The Sublime In The Asylum

While reading “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne, I couldn’t help but feel a constant overwhelming sense of dread. The root of this could have come from the story’s dark setting deep within an “haunted forest” or from Brown’s mysterious “Devil”-esque companion. While I read, another story came into my mind; the story of the “Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe. In Poe’s tale the same heart pounding emotion can be felt as he describes the reunion of two friends within “the House of Usher.” With the manors “eye-like windows” and “sorrowful impression,” Poe wastes no time in setting the Gothic mood. Through their distinct writing styles Hawthorne and Poe establish a common Gothic theme within their stories.

Literature is a wonderful medium of delivering fear. From Gothic stories to science fiction, fear has embraced

One of the spookiest experiences in Harley’s life was on a cold, dark Halloween night when Harley and her friends, Lauryn and Heidi, got chased by a clown for 3 blocks on a gloomy narrow road. This scenario relates to traits  of Gothic Literature and Magical Realism because, that experience was in a dark setting and contained weird incidents and a disturbing plot. Those two genres are similar because they both usually have unrealistic characters and scary plots. However, in Edgar Allan Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” is an example of Gothic Literature because, the story’s setting is in an isolated, creepy, and large house with odd characters and a frightening plot line, while Julio Cortazar’s “House Taken Over” is an example of  Magical Realism because the realistic characters are accepting the unimpressed narrative tone in an ordinary way of life. Gothic Literature is a style of writing that is characterized by elements of fear, horror, death, and gloom. Settings are usually in a isolated and haunted location in a big house or castle with trap doors, dark rooms, and secret passages. Characters are usually supernatural beings or monsters.

Have you ever thought about what makes you become scared when reading scary stories? Gothic writing developed in the late eighteenth century and it was mainly a style of writing where abnormal or ghostly experiences were portrayed. In the stories Castle of Otranto, “Sir Bertrand,” and Romance of the Forest, terror is illustrated by emphasizing the architectural environments that are encountered. The architectural environments in Gothic literature, engage readers and immerse them into the story so that supernatural events can be imaginable, by using common features such as darkness, intricate or secret passages, and abandoned or isolated buildings.

Writers have various ways to scare their readers, whether it’s with unexplainable and unnatural things, or just straight out disgusting things, everyone has their own method. In the two short stories, “ The Fall of the House of Usher ” by Edgar Allen Poe, and “ House Taken Over ” by Julio Cortazar, it is evident that both writers have distinct writing styles, but do share some similar elements in their stories. These two works of literature feature many qualities of the subgenres known as, Gothic and Magical Realism, which are two methods that have been used in the past to bring fear in readers. For Poe’s story, he writes with the gothic subgenre, while Cortazar writes with magical realism. Although both stories share a certain atmosphere,

Edmund Burke a theorist stated in his works that, "…Whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger; that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime" [2] . The critic attempts to assemble an authoritative definition of the sublime here.

Scary literature is powerful in the sense that it can cause readers to be on the edge of their seats, keep them up all night, and leave them even more attracted to the allure of fear. In Edgar Allan Poe’s Gothic short story, “The Fall of the House of Usher,” a man visits his mentally-ill old friend, Roderick Usher, and experiences unordinary events following the death of Usher’s twin sister Madeline. Another spine-tingling short story is “House Taken Over” by Julio Cortazar, which falls into the category of Magical Realism and is about a pair of siblings who are driven out of their grand home after a mysterious entity takes control over it. The genres and settings of “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “House Taken Over” share several of the same elements but also differ in numerous ways.

These implicit forms of ‘haunting’ – evident in both the elements of theme as well as the language of the novel – challenge the conventionality of Gothic literary tradition, and project a modernist understanding of how meaning and importance are not limited by physical presence.

Edgar Allen Poe has long been acknowledged as a master of gothic horror. Poe wrote many of the classics of the genre, and created many of its conventions. Accurate though this description is, however, it actually sells Poe’s talents short. His works were often more than just gothic, as the term is understood today. Poe was a master at using psychological techniques to manipulate the minds of his readers, drawing them into the creation process, almost making them co-authors of the tales that they are reading. This unique style can easily be seen by examining one of Poe’s stranger tales, one that is sometimes hard to interpret or even to understand: “The Fall of the House of Usher”. Poe does not restrict his readers to one particular reading of this tale, as with many if his other tales. By making

In these gothic literature short stories regarding romanticism the authors often use many elements that pertain to fear, however, the most prevalent themes in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe, “Prey” by Richard Matheson, “The Devil and Tom Walker” by Washington Irving, and “The Feather Pillow” by Horacio Quiroga are grotesqueness and violence. The authors utilize grotesqueness and violence in order to furthermore portray a dismal mood, foreshadow events to come, and to further entice the reader

While taking this Horror Literature course in the spring semester, I have learned so much about different horror writers that impacted the genre as a whole. From Edgar Allan Poe’s poem called “The Raven” where the protagonist is mourning the death of his lover and a raven managed to make him go insane with the quote “nevermore” to Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein where a scientist creates a monstrous creature while dehumanizing women. These different plots will remain in my memory due to the impactful psychological meaning in each piece of writing. Throughout this course, I have learned so much about myself such as a writer, a scholar, and a reader of horror literature. In the beginning of the semester,

Sometimes I like to read something a bit dark and horrific. I like to be spooked, to be made to feel eerily uncomfortable. I like it when the hairs creep up on the back on my neck and I start to look at the darker corners of my room a little more closely. That was what I was in the mood for when I picked up The Asylum For Fairy Tale Creatures by Sebastian Gregory. It was a book that promised all of the above, that promised a dark twist on the classic fairy tales from my youth. The book delivered on some of those promises. It was grim and full of horror, in parts gross and in others creepy. But unfortunately somewhere along the road the execution of this book failed and instead of being terrified I ended up a little bit bored.

He believed that terror could influence the sublime and that the sublime itself was “whatever is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger... Whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror” (Burke 211). This particular theory can be applied, to the paradox of horror films because it states whatever causes us fear or pain also produces feelings of pleasure. Looking at the concept of the sublime, it can be broken into these premises and

Moving along throughout the semester, it’d be fair to say that, as per the presented curriculum of this Senior Seminar, I’ve gained a wider breadth of knowledge, and the means through which my exploration of “the sublime” can be furthered. Coinciding with a range of classical and modern writers, and their respective texts, grants this elusive concept with multifaceted sources and approaches for us to comprehend, whether literal, anecdotal, or otherwise. What’s most striking to me, though, beyond the basis of a simple, rudimentary definition, are human consequences, as we become proverbial viewers, and, basically, “discoverers” of these phenomena. Recurring circumstances in all these works have each suggested that, though a large majority of these things have existed long before us, and will continue long after us, we are, of course, receiving whatever small insights from our own

Just like the slow ticking of an old grandfather clock, Gothic literature will be one of the most feared titles one will ever read for good reason. Heart-pounding. Sweat-inducing. Pupil-shaking. So startlingly real and lifelike, you will not be able to stop yourself from turning around to just check. Those deep, dark, unexplained laments in the murky recesses of our minds have moulded itself into two very distinct types of Gothic literature - traditional and contemporary. Traditional Gothic literature, like Charles Dickens’ ‘The Signalman’ utilises an unusual setting, and revolves heavily around the supernatural, which uses third person to further emphasise its creepiness; contemporary literature, like Roald Dahl's ’ ‘Lamb to the Slaughter’