Dissertation Project

Working title: Mapping Postmodern Anxiety: (Re)Location of the Monstrous in Contemporary Gothic Fiction.

The project examines the (re)modelling of space in contemporary permutations of the Gothic mode. Gothic is regarded as a dynamic set of aesthetics which has dressed and addressed epochal discourses throughout its literary history. The locations commonly haunted by the Gothic, be it the city, the haunted house or landscape have always taken a dominant role in constructing the fears and anxieties dominating the Western world.
In the twenty-first century, Western society is occupied with a variety of themes which have recently fed the Gothic imagination: individualism turns into menacing loneliness; a hypertext portrayed as an inescapable labyrinth visualises the vast dangers of the Information Age; the manmade destruction of our planet creates a feel of the pending apocalypse, and the subliminal, yet ever-present threat of terrorism may not find a more suitable formulation than in the very language of terror. The project is interested in the subversive and complex manner Contemporary Gothic spaces may model the interrelatedness of imperialism, religion and nationality.
Besides its thematic adaptability, the Gothic’s affinity for intermedial shifts assured the ability to rapidly react to contemporary matters. I claim that the highly figurative nature of the Gothic novel today has been acquired through its dialectical relationship with different types of media, such as film, television and comics. Thereby, contemporary Gothic fiction projects its locations with an otherwise unthinkable immediacy. The project intends to analyse these hybridised aesthetics of postmodern Gothic fiction in the light of its history of adaptation and adoption.

Vita

Teaching

Editorship

Dynamik der Form. Literarische Modellierungen zwischen Formgebung und Formverlust, Heidelberg: Winter, 2019 (mit Jutta Gerber et al.)