Gothic Things
Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
- 240 pages
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Gothic Things
Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
About This Book
Offering an innovative approach to the Gothic, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and AnthroÂpocene Anxiety breaks ground with a new materialist analysis of the genre, highlighting the ways that, since its origins in the eighteenth century, the Gothic has been intensely focused on "ominous matter" and "thing power." In chapters attending to gothic bodies, spaces, books, and other objects, Gothic Things argues that the Gothic has always been about what happens when objects assume mysterious animacy or potency and when human beings are reduced to the status of just one thing among manyâmore powerfulâothers.In exploring how the Gothic insistently decenters the human, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock reveals human beings to be enmeshed in networks of human and nonhuman forces mostly outÂside of their control. Gothic Things thus resituates the Gothic as the uncanny doppelgĂ€nger of twenty-first-century critical and cultural theory, lurking just beneath the surface (and sometimes explicitly surfacing) as it haunts considerations of how human beings interact with objects and their environment. In these pages the Gothic offers a dark reflection of the contemporary "nonhuman turn, " expressing a twenty-first-century structure of feeling undergirded by anxiety over the fate of the human: spectrality, monstrosity, and apocalypse.Substituting horror for hope, the Gothic, Weinstock explains, has been a philosophical meditaÂtion on human relations to the nonhuman since its inception, raising significant questions about how we can counter anthropocentric thought in our quest to live more harmoniously with the world around us.