial dimension, especially in relation to the idea of home and
family, family trauma, the destabilization of the domestic, the uncanny,
and the idea of home as a metaphor for the nation.
Deadline for presentation proposals: February 28, 2021
- GOTHIC AND THE ETHNIC OTHER + BODIES AND BOUNDARIES
Gothic narratives revolving around invading
non-humans and unspoken anxieties related with the assumed dangers of
“racial intrusion” have been used to elaborate more or less overtly on
ethnic otherness. The contact and confrontation with the ethnic other
have been linked to the unwanted blurring of both metaphorical and
material boundaries. The ethnic minority body has been perceived as the
unsettling product of a physical and cultural miscegenation, an unstable
blend evoking ambiguous representations transgressively exotic and
immorally, savagely inferior altogether. At the same time, Gothic
narratives protagonized by ethnic minority subjects have been created,
giving voice to their own anxieties and perceptions of ethnic boundaries
and xenophobic terrors.
Deadline for presentation proposals: March 7, 2021
- ECOGOTHIC
American culture has maintained a strained
relationship with nature and the environment ever since the arrival of
the first settlers. The vast lands that they encountered were
conceptualized simultaneously as a bountiful Garden of Eden that would
facilitate the colonial experience, and as a “howling wilderness” that
threatened the first, precarious settlements. Environment-related
anxieties have permeated into all cultural forms, often through Gothic
imagery. More recently, environmental concerns have more to do with the
durability of the planet and the increasingly worrying consequences of
human activities upon it, often resulting in (post)apocalyptic
narratives.
Deadline for presentation proposals: March 14, 2021
- BODIES AND BOUNDARIES + GENDER, SEXUALITY AND THE GOTHIC
Body-related anxieties have often been connected
to gender, sexuality, and physical otherness, as fears and struggles
intrinsic to the wish for liberating repressed, unconventional, or
assumedly immoral desires. Socially imposed boundaries blur, connecting
with feelings of guilt, degeneration, excess, disruption. The corporeal
“other” becomes the image of transgression, depravity, and the breaking
of taboos related to the body in all its forms. Themes related to sexual
pleasure, physical abjection, body transformation, and gender become at
the same time stigmas and boundaries to cross in order to express and
face one’s own true self.
Deadline for presentation proposals: March 21, 2021
- CHILDREN AND YA GOTHIC STUFF
Children and YA gothic narratives have dealt
with anxieties related with development, a growing awareness of the self
and one’s own sexuality, the transformations within the family
environment, the increasing necessity to cope with external contexts.
The creation of gothic worlds—belonging to either an alternative reality
or the characters’ imagination—has also been exploited as a means to
represent the complex passages between different stages of life,
coming-of-age experiences, and conflicts internal to the characters’
everyday life as children.
Deadline for presentation proposals: March 28, 2021
- AUTOMATA, CYBER TERROR AND TECHNOCRATIC REALITIES
The extent of contemporary human reliance on
technology has stirred up new embodiments of the uncanny elements found
in traditional gothic horror. As a response to the fear of technological
advances, anxieties about the future and parasocial relationships,
robots and automata have replaced the ghouls of our nightmares.
Similarly, in lieu of a haunted mansion or a labyrinth, we come to find
the liminal space of our technological anxieties represented in our
immaterial existence in the online realm.
Deadline for presentation proposals: April 4, 2021
Presenters will be welcome to submit an article related to their
presentation topic, to be peer-reviewed and published on our platform (https://popmec.hypotheses.org ISSN:
2660-8839) as part of a special section dedicated to the subject.
According to the feedback and participation the series raises, we will
consider proposing the publication of an edited volume collecting
selected contributions.
You can find this call published here: https://popmec.hypotheses.org/3576
