ACLA 2006 Annual Meeting: The Human and Its Others

Conventionally, the Gothic narrative traces the encounter of the human subject with the mysterious and horrifying supernatural, that lies beyond human experience. This seminar will address the tendency of the Gothic text to replace the supernatural figure of horror with the human Other, the person who is represented as being inhumanly horrifying. The seminar will be divided into three panels: The Racial/Cultural Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which Gothic horror is located onto the figure of the racial or cultural Other, who is represented as monstrous by the dominant culture. The Sexual Other and Gothic Horror panel will consider moments in which sexual difference results in horror. The Ill or Disabled Other and Gothic Horror panel will detail moments in which physical or mental difference is translated into inhuman monstrosity that results in horror.

Friday, March 24

Panel Title: The Racial/Cultural Other and Gothic Horror

Matthew Frankel, University of Rhode Island
“The Architecture of Melville’s Imagination”
Grzegorz Danowski, The University of Western Ontario, Bram Stoker’s
“Dracula and the Vampire of Victorian Xenophobia”
Chuck Jackson, University of Houston-Downtown
“The Gothic State(s): The Horrors of National Emergency and the Crisis of Black Male Subjectivity”
Monica Young-Zook, Macon State College
“A Very Old Program: 9/11 and the Vampires of The Matrix: Reloaded”

Saturday, March 25

Seminar meets in McCosh Hall B12

Panel Title: The Sexual Other and Gothic Horror

Ruth Bienstock Anolik, Villanova University
“‘There Was a Man’: The Dangerous Husband in The Winter’s Tale, A Sicilian Romance and Linden Hills”
Elizabeth Neiman, University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee
“Criminalizing Readership: Critical Reaction to the 1790s Minerva Press Gothics”
Alexandra Reuber, Louisiana State University
“Inhuman Monstrosity: The Sexual Other in Matthew Lewis’s The Monk and Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein”
Adria Garry, Indiana University-Bloomington
“Possession, Transgression, Repression, and Revenge: Japanese ‘Gothic’ and the Feminine”

Sunday, March 26

Panel Title: The Ill or Disabled Other and Gothic Horror

Cynthia Hall, University of California, Riverside
“Gothic Deformities: Hunched Backs, Curved Spines, and 19th-Century Social Reform”
Gwen Hyman, The Cooper Union
“‘Literally the Half of a Man’: Class, Industrialism and the Gothic Gentleman in Wilkie Collins’s The Law and the Lady”
Hitomi Nabae, Kobe City University of Foreign Studies
“Hands, Breasts, and a Feeling of the Human: A Modern Gothic in Lafcadio Hearn’s ‘Ingwa-banashi’”
Maria Purves, Independent Scholar
“Disabled Women in Daphne du Maurier’s Short Stories”