DEADLINE EXTENDED 10/15 NeMLA Panel: The Gothic Alternative: Vulnerable and Intimate Imaginations of the Future

deadline for submissions: 
October 15, 2021
full name / name of organization: 
Justin Rogers and Sara Chung
contact email: 

NeMLA Panel: The Gothic Alternative: Vulnerable and Intimate Imaginations of the Future

 

Deadline for Submissions: Extended to October 15th, 2021.

 

Contact: Justin Rogers (ridetheskies@tamu.edu) and Sara Chung (yssarachung@tamu.edu)

 

This session is about analyzing the Gothic through an ethics of care that, through the sense of vulnerability and intimacy, envisions alternative futures. While the Gothic in British fiction is often associated with fears of degeneration, subversiveness, and social and political anxieties, the challenges the Gothic evokes are underpinned by an investment in the possibility of alternative futures. Texts that utilize the Gothic are focused on the ability of the character to be challenged by their gothic encounter and undergo change as a result. This is not dissimilar to the change that could occur within the reader who experiences the gothic through the novel. The challenge posed by the gothic renders characters and readers to be extremely vulnerable, and in that way, it creates a sense of intimacy. In its perversity, the gothic fascinates and lures readers and then challenges what they consider to be normative. Disrupting the ordinary and normative necessitates an ethics of care as it reflects the need to critically attend to reality and imagine alternative possibilities that corrects it. The aim of this panel is to reorient the way we see the Gothic by relating it to the ideas of vulnerability, intimacy, and care, which is often overlooked in scholarship. The Gothic does more than subversion: it imagines possible alternative futures.

 

Abstracts should be submitted on the NeMLA website’s abstract submission portal (https://www.cfplist.com/nemla/Home/login) by October 15, 2021.

Please direct any questions to both Justin Rogers (ridetheskies@tamu.edu) and Sara Chung (yssarachung@tamu.edu).