This is the channel for the Romancing the Gothic online project which offers free classes, lectures, talks, workshops, informational videos, readalongs and author showcases! All connected (sometimes tenuously!) to the Gothic. For more info or to join the free lives classes see the website www.romancingthegothic.com
@@mudgetheexpendable oh thank you! I was aware of all the minor plot points I was speeding past as we went but there are so many!!! Had to let some slide past.
This is great, thank you! I particularly enjoyed the overview of different forms of the sublime. And I was wondering, do you know any good sources on longing or desire-based sublime? I'm very interested in Sehnsucht as sublime longing, but so far haven't found many people discussing it in depth outside of C. S. Lewis.
'Twin Peaks' is interesting for more than its antler imagery, of course. Its owls, being not what they seem, and the implication that owls are what the brain substitutes for something it cannot bear to look upon, suggest the presence of wendigo, and the possessions caused by BOB resemble the state of going wendigo.
I’m not too familiar with gothic literature but I have always noticed a darkness in Taemin’s work. I have been a fan since 2020. This was very interesting and insightful. I find that Herman Hesse quote very interesting in the context of the K-pop industry. The egg is the industry. Taemin is trying to break out of the industry standards and live his truth. He was in the shadow of the other members at first. His solo career he wanted to express himself and challenge those societal norms in K-pop and South Korea as a whole. He was sexualized and treated badly as a kid for being feminine. SM helped push that innocent feminine image. Min Hee Jin (who’s now the CEO of NewJeans label ADOR and has a lot of questionable artistic imagery involving minors and young adults) had him dress shirtless at age 18 in the Sherlock photo shoots. When he was 21 and made his solo debut, she asked him to be shirtless. He wasn’t told beforehand that he would be shirtless. He was mad, because he wasn’t allowed to bulk up in advance. For that first EP he tried to be very masculine to push back at the feminine image forced upon him. During MOVE he was able to reconcile his masculine and feminine sides with the choreography. He absolutely knows what he’s doing! He’s clearly familiar with this western literature. Also, the ending quote is great. Life is not sunshine and rainbows. I also find a lot of his work to cope with loss. I won’t go too in depth and some of it is theorizing, but some of the “doubles” can be interpreted in other ways. Like the just me and you video, and he even has a song called shadow. It can be about a side of himself and unable to escape a certain image that was forced on him. He was brought up in the shadow of Jonghyun who also taught him how to sing when SM wouldn’t train him because he was “tone deaf”. Yeah. But his singing style can be similar. And Jonghyun wrote pretty boy and other songs. So some people would compare them. Taemin wanted to have a unique identity. Jonghyun supported this and supported his career the hardest. I’m sure you know what happened so I won’t say here. But I feel like he is coping with that loss intensely through art. Not only losing a best friend and mentor but losing part of his own artistic identity in a way. The song “identity” at the end of the never gonna dance again series (oh gosh I could go into the concepts of IDEA alone) has the lyric “base to ace” which has a double meaning. Because it’s about his career journey and how he’s known as the ace of K-pop. But the other thing is that his solo album was called Ace and Jonghyun’s was called Base. NGDA series is exploring loss and trying to move forward. Identity is acknowledging how Jonghyun helped him forge his identity. Advice is his claiming himself. Guilty is him tearing down the institutions that hurt him. It’s self incrimination for SM, I’m shocked they let him release it at all. He left the agency this year and has joined BigPlanetMade. He’s still in SM with SHINee. SM makes it hard to leave the company totally as they’ve blacklisted artists before and won’t give up their group names and such. It’s sad. That’s why the whole group hasn’t left I think. But the whole industry is a prison, some cells are just closer to the surface, or the egg shell I guess. You say he’s perfectly happy being a man. Maybe he is. But it’s hard to know that. If he came out as trans or even gay, he would be blacklisted from the industry. The only artists who are able to be out are independent artists. It’s still taboo in South Korea sadly. Slowly changing with the youth. But we’ll see. Companies want to push fan service. I’m non-binary (AFAB) and tbh Taemin was probably instrumental in my self discovery even if I didn’t realize it at the time. I would wonder if he would identify somewhere on the non-binary spectrum if allowed to or even able to come out to himself. Again, we will never know this. Maybe he is happy as a man and it’s all performance. But it’s important to remember that we never know who someone really is. Also, an additional note, the press your number video features him pointing a gun at himself I think. Anyway, thanks for making this!! I really appreciate it.
This talk was such a pleasant surprise! I never thought that kpop would be a topic of discussion in the world of the Gothic, but I’m so glad that scholars are finally recognizing artists (singers, musicians, directors, etc) who utilize the Gothic in their work. I’ve been a fan of Taemin for a long time and have always been fascinated by his unique aesthetic and fearlessness in creating art that’s personal to him (as opposed to simply making something trendy.) You’re 100000% correct in saying that identity is important to Taemin; it’s a theme that is continuously weaved into almost every music video he’s ever made. Taemin’s constantly exploring identity and doubling and using those themes as a way to try to better understand the differences within himself. It’s quite fascinating!
@@deanfan8 There's quite a lot of work on the use of gothic in music and music videos out there :) We even have some more videos about it on this channel! (Though no more Taemin)
@@RomancingTheGothic Thanks! That’s great to know! I hadn’t realized how much work had been done on the Gothic in music/music videos in general, but I’ll certainly look for those videos.
The ultimate haunted house in space for me would have to be the USG Ishimura from the first Dead Space game. Another good one would be the Sevastopol space station from Alien: Isolation. Sierpinski-23 from Signalis is also probably worthy of a mention as a more modern example.
This channel is a goldmine! Are these videos recorded from seminars as part of a larger university course? The format takes me right back to my uni days!
They are recorded from free online classes. If you google Romancing the Gothic you'll find us! There's an eventbrite where you can book to come live if you're interested. There is always a question and answer session which we don't record so you get a little extra live :)
I reread the book recerntly - a fancy new hardback cover the library got in - and realised how much I adored the Seton novels as a kid. Never forgot about oleander poisoning, I tell you... Dean Koontz had a definition of gothic - he wrote some under a penname in a matter of days - but he stressed part of the formula was that the heroine was quite passive, and did not rescue herself. Something I note in the Mary Stewart ones; governesses that could not drive a car, say. It would all be over fast if she could just grab the kid and drive off!
Dean Koontz is quite dismissive of the genre and his own work in it. I do have an issue with all the 'formulas', as they never cover the breadth of the genre. There are plenty of more active heroines in Gothic and Gothic romance too :)
@@RomancingTheGothic I ran off to see if the Seton novels were in audible, and found a Bio of her in the Plus catalogue - dear god, she is sipping vodka before breakfast! HOW did she manage to write anything coherently??? I am SO going to write an Australian Gothic novel; it has all the creepy elements in spades.
Very enjoyable talk about a film and book I loved once upon a time. I can really see the levels you've pointed up and they imporove my memory of both works. Plus, Vincent Price *delicious shiver* Would love to see you wrestle GAYWYCK by "Vincent Virga" to the ground as well. Always assuming you haven't....
Thanks for the lecture Dan! I picked up I Am Stone and read it cover to cover. Thanks for your hard work with collecting the stories! I've really fallen in love with Gilchrist's work. It would be amazing to read one of his novels in the future!
I think there might have been an earlier depiction of the Dance of Death on a glass window in Marktkirche in Hamelin c.1300. We only have a copy of the window today, a painting from 1592. So I don't know if that counts. It's connected to the Pied Piper story.
Thinking a bit more I don't think it can be classified as the Dance of Death. The piper is someone who leads them to the other side, probably not a personification of Death.
Excellent discussion and exploration of Crimson Peak! It's one of my favourite films! I feel like we still aren't aloud to express many of our emotions, even today, wothout being judged, talked about, labeled various things, or made pariahs.
Looking for the works mentioned in this talk and not sure what to put in your search engine? They are as follows: Film: Crimson Peak (2015), directed by Guillermo Del Toro Novel: Wuthering Heights, by Emily Brontë Novel: Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Brontë Novel: Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus, by Mary Shelley (related references to Percy Bysshe Shelley, Lord George Byron, and Mary Wollstonecraft) Novella: Mathilda, by Mary Shelley (I mistakenly described this as being abuse by an uncle, but it was her father in the text) Film: Jane Eyre (2011), directed by Cary Fukunaga Novel: Middlemarch, by George Eliot Novel: Pride and Prejudice, by Jane Austen Novel: Twilight, by Stephenie Meyer Novel: Dracula, by Bram Stoker TV Series: NBC Hannibal TV Series: Game of Thrones & House of the Dragon Movie: Barbie (2023), directed by Greta Gerwig Academic Analysis: The cult structure of the American anti, by Samantha Aburime Essay: Crimson Peak: A Love Letter to Gothic Romance, by Johannes T. Evans Essay: The Real Harm in "Harmful Content", by Johannes T. Evans
Brava! Loved the close exploration of Crimson Peak, and even more the exploration of what the throtling of media that help people explore their own complicated feelings ties so closely to authoritarianism. (Much easier to control people when they haze no choices, on anything.)
Thank you for the lecture! I wanted to ask your opinion on "The Yellow Wallpaper" by C.Gilman and "The Lottery" by S.Jackson - can we put them into the category of female gothic of women in the gothic?
@@RomancingTheGothic I've looked through all the videos on this channel and have encountered so many interesting topics that I'm excited to dwell on . But I haven't noticed anything on Shirley Jackson. Would you be so kind to say where exactly I can find them? If it's not difficult of course
That spinning chair thing being considered "an effective way of emptying the bowels, the bladder and the stomach"...I'm sure it was, good heavens. Also likely a good brain scrambler; I wonder if the people so treated had any balance left, or if their stumbling would be considered proof they needed more of the torture.
@@RomancingTheGothic It is! And it brings to mind Christian, Duke of Jervaulx, from Laura Kinsale's _Flowers from the Storm_, who's sent to Bedlam by his 'loving' family after suffering a head injury and waking up with speech impairements.
One of the most interesting aspects of the pervasiveness of these images (Dracula, Frankenstein, the Headless Horseman) for me, as someone who didn't grow up in an English speaking country, was how they crossed borders and were adapted (and adopted) by other cultures almost seamlessly, well before the internet or foreign film distribution. In Mexico, during the Golden Age of cinema there (between 1936 and 1956, generally), there were multiple movies that explored and used the themes, without being overt adaptations of the translated works. It could be argued that this was due to proximity with the U.S., but I don't believe that alone explains it.
