THE GOTHIC: VILLAINS, VIRGINS, DOUBLES; VAMPIRES, ZOMBIES, GHOSTS

In 2020, Julia Ducournau received the prestigious Golden Palm Film Award for her latest film “Titan”. It provoked a number of ambiguous reactions, some of them in Bulgaria. Although her latest work repeatedly focuses on the woman and her experiences, Ducournau’s brave solutions and feminist themes are visible in the 2016 production entitled “Raw”. This debut film plays with roles and concepts, long established in cinema, of the passive position of women. Ducournau’s heroine literally and metaphorically “tastes” the blood of life. Justin’s story and the course of her ritual transformation allude to the Gothic tradition of representing the vampire. But while the classical gothic vampire feeds on his immortality (and sexuality) by feeding on the blood of his victims, Ducournau’s bloodthirsty heroine “drinks” her way to realization of one’s own pleasure and emotional maturity. The origin of Justin’s thirst is not insignificant – she inherits it from her mother. This article analyses the film “Raw” as a female reading of classical gothic imagery and the typification of the female character.

The article explores the myth of the double and its manifestations in literature. The focus is on the novella “Adventure on New Year’s Eve” by E. T. A. Hoffman. The figures of doppelgängers in the novel and the wavering ego identities of the characters are consistently traced. The multiplicity of the self and its vacillation are examined through Carl Gustav Jung’s concept of total personality.

This paper looks at a series of “fearful” translated fictional texts around the short story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1856) by Edgar Allan Poe that appeared in the periodicals after the end of the Crimean war (1853–1856), offered by authors such as Todor Shishkov, St. S. Bobchev, Konstantin Fotinov, Hristo Vaklidov, Nikola Mihaylovski, Dimitar Blaskov, Pandeli Kisimov, et al. These texts corresponded to the old human interest in horrors and the supernatural that gain new force in the mid-19th century in Bulgarian literature. In this context, their similarities with the Gothic novel are traced. Some transformations of the originals in the process of translation are marked, such as the shift from anti-Catholic line to anti-Greek, and also their influence on the original Bulgarian fiction from that time.

The article outlines the parameters of the horrific in the Slavic mediaeval literature of Byzantine type. The aim of the research is to compare the mediaeval Slavic horrific with the Gothic version of the same category through a prospective approach. Translated and original Slavic-language works (different in origin, genre and style) from the IX to the XVII century have been analyzed, but later texts have also been used for comparison. Among the main contextual meanings of the Slavic mediaeval words for horror are: 1. ‘fear’, 2. ‘compassion’, 3. ‘fear combined with astonishment’, 4. ‘combination of wonder and delight’. Attention is paid to the significantly reduced presence of verbal signals of experience of horror-compassion in the Byzantine martyrs’ lives and, conversely, to the escalation of the feeling of horror in the Slavic versions of the vitas (in the works of St. Dimitry of Rostov). The common features which unite the mediaeval horrific and the Gothic one are above all the supernatural as a source of horror and the connection between the horror and the sublime. Revelation (to the mind) of the Divine plan for the salvation of people, which is the most sublime phenomenon in the history of the world, stimulates the theological activity of mind and arouses delight. In mediaeval Slavic texts, however, this delight is often referred to by the lexeme оужасъ and its derivatives. The reason for this is sought primarily in the Greek equivalent ἔκστασις, which tends to be used as a generic term for going beyond the usual emotional states, for any kind of extreme experience – positive or negative.

The text presents a genealogy of terror and terrorism by interpreting the political rhetoric of the French Revolution and the political theory of the Enlightenment in relation to the reception of Gothic fiction in late 18th century England. By doing that, the article tries to establish connections in the use of terror in literature and politics in order to present the links between fiction and power in relation to the problems of terror and terrorism in the particular time frame.

The article focuses on the dialogue “Lugubrious Nights” by José Cadalso and analyses it from the point of view of its Gothic and Enlightenment traits. While Tediato, the protagonist, embodies the ideas of the Enlightenment, the Gothic is associated with the atmosphere of horror and the constant presence of the supernatural. The dichotomies, constituent of the poetics of the Gothic, between the supernatural past and the devoid of supernatural present are transformed in the dialogue into oppositions between the rational Tediato and the superstitious Lorenzo. Thanks to the genre of the dialogue the tension between the two poles remains constant which on its turn enhances the impact of “Lugubrious Nights”.

The present text focuses on the idea of the self-reflexive nature of the Gothic. It is argued that one of the signs of such “Gothic” self-reflexivity can be linked to the notion of Gothic laughter, developed by Ognyan Kovachev in his work on Gothic literature. The central research question regards how the idea of gothic self-reflexivity can be found in contemporary literature through the analysis of the novel “Prince” by Argentinian writer César Aira.

The current paper aims to point out three points of intersection between the gothic tradition and surrealist art by drawing comparisons between some of the works of Max Ernst, Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo and some key gothic fiction traits. The work of Max Ernst is represented by his three collage novels, while the text also focuses on Leonora Carrington’s fiction and some of Remedios Varo’s paintings. The paper examines the ways in which the three artists’ works relate to reality and dream and how the convergence of the two states forms surreality. The relationship between reality and surreality is examined through the lens of alchemy, madness and mystification, which are inseparable parts of the work of Ernst, Carrington and Varo, as well as key elements of the gothic cannon. Additional examples are drawn from the works of Vítězslav Nezval and China Miéville.

Matilda is the key character in Matthew Gregory Lewis’ novel “The Monk”: she is the seductress, the femme fatale, who sets in motion the series of sins committed by the monk Ambrosio. The text examines Matilda as a figure of seduction in Lewis’s novel, defining the heroine’s fatality through questions of the instrumentalization of gender, the exposure of the body, the dynamics between disguise and revelation. By outlining several techniques of seduction that the heroine employs in the realization of her goal (disguise of self, gender, virtues, face) it will appear that the use of disguise and the play of concealment and revelation are the temptress’s primary tools.