Abstract
This article seeks to reassess widespread critical usage of the terms “surface” and “superficial” with regard to Gothic fiction. The first part of the article provides a critical examination of the conventional surface-and-depth model, and proposes, as an alternative, a surficial approach to text which assigns to thresholds a central role. The second part brings these notions to bear upon the formulaic language associated with the word “horror”. This is a key term in Gothic fiction but one which (as opposed to the concept of horror) has never been an object of analysis. Concentrating on one Gothic novel, Peter Teuthold’s The Necromancer, the article outlines the formulaic pattern shaped by the fifty-seven tokens of “horror” in the novel, and distils the system of connotations which the pattern attaches to the word. Analysis of formulaic structures reveals two things: first, that formulaicity is a technique for making the “surface” of the text—its language—visible; second, that the connotative system of “horror” in this novel is tied to a conceptualisation of reality for the description of which surface/depth models are inadequate. An alternative analysis is then offered in the light of the concepts of the surficial and the liminal.
Similar content being viewed by others
Notes
For the German source see Kahlert (1792).
The nearest to it is found in analyses of the formulaic language of epic; see, e.g., Lord (1960).
See, e.g., Kames (1762).
For a critique of Punter’s position see Baldick and Mighall (2000).
For detailed analysis of this group see Aguirre (2014).
The system is open; the corpus would expand considerably were we to add instances where diverse synonyms replace “horror”. Compare This horrid tale made my blood run chill (1.187), The preamble of the Austrian gave us reason to expect some horrid tale (1.128); and compare [6], [11], [21].
References
Aguirre, M. (2014). ‘Thrilled with chilly horror’: A formulaic pattern in gothic fiction. Studia Anglica Posnaniensia,49(2), 105–123.
Aguirre, M. (2016). ‘The hollow echo’: Gothic fiction and the structure of a formulaic pattern. European Journal of English Studies,20(1), 95–110.
Aguirre, M. (2017). Thick description and the poetics of the liminal in gothic tales. Orbis Litterarum Universarum,72(4), 294–317.
Aguirre, M., Quance, R., & Sutton, P. (2000). Margins and thresholds: An enquiry into the concept of liminality in text studies. Madrid: The Gateway Press.
Althusser, L., & Balibar, E. (1965, 1973). Lire le capital. Paris: Maspero.
Bakhtin, M. (1981). The dialogic imagination: Four essays (Michael Holquist & Caryl Emerson, trans.). Austin: University of Texas Press.
Baldick, C., & Mighall, R. (2000). Gothic criticism. In D. Punter (Ed.), A new companion to the gothic (pp. 267–297). Oxford: Blackwell.
Baskin, J. (2015). Soft eyes: Marxism, surface, and depth. Mediations, 28(2). http://www.mediationsjournal.org/articles/soft-eyes#endref_13. Accessed 9 May 2018.
Best, S., & Marcus, S. (2009). Surface reading: An introduction. Representations,108(1), 1–21.
Botting, F. (1996). Gothic. London: Routledge.
Chomsky, N. (1965). Aspects of the theory of syntax. Cambridge: MIT Press.
Conger, S. M. (1980). Matthew G. Lewis, Charles Robert Maturin and the Germans. New York: Arno Press.
Deleuze, G. (1969). Platon et le simulacra. Logique du sens (pp. 292–306). Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, G. (1988). Le pli. Leibniz et le baroque. Paris: Minuit.
Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (1980). Mille plateaux. Paris: Minuit.
Derrida, J. (1967). L’écriture et la différence. Paris: Seuil.
Derrida, J. (1979). La loi du genre. Parages (pp. 249–287). Paris: Galilée.
Douglas, M. (1966). Purity and danger: An analysis of the concepts of pollution and taboo. London: Routledge.
Eco, U. (1988). Il pendolo di Foucault. Milano: Bompiani.
Felski, R. (2012). Critique and the hermeneutics of suspicion. M/C Journal, 15(1). http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/431. Accessed 16 July 2016.
Foucault, M. (1967, 1994). Des espaces autres. In Dits et écrits IV (pp. 752–762). Paris: Gallimard.
Freud, S. (1920). Manifest dream content and latent dream thought (G. Stanley Hall, trans.). New York: Boni & Liveright. https://ebooks.adelaide.edu.au/f/freud/sigmund/general-introduction-to-psychoanalysis/chapter7.html. Accessed 24 November 2018.
Gelder, K. (Ed.). (2000). The horror reader. London: Routledge.
Hall, D. (2000). The gothic tide: Schauerroman and gothic novel in the late eighteenth century. In S. Stark (Ed.), The novel in Anglo-German context: Cultural crosscurrents and affinities (pp. 51–60). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Howells, C. A. (1978). Love, mystery and misery: Feeling in gothic fiction. London: Athlone Press.
Islami, S. Y. (2014). What is surficial thought in architecture? Architectural Research Quarterly,18(1), 39–46.
Josselson, R. (2004). The hermeneutics of faith and the hermeneutics of suspicion. Narrative Inquiry,14(1), 1–28.
Kahlert, K. F. (a.k.a. Lawrence Flammenberg) (1792). Der Geisterbanner. Eine Wundergeschichte aus mündlichen und schriftlichen Traditionen. Vienna. https://books.google.es/books?id=FV8ZtHDKQIkC&pg=PA288&lpg=PA288&dq=Der+geisterbanner&source=bl&ots=Q8qAvc0YdV&sig=paaYGqAnIy7KpfuyTscJ3Q_rPhA&hl=en&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjR7pj46ZnRAhVBBMAKHdUTDkMQ6AEIKjAD#v=onepage&q=Der%20geisterbanner&f=false. Accessed 9 July 2017.
Kames, L. (1762, 2005). In P. Jones (ed.) Elements of criticism, (vol. 1, ch. 15). Indianapolis: Liberty Fund. http://oll.libertyfund.org/titles/kames-elements-of-criticism-vol-1. Accessed 29 May 2017.
Kristeva, J. (1980). Pouvoirs de l’horreur. Essai sur l’abjection. Paris: Seuil. The powers of horror: An essay on abjection (L. S. Roudiez, trans.). New York: Columbia University Press (1982), http://users.clas.ufl.edu/burt/touchyfeelingsmaliciousobjects/Kristevapowersofhorrorabjection.pdf. Accessed 2 May 2018.
Lord, A. B. (1960). The singer of tales. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Mandelbrot, B. (1999). The fractal geometry of nature (Rev ed.). New York: W. H. Freeman & Co.
Mandelbrot, B. (2010). Fractals and the art of roughness. TED Talks. http://www.ted.com/talks/benoit_mandelbrot_fractals_the_art_of_roughness. Accessed 10 June 2014.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1945). Phénoménologie de la perception. Paris: Gallimard.
Merleau-Ponty, M. (1964). Le visible et l’invisible. Paris: Gallimard.
Miles, R. (1993). Gothic writing 1750–1820: A genealogy. Manchester: Manchester University Press.
Miles, R. (2012). Ann Radcliffe and Matthew Lewis. In D. Punter (Ed.), A new companion to the gothic (pp. 93–109). Oxford: Blackwell.
Moretti, F. (2000). Conjectures on world literature. New Left Review 1. https://newleftreview.org/II/1/franco-moretti-conjectures-on-world-literature. Accessed 29 December 2016.
Moretti, F. (2005). Graphs, maps, trees. London: Verso.
Murnane, B. (2010). Uncanny translations, uncanny productivity: Walpole, Schiller and Kahlert. In S. Stockhorst (Ed.), Cultural transfer through translation: The circulation of enlightened thought in Europe by means of translation (pp. 141–165). Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Napier, E. R. (1987). The failure of gothic: Problems of disjunction in an eighteenth-century literary form. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Punter, D. (1980). The literature of terror. London: Longman.
Ricoeur, P. (1965). De l’interprétation. Essai sur Freud. Paris: Seuil.
Ricoeur, P. (1969). Le conflit des interprétations. Essais d’herméneutique. Paris: Seuil.
Sadleir, M. (1927). The Northanger novels: A footnote to Jane Austen. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Sedgwick, E. K. (1981). The character in the veil: Imagery of the surface in the gothic novel. Papers of the Modern Linguistics Association,96(2), 255–270.
Sinclair, J. (1991). Corpus, concordance, collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Stroll, A. (1988). Surfaces. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.
Symons, J. (1978, 1981). The tell-tale heart: The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books.
Teuthold, P. (1794). The Necromancer: or the tale of the Black Forest: Founded on facts. Translated from the German of Lawrence Flammenberg. London: Minerva Press.
The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language. (1992). (3rd ed.). Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company.
Thompson, G. R. (Ed.). (1979). Introduction to romantic gothic tales, 1790–1840. New York: Harper & Row.
Turner, V. (1969). The ritual process: Structure and anti-structure. New York: Aldine de Gruyter.
Turner, V. (1974). Dramas, fields and metaphors: Symbolic action in human society. Ithaca: Cornell University Press.
Walpole, H. (1764, 1991). In W.S. Lewis (ed.) The castle of Otranto. Oxford: World’s Classics.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Additional information
Publisher's Note
Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Aguirre, M. “Dreary Abodes”: Gothic Formulaic Discourse as a Technique of the Surface. Neophilologus 104, 1–18 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09617-6
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s11061-019-09617-6