#steven bruhm

[gothicseverance]

The body is vulnerable, fragile, and subject to dissolution — as is the body in psychoanalytic fantasy or desire — and at the same time excessive and inchoate, proliferative, with too many significations.

—Romanticism on the Net

Art by @eggsistential-breakdown 🖤

[starsandsteelandbrokenglass]

June + July 2024 Reading Wrap Up

It's been a busy couple of months! I did lots of traveling, which included a wide variety of activities such as: I took a course on bookbinding which was AMAZING--hoping to replicate some of that work at home (and perhaps post some pics). I did sightseeing in three new cities! And I presented at a conference. All that means that I did not have much time for reading, though now that I'm home I've been back at it. Over these two months I read 12 books (about 4,200 pages), most of which were read in July. Here they are:

Leisure Reading:

The Night Villa by Carol Goodman- 4/5 stars; the professor/student romance tones are one of my least favorite tropes, but they didn't hit that *too* heavily and I liked the plot overall, not the worst representation of academia I've read

The Only One Left by Riley Sager- 3.5/5 stars; good twisty mystery, though there were some tropey cliches

She Is a Haunting by Trang Thanh Tran- 3/5 stars; wanted to like this more but the plot was kind of meandering

The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek (The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek #1) by Kim Michele Richardson- 1/5 stars; did not like this--found it poorly written with gratuitous sexual violence and some commentary on race that made me go "hmmm" in a bad way

Goddess of the River by Vaishnavi Patel- 3.5/5 stars; liked this, but not as much as Kaikeyi and felt like there was kind of a lot going on in the background that was distracting

A Head Full of Ghosts by Paul Tremblay- 4.5/5 stars; very dark and super creepy, but I especially liked its engagement with pop culture/academia and how realistic its characters and family dynamic felt

The Strange Case of the Alchemist's Daughter (The Extraordinary Adventures of the Athena Club #1) by Theodora Goss- 3.75/5 stars; some things about the writing style kind of irk me, but the premise is good enough to override that, at least for now

The Charmed Wife by Olga Grushin- 4/5 stars; continuously flipping the fairytale on its head while examining the complexities of marriage, family, and mental health, this was a pretty neat take on Cinderella

The Spectral Arctic: A History of Ghosts and Dreams in Polar Exploration by Shane McCorristine- took me a while to get through but really interesting!

Academic Reading:

The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature edited by Kevin Corstorphine and Laura R. Kremmel

Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction by Steven Bruhm

The Horror Film edited by Stephen Prince

My favorite book(s) this month was A Head Full of Ghosts. It's pretty heavy and fairly disturbing, but also a fascinating nexus of academia, pop culture, horror culture, and the American family. The complicated dynamics of the Barrett family--genuine love, extreme frustration, financial tension, mental health--felt super realistic, as did the eight-year-old narrator's voice. Not for the faint of heart but would definitely recommend!

Currently Reading: Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel #1) by Josiah Bancroft

[weirdletter]

The Edinburgh Companion to Gothic and the Arts (Edinburgh Companions to Literature and the Humanities), edited by David Punter, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Cover image by Irina Kharchenko, info: edinburghuniversitypress.com.

The Gothic in all its artistic forms and ramifications is traced from the medieval to the twenty-first century. From architecture, painting and sculpture through music, ballet, opera and dance to installation art and the graphic novel, each of the 33 chapters reflects on and weighs in on the ways in which the Gothic is taken up in the art forms and modes under examination. An Introduction discusses Gothic as a changing cultural form across the centuries with deep psychological roots. This is followed by sections on: architectural arts; the visual arts; music and the performance arts; the literary arts; and media and cultural arts.

Contents: List of Illustrations List of Contributors Introduction – David Punter     Part I: Architectural Arts 1. Gothic and Architecture: Morris, Ruskin, Carlyle and the Gothic legacies of the Lake Poets – Tom Duggett 2. Gothic and the Built Environment: Literary Representations of the Architectural Uncanny and Urban Sublime – Sara Wasson 3. Gothic and Design: The Geometrical Roots of Gothic Aesthetics in the Cologne Cathedral Choir – Robert Bork 4. Gothic and Sculpture: From Medieval Piety to Modern Horrors and Terrors – Peter N. Lindfield and Dale Townshend 5. Gothic and Installation Art: Spectral Materialities, Monstrous Ephemera – Katarzyna Ancuta　     Part II: The Visual Arts 6. Gothic and Earlier Painting: Nightmares and Premature Burials in Fuseli and Wiertz – Maria Parrino 7. Gothic, Caricature, Cartoon: Insatiable Nightmares – Franz Potter 8. Gothic and Portraiture: Resemblance and Rupture – Kamilla Elliott 9. Gothic and Surrealism: Subculture, Counterculture and Cultural Assimilation – Avril Horner 10. Gothic and Modern Art: The Experience of Ivan Albright – Antonio Alcalá González 11. Gothic and Photography: The Darkest Art – David Annwn Jones     Part III: Music and the Performance Arts 12. Gothic and Music: Scoring ‘Silent’ Spectres – Kendra Preston Leonard 13. Gothic and Opera: Overwhelming Passions and Irrational Dreams – Anne Williams 14. Gothic, Ballet, Dance: The Aesthetics and Kinaesthetics of Death – Steven Bruhm 15. Gothic and Contemporary Music: Dark Sound, Dark Mood, Dark Aesthetics – Isabella van Elferen     Part IV: The Literary Arts 16. Gothic and Graveyard Poetry: Imagining the Dead (of Night) – Eric Parisot 17. Gothic Chapbooks and Ballads: Making a Long Story Short – Doug Thomson and Wendy Fall 18. Gothic and Nineteenth-Century Poetry: Thresholds of Influence, Possibilities and Desire – Angela Wright 19. Gothic and Modern Poetry: The Poetics of Transgression – Maria Beville 20. Gothic and the Eighteenth-Century Novel: At Home in the English Style – Robert Miles 21. Gothic and the Nineteenth-Century Novel: The Art of Abjection – Jerrold E. Hogle 22. Gothic and Recent Fiction: Fears of the Past and of the Future – David Punter 23. Gothic and the Short Story: Revolutions in Form and Genre – Sarah Ilott 24. Gothic, Melodrama, Victorian Theatre: Gothic Drama to 1890 – Clive Bloom 25. Gothic and Modern Theatre: Staging Modern Cultural Trauma – Ardel Haefele-Thomas 26. Gothic and Children’s Literature: Wolves in Walls and Clocks in Crocodiles – Anna Jackson 27. Gothic and Young Adult Literature: Werewolves, Vampires, Monsters, Rebellion, Broken Hearts and True Romance – Gina Wisker     Part V: Media and Cultural Arts 28. Gothic and Cinema: The Development of an Aesthetic Filmic Mode – Xavier Aldana Reyes 29. Gothic and Television: The Monster in the Living Room – Linnie Blake 30. Gothic and Comics: From The Haunt of Fear to a Haunted Medium – Julia Round 31. Gothic and the Graphic Novel: From the Future Shocks of Judge Dredd to the Aftershocks of DC Vertigo – Stuart Lindsay 32. Gothic and Videogames: Playing with Fear in the Darkness – Dawn Stobbart 33. Gothic and Internet Fiction: Digital Affordances and New Media Fears – Neal Kirk Index

[cuddlytogas]

#EXCUSE ME HELLO WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU'RE ALLOWED TO HIDE THIS IN THE TAGS skljgaflkgadfhah I'M SORRY XDD

I so nearly made an angsty post about this months ago but decided against it, because steven bruhm is right, when we only look for queer pain, we only find queer pain, and the show is about so much more

but also

ouch

ooo free psychoanalysis! XD i am absolutely a stede simp, and fave secondary character is either lucius or oluwande, my competent beloveds <3

course, all the best people are <3 (a stede simp that is)

This show got you with the aesthetics and kept you with the interpersonal relationships. Found family dynamics are your jam. It's about the fantasy of finding a group of people who turn out to be yours completely by accident, isn't it.

The way this show handles the homophobia inherent in the setting is balm on your soul. You notice details I wouldn't even think to look for.

If you could marry Stede's party coat from ep5, you would.

x

[gothicseverance]

The Gothic invites the repressed to return; it brings us on stage with pain.

—Gothic Bodies

Gif by @goodsirs 🖤

[gothicseverance]

The Gothic invites the reader into a sympathy with the devil (the monster, the tyrant, the historical ghost, the queer).

—Romanticism on the Net

Art by @deadcrushing 🖤

[gothhabiba]

‘The pained body often operates not only in tandem with the mind, but also in spite of it. The pained body's privileging of itself over the mind helps to explain our culture's antagonism to our own inescapable corporeality. In her 1985 book The Body in Pain: The Making and Unmaking of the World, Elaine Scarry suggests that, regardless of the physiology of pain, the experience of pain reinstates a Cartesian antagonism between body and mind by attacking the "self" with pain: "The ceaseless, self-announcing signal of the body in pain, at once so empty and undifferentiated and so full of blaring adversity, contains not only the feeling 'my body hurts' but the feeling 'my body hurts me'" (47). [...] In our thinking, pain is not "natural"; it is adversarial. Our English word "pain" comes from the Latin poena, meaning penalty or punishment. The body in pain attacks the self that recognizes that pain. This sense of being attacked by one's own body, says Scarry, explains why metaphors for pain are so often those of weaponry, assault, and violation (pounding, burning, tearing). Pain evokes an antagonistic relationship between the body and the self at the same time that it allows no distinction between body and self: I hurt and I am being hurt; I hurt myself. Thus what pain effects is a return of the body to a preCartesian body - where mind and body are inseparable - at the same time as it pits the mind firmly against the body. Pain confounds one aspect of dualism (the primacy of mind over body) by evoking another aspect of dualism (the body's perceived estrangement from the self). What is perhaps most singularly remarkable about this confusion, then, is the way pain destabilizes Cartesian thinking, in which the mind is separated from and privileged over the body. And this destabilization seems to make its birth cries in the literatures of sensibility, and emphasized in its descendent, the Romantic novel.' [Steven Bruhm, Gothic Bodies: The Politics of Pain in Romantic Fiction (1994), p. 9]

e.g... this is what I’ve talked about before as the kind of conception of pain and of the body that chronic pain forces you to confront and discard if you’re going to have any semblance of peace

I Will write & publish a Gothic theory of chronic pain & I Cannot be stopped

[gothicseverance]

Invariably, the Gothic child knows too much.

—Nightmare on Sesame Street

[weirdletter]

The Gothic and Theory: An Edinburgh Companion (Edinburgh Companions to the Gothic), edited by Jerrold E. Hogle and Robert Miles, Edinburgh University Press, 2019. Info: edinburghuniversitypress.com.

This collection provides a thorough representation of the early and ongoing conversation between Gothic and theory – philosophical, aesthetic, psychological and cultural – both in the many modes of Gothic and in many of the realms of theory now current in the modern world. Each essay focuses on a particular kind of theory–Gothic relationship, every one of which has a history and each of which is still being explored in enactments of the Gothic and of theory today.

Contents: Acknowledgements The Gothic-Theory Conversation: An Introduction – Jerrold E. Hogle     Part I: The Gothic, Theory, and History 1. History / Genealogy / Gothic: Godwin, Scott, and Their Progeny – Robert Miles 2. The Gothic in and as Race Theory – Maisha Wester 3. Postcolonial Gothic in and as Theory – Alison Rudd     Part II: The Gothic of Psychoanalysis and its Exfoliations 4. The Gothic Body Before and After Freud – Steven Bruhm 5. Abjection as Gothic and the Gothic as Abjection – Jerrold E. Hogle     Part III: Feminism, Gender Theory, Sexuality, and the Gothic 6. Unsettling Feminism: The Savagery of Gothic – Catherine Spooner 7. Gothic Fiction and Queer Theory – George E. Haggerty     Part IV. Theorizing the Gothic in Modern Media 8. The Gothic at the Heart of Film and Film Theory – Elisabeth Bronfen 9. Techo-Terrors and the Emergence of Cyber-Gothic – Anya Heise-von der Lippe     Part V: The Gothic Before and After Poststructuralism 10. The Gothic as a Theory of Symbolic Exchange – David Collings 11. Incorporations: The Gothic and Deconstruction – Tilottama Rajan 12.Dark Materialism: Gothic Objects, Commodities, and Things – Fred Botting 13. Thinking the Thing: The Outer Reaches of Knowledge in Lovecraft and Deleuze – Anna Powell 14. Gothic and the Question of Ethics: Otherness, Alterity, Violence – Dale Townshend     Part VI: The Gothic-Theory Relationship in Retrospect and Prospect 15. On the Threshold of Gothic: A Reflection – David Punter