International Gothic Summer School

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.

Programme for Thursday 8 June

• 9:30-11:00: Workshop one — Emily Brick, Witches
• 11:15-12:45: Workshop two — Sarah Ilott, The Monstrosity of the Border in Contemporary Gothic
• 12:45-13:45: Lunch break
• 13:45-15:15: Workshop three — Xavier Aldana Reyes, The Trauma of Contemporary Horror Cinema
• 15:15-15:45: Coffee break
• 15:45-17:15: Workshop four — Linnie Blake, The Politics of the Gothic. With Zombies.
• 17:30-19:00: Wine reception and literary reading — Carol Margaret Davison reads from her new novel, Bodysnatcher (2023)

Workshop descriptions

Workshop one

This workshop is called Witches, by Emily Brick.

There has been a recent resurgence of witches on screen and in popular culture, encompassing a wave of remakes and reboots of Charmed (2018), The Craft: Legacy (2020), Sabrina (2018) and Suspiria (2018), as well as a rich variety of new texts. New media technologies also offer new ways of representing and engaging with witchcraft via meme culture, #witchtok, spell apps and collective practice via social media.

This session will explore the relationship between historical and contemporary representations of witchcraft, looking at the ways in which these new texts engage with the past and shift established tropes of witches on screen. In doing so, we will consider such questions as what has prompted this renewed interest in the witch as a cipher for social and political anxieties about women? How do contemporary witch texts engage with thematic concerns of the Gothic? And how do male witches fit into frameworks typically focussed on women?

Texts under consideration may include The Witch (2015), American Horror Story: Coven (2013), American Horror Story: Apocalypse (2018) and The Love Witch (2016).

Workshop two

This workshop is called The Monstrosity of the Border in Contemporary Gothic, by Sarah Ilot.

In a period of resurgent and increasingly militarised nationalism, contemporary Gothic has responded with border-crossing monsters that challenge the very distinctions that the border has come to represent in nationalist discourse: the difference between us and them, home and away, host and guest. We will be considering how border-crossing monsters such as the soucouyant and night-witch speak to the violence of systems and the ‘hostile environments’ created for those forced to migrate or deemed not belong in ethno-racist societies. This session will look at a number of contemporary Gothic narratives in order to explore constructions of monstrosity in a divided and unequal world wracked not just by the aftermaths of colonial violence, but by the continued and ongoing racialised and neoimperial violence of the present day. This will enable us to contextualise and explore the critical shift from postcolonial to decolonial Gothic.

Texts under consideration may include David Chariandy’s Soucouyant (2007), Raj Kamal Jha’s Fireproof (2007), Helen Oyeyemi’s White Is For Witching (2009), Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad (2014) and Remi Weekes’ His House (2020).

Workshop three

This workshop is called The Trauma of Contemporary Horror Cinema, by Xavier Aldana Reyes.

Trauma has become the master narrative of contemporary horror, its films compulsively restaging repressed memories, guilt, grief and the overwhelming legacy of the harmful actions of others. What are the social and cultural contexts for this ‘trauma obsession’? And why are the horror genre and the Gothic mode particularly well placed to articulate the silences, occlusions and partial remembrances typically associated with trauma?

This session will look at a number of twenty-first-century films and focus on the ways in which personal trauma is explored by and expressed through the hallucinatory and discombobulating language of cinema and the unique thematic concerns of the Gothic. It will also ask questions about the limits and ethics of painful representation.

Texts under consideration may include The Babadook (2014), Ritual (2017), Hereditary (2018), The Nightingale (2018), Midsommar (2019), It Chapter Two (2019), Saint Maud (2019), His House (2020), Censor (2021) and Men (2022).

Workshop four

This workshop is called The Politics of the Gothic. With Zombies. by Linnie Blake.

In contemporary times the zombie is ubiquitous. But why? How is this figure Gothic and what has it got to tell us about ourselves and our planet?. This session will look at a number of postmillennial zombie narratives in order to explore the ideological function of the Gothic in the late capitalist world. We will be considering whether the Gothic mode of the new millennium is a radical or conservative entity; whether it challenges or retrenches dominant ideologies; whether it offers a critique of the norms and values of our late capitalist world; and whether we, in turn, are zombies or survivors.

Texts under consideration may include Max Brooks’ superlative zombie apocalypse novel World War Z (2006), the Canadian film melodrama pastiche Fido (2006), the US blockbuster Warm Bodies (2013) and BAFTA-winning British television series In the Flesh (2013).

Programme for Friday 9 June

• 9:30-11:00: Getting published. Participants can choose one of two available sessions:
  • Carol Margaret Davison, Writing and Publishing Gothic Fiction
  • Matthew Frost (Head of Editorial at Manchester University Press), Publishing Gothic Scholarship
• 11:15-12:45: Participants can choose one of the two available sessions:
  • Peter Lindfield, Gothic Manchester Walking Tour
  • Neil McRobert, Contemporary Horror and the Talking Scared Podcast
• 12:45-13:45: Lunch break
• 13:45-17:15: Mini conference

Mini conference information

The afternoon session will be devoted to participants’ own papers.

If you’re interested in giving a 20-minute paper, please email a title and short abstract to gothicsummerschool@mmu.ac.uk