The Sublime and the Gothic: Otranto
Transgressions, border-crossings, migrations
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office hours: M 11-12, W 2-3l office:
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ecook@english.ucsb.edu
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TAs: Billy Hall
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Paxton Hehmeyer l
Alex McKee l
Laura Miller
What ties together the difficult linguistic experiments of poems by Thomas Gray and William Collins with the visual experiments of graphic artists like Joseph Wright, George Stubbs, Henry Fusli, and William Blake? And how are these related to Walpole's Castle of Otranto?
Each of these works explores the possibility of moving across or beyond boundaries or borders that structure our conventional experience of daily life. One way they do so is by collapsing the dichotomy of "natural" vs. "supernatural," often suggesting that the latter is always present in the former, even though we don't usually see it.
Strategies
- exploring extreme psychological/emotional states (as in the exploration of darkness and inarticulacy in "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard," or that of fear in "Ode to Fear")
- mixing realistically depicted settings and characters (the natural) with personifications (the "supernatural") [or "other-natural"?] (as in "Ode on a Distant Prospect of Eton College" and "Ode to Evening").
- at the linguistic level: mixing literal and figurative meanings (as in the curse in Otranto!)