Programme for Wednesday 7 June
- 9:30-11:00: Workshop one — Matt Foley, Reading Gothic Entrapment in the Writings of Ira Levin
- 11:15-12:45: Workshop two — Elle Beal, Mid-twentieth-century Gothic and Existentialism
- 12:45-13:45: Lunch break
- 13:45-15:15: Workshop three — Matt Carter, The Bizarre Enormity of ‘the Mad and the Macabre’
- 15:15-15:45: Coffee break
- 15:45-17:15: Workshop four — Sorcha Ní Fhlainn, ’ A Plane out of Phase’: The Undying Gothic 1980s
Workshop descriptions
Workshop one
This workshop is called Reading Gothic Entrapment in the writings of Ira Levin, by Matt Foley.
The session will begin with a short lecture, one that aims to introduce attendees to Ira Levin’s hitherto critically neglected corpus by reading the Gothic motifs of his dramatic works, including themes of entrapment and revenge in his play Veronica’s Room (1973).
In the workshop, attendees will undertake a series of exercises that prompt discussion of Levin’s consistent explorations of the dissolution of individual will and sanity in the face of collective delusions. The representation of gendered entrapment is one of the hallmarks of Levin’s aesthetic. The workshop will begin with a close analysis of Rosemary’s Baby (1967) as a starting point for undertaking a comparative reading across Levin’s writing that reframes his popular fictions in view of the recurring concerns of his less studied writing. Can we articulate a particularly Levin-esque aesthetic of entrapment that recurs across what on the surface may seem to be such a diverse range of genre writing?
Workshop two
This workshop is called Mid-twentieth-century Gothic and Existentialism, by Elle Beal.
This session will open with a short lecture introducing attendees to themes of existential dread and the Gothicising of morality in the mid-twentieth century before focussing on the works of Iris Murdoch, principally her strange Gothic novel of entrapment, The Unicorn (1963).
One of the defining features of literature and philosophy of the mid-twentieth-century period (and represented in Murdoch’s fiction and non fiction writing) is the haunting awareness ‘that God is dead. God remains dead’ (Nietzsche, 1882), culminating in a distinct and reoccurring Gothic aesthetic of purgatorial entrapment in dream-like spaces with no exit or escape, where characters wait, watch and are being watched!
The workshop that follows will begin with a reading of the journey to the ‘wrong place’ in the introductory chapter of The Unicorn as an opener to the novel’s themes of purgatory and to Murdoch’s reframing of the individual as a mythical, illusory and performative being acting out their life as if in a dream or on a precarious stage. Attendees will then move through a series of exercises and debates to prompt discussion of the philosophical or existential implications raised by The Unicorn in relation to key scenes from the novel. Are all Murdoch’s characters morally un compassed and doomed to be shaped and directed by nothing loftier than selfish human desire?
Other mid-century purgatorial texts for consideration may include Daphne De Maurier’s Rebecca (1938), literature of the post-WWII period, such as Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (1944), Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot (1953), and the horror films of the 1970s Don’t Look Now (1973) and Long Weekend (1978).
Workshop three
This workshop is called The Bizarre Enormity of ‘the Mad and the Macabre’, by Matt Carter.
The Gothic is replete with examples of strange places that present phenomena that are beyond human capacity to control, and which collapse normative boundaries and compromise reality. Frequently, such places are manifested in the so-called ‘terrible house’ – different, degraded, dangerous – in short, the ‘wrong place.’
This session will look at just such a place in Tobe Hooper’s The Texas Chain Saw Massacre (1974). It will first introduce the film by outlining its status as a benchmark in horror cinema. Then will follow a series of exercises that explicate its incongruities, and which place it within the context of the American imaginary during a traumatic period in the United States’ history. Though focused on The Texas Chain Saw Massacre, the session will also refer to other Hooper films that use Gothic intertexts, and which recapitulate them as metatexts,
including Eaten Alive (1976), Salem’s Lot (1979), The Funhouse (1981) and Lifeforce (1985).
Workshop four
This workshop is called A Plane out of Phase’: The Undying Gothic 1980s by Sorcha Ní Fhlainn.
The session will conclude the day on the twentieth-century Gothic with a short lecture on the ‘long 1980s’, aiming to prompt attendees to consider why this decade still has a profound sense of cultural purchase right into the twenty-first century. In the accompanying workshop, attendees will undertake discussions and apply critical concepts about 1980s visual aesthetics, storytelling, and socio-cultural anxieties in exemplary Gothic film and literary texts to examine why much of our understanding of the contemporary Gothic experience still returns to 1980s cultural horrors. The workshop will begin with the 1980s as we ‘know’ it through filmic examples, with a focus on youthful protagonists (heroes, vampires, and slasher survivors), and move on to examine how we have ‘repackaged’ and perhaps are still in the thrall of an (undying) Gothic epoch. Texts include, but will not be limited to: sequels, reboots, remakes, and Stranger Things, seasons 1-4.
The workshop will consist of identifying key concepts and ideas that spring from the 1980s onscreen, its anxieties and concerns, and how these are (re)interpreted today, marking the decade as a Gothic space in its own right, and in the memory of those who survived it. The session will also refer to prevalent Gothic film texts and anxieties around children, hauntings, vampires and slasher killers, in text such as Return to Oz (1985), The Lost Boys (1987), A Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), The Monster Squad (1988), and a variety of other popular films of the 1980s and into the 1990s and the Fin-de- Millennium.