The Gothic Imagination

Most definitions of The Gothic begin by describing it as a reaction to the rationalism of the Enlightenment, and Italy is the locus, and focus, of so much of the anxiety emerging from the  Enlightenment’s discourse of reason against “superstition” as well as (Protestant) England’s simultaneous fear of and fascination with Catholic Europe (Italy and Spain).  Many of the emerging anxieties and repressed desires of Enlightenment England/France are expressed and examined in the subversive “Gothic” texts: anxieties about the place of the imagination in the face of the emphasis on the “rational,” for instance; about the fear of female desire for agency and equality in the Age of Revolution; about the Orientalist suspicion of the lure of the “foreign(er)”/”Eastern(er),” and so on.
 Given the location of the course, I view this iteration of the course as an opportunity to focus on the importance of location, the sense of place, in the way the issues are worked out in the “Gothic Imagination.” Being anchored in Prague, the city in Central Europe looking both ways to the East and the West, the city at the crossroads of of the emergence of secular humanism and religious dispute, we will be able to explore both the myth of “Gothic Italy” as represented in The Castle of Otranto and The Mysteries of Udolpho, and the more complicated historical reality. Radcliffe’s novel, in particular, is an excellent example of the division between England/France as spaces of the Enlightenment; Italy and places east—Budapest, Transylvania—are, by contrast associated with the mysterious, menacing East represented by Dracula.  Prague Castle will be our representative space for a wide-ranging exploration of the themes. We will investigate the extent to which locus and habitus (as defined by Bourdieu: “a set of dispositions which generate practices and perceptions”) are related in the development of the Gothic Imagination.