1 ENRIQUE AJURIA IBARRA (Universidad De Las Américas Puebla
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1 GOTHIC HYBRIDITIES: INTERDISCIPLINARY, MULTIMODAL AND TRANSHISTORICAL APPROACHES 14TH CONFERENCE OF THE INTERNATIONAL GOTHIC ASSOCIATION Speakers, Abstracts and Biographies (in alphabetical order by surname) A JEFFREY ACHIERNO (San Francisco State University, USA) Paper Title: The Tragic Gothic: Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and the early Gothic Novel Gothic literature is often discussed as a genre about the confrontation between two opposing forces: the empirical/rational and the unseen supernatural. This is dichotomy is strikingly similar to the dichotomy that Nietzsche presents his Birth of Tragedy between the Apollonian and the Dionysian. In this confrontation, Nietzsche posits that when the Dionysian prevails, the Apollonian is checked and destroyed while when the Apollonian prevails it stands ever more rigid than before. Using early Gothic novels – Walpole’s Castle of Otranto, Lewis’s The Monk, Beckford’s Vathek, and Brown’s Wieland – the genre will be analyzed through the lens of this dichotomic struggle. Through this discussion, this concept of the “tragic Gothic” will be constructed with the support of the same Nietzschean dichotomy found within these works and how the genre relates to the tragic form. Biography: I am currently an MA student in Comparative Literature at San Francisco State University, after having received my BA in Humanities at the University of Colorado at Boulder. My research interests are the philosophical intersections between cultural productions, with particular interest in the art and literature of the eighteenth century. ENRIQUE AJURIA IBARRA (Universidad de las Américas Puebla, México) Paper Title: Media, Shadows, and Spiritual Bindings: Tracing Mexican Gothic in Óscar Urrutia Mexican Gothic horror cinema has usually borrowed elements from other film traditions, such as the United States, Britain, or Asia. Most commonly, monstrous characters and plot situations have been imported, appropriated, and adapted to local settings, resulting in a particular manifestation of the horror genre that offer a glimpse of the presence of Gothic in Mexico, but usually as an external aesthetic. Nevertheless, there are particular cases where Gothic is effectively used to explore the complex discourse that frames Mexican cultural identity in relation to its past and its positive view on hybridity. This paper focuses on one such particular case: Rito terminal [Terminal Rite] (2000), directed by Óscar Urrutia Lazo. Although not a proper horror film, it manifests Gothic motifs such as: the uncanny double, past events haunting the present, spectral apparitions, a matriarchal villain, and supernatural magic. The film explicitly approaches the panic of invasion in a small, isolated village with strong pre-Hispanic roots, especially when it faces modern media technologies. Urrutia Lazo’s work addresses uncanny spectralizations that are manifested through photography and other visual media, which allow us to assess the relationship between haunting, technology, and Gothic, and 2 evaluate the idealized discourse of mestizaje in Mexican culture. Thus, in this film Gothic works to explore the anxiety of a cultural psyche that is constantly at odds with its modern national identity. Biography: Enrique Ajuria Ibarra is Assistant Professor at Universidad de las Américas Puebla, Mexico. He has previously published several articles and book chapters on Mexican horror cinema. He is the editor of the peer-reviewed online journal Studies in Gothic Fiction, and is currently preparing a book on the relationship between movement, Gothic, and the horror film. ANTONIO ALCALÁ GONZÁLEZ (Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico) Paper Title: Carlos Fuentes’ ‘The Doll Queen’ and the Transgressive Presence of the Past Dolls are created in imitation of humans. They are empty humanoid shells without life which the observer can turn into recipients of the past intended to overcome present threats. In Carlos Fuentes’ text ‘The Doll Queen’, the threat is the uncanny presence of Amilamia. She is a hunchbacked woman whose parents describe as an evil breed and who is kept hidden so much that the narrator does not see her until the last lines of the story. In an attempt to silence her deformed present condition, her parents claim she died at the age of 7 when she was a charming beautiful girl. They honor her memory in an altar of dolls where the central object is a coffin containing a porcelain doll that resembles her in all proportions as a child, but that the narrator recognizes as a false corpse. The couple needs to ask the narrator, a former friend from Amilamia’s childhood, what the girl was like since, after 15 years, their memories are blurred and they doubt how much the inert object really resembles the child. The purpose of this paper is first to analyze the attempt the parents make to impose the permanence of the past over the present in the dead image of eternal childhood presented by the porcelain doll queen. Secondly, I will explore how the uncanny presence of the real girl in the house makes this project collapse. The analysis will rely on both Fuentes’ original text (1964) and Sergio Olhovich’s film version (1971). Biography: Antonio Alcalá González is literature and English professor at Tecnológico de Monterrey, Mexico City, and lecturer on literary criticism at UNAM. He is founder and permanent organizer of the International Gothic Literature Congress that takes place every two years at UNAM. EMILY ALDER (Edinburgh Napier, UK) Paper Title: Mould Ships and Fungal Islands: Mycology, EcoGothic and William Hope Hodgson’s ‘Doubtful Beings’ For most of the long nineteenth century, the apparently hybrid biological workings and the unstable taxonomical status of moulds and fungi puzzled and fascinated scientists. Their ubiquity, plasticity, and position in what Ernst Haeckel termed a ‘boundary kingdom’ made moulds and fungi ideal imaginative substances for weird horror writers like William Hope Hodgson in the 1900s: they are ecoGothic organisms par excellence (abject, necrophagous, evasive, transmutable, transgressive, adaptable, numerous). Hodgson’s fungal monsters populate liminal marine spaces - islets, derelicts, shores, and coasts – borderland locations within which it was easy to conceive the emergence of strange new forms of life. Haeckel’s ecological concept of the ‘boundary kingdom’ can function on multiple levels, describing the intermediate space between animal and vegetable, land and sea, dead and alive, human and other. Hodgson’s weird sea stories ‘The Derelict’ and ‘The Voice in the Night’ work to collapse such binaries and hierarchies by addressing the anxieties triggered by the interstitial qualities and scientific uncertainty of mycological and mycetozoan organisms. The border zones represented by shorelines and wrecked or abandoned ships become alternative ecological 3 sites in which moulds and fungi (often seen as evolutionary dead ends) can evolve anew into frightening but more advanced forms, challenging preconceptions about the nature of life and elevating the status of mould and fungus in the natural world to equal that of animals and plants. Biography: Dr Emily Alder is Lecturer in Literature and Culture at Edinburgh Napier University and a member of the Young Academy of Scotland. Her research interests are interdisciplinary and lie in literature and science, environmental humanities, and weird, Gothic and science fiction especially of the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries. Current projects include a study of Frankenstein in children’s picturebooks and graphic novels, and a monograph, Weird Fiction and Science at the Fin de Siècle. DANA ALEX (Kingston University, London, UK) Paper Title: Transformation of Identity: Examining Neural Plasticity in William Gibson’s Cyberpunk Novel Neuromancer Gothic fiction can be defined as the fiction of the nerves. It tremors and unsettles its readers, and plays with their senses and anxieties. William Gibson’s Neuromancer engages with this definition as it focuses on the nervous system, which is used to modernise Gothic tropes, as for instance, tyrannical AIs, haunted cyberspaces and cyber-ghosts. Gibson’s cyberpunk novel is distinct from the Gothic tradition, yet it is precisely this distinction that makes it stand out in contemporary Gothic. Fred Botting notes that cyberpunk evokes ‘new anxieties’ and functions as the ‘dissolution of older […] corporeal orders’ (2008). Indeed, new anxieties emerge in Neuromancer, as through its unlimited possibilities of modifying hybrid, cyborgic bodies, characters and their nervous systems are damaged, diseased and traumatised, which presents a reconsideration of identity. This raises the question: in how far does a subject’s identity alter as a result of brain lesion? (Neuro-)Philosopher Catherine Malabou explores neurological damages using the concept of neural plasticity and argues that events, such as brain damage/trauma, cause an irrevocable ‘metamorphosis of identity’ (2012). In this paper, I will read Neuromancer through a neuro- philosophical lens. Fusing cyberpunk literature and scientific discourse, I will argue that Gibson’s characters – focusing on Case, Molly and Armitage/Corto – do not suffer from old but new forms of neurological damage, which makes them, in Malabou’s terms, the new wounded. I will explain how the characters’ hybrid identities are constructed and altered in Gibson’s neuromantic world, and what this means in terms of the new anxieties within the Gothic, emerging from cyberpunk fiction. Biography: Dana