This page contains materials intended
to facilitate class discussion (excerpts from readings,
outlines of issues, links to resources, etc.). The
materials are not necessarily the same as the instructor's
teaching notes and are not designed to represent
a full exposition or argument. This page is subject
to revision as the instructor finalizes preparation.
(Last revised
3/6/02
)
Preliminary Class Business
Description of Reading Exam 2 on Friday, March
8th
Last name only in ID section
New section of exam for "mini-essays"
on concepts (e.g.,
"how would you explain 'viral art'
to someone?"). Instructions
read: "the best answers are ones that
cover the major issues of a topic and also
give evidence of some detailed knowledge
of the readings."
How the exam will handle the business
books (with the exception of Schumpeter)
The Villa Straylight in Neuromancer
(e.g., Ashpool's room, pp. 182-83)
Cf., Poe,
"Fall of the House of Usher":
A servant
in waiting took my horse, and I entered
the Gothic archway of the hall. . . .
The
room in which I found myself was very
large and lofty. . . .
Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light made
their way through the trellissed panes,
and served to render sufficiently distinct
the more prominent objects around. . . .
Dark draperies hung upon the walls.
The general furniture was profuse, comfortless,
antique, and tattered. Many books and
musical instruments lay scattered about,
but failed to give any vitality to the
scene. I felt that I breathed an atmosphere
of sorrow. An air of stern, deep, and
irredeemable gloom hung over and pervaded
all.
The "dungeons and dragons" scene
of MUDs and computer games (such early MUDs
of the late 1970s as "Scepter of Goth"
were based on "Dungeons
and Dragons" role-playing game). The
dungeons-and-dragons scene is supplemented in
cyberpunk fiction by the "voodoo"
scene (as in Gibson's Mona Lisa Overdrive)
Julian Dibbell's "gothic" reporting
of "A Rape in Cyberspace":
The black "magic" motif (pp.
200, 212-213)
The "voodoo" motif (pp. 199,
202)
The "undead" motif (p. 211,
213)
"Melancholy and the creeps"
(p. 213)
The involvement of the narrator in the
story (from objective to subjective, rational
to irrational)
The revival of Gothic architecture in the
18th and 19th centuries in England: an expression
of "romantic" spirit counter to Enlightenment
"rationality"
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House
of Usher" (1839) as example of the main themes
of "Gothic" literature:
The Gothic is an anti-Enlightenment
exploration of darkness and irrationality
"During the whole
of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn
of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively
low in the heavens, I had been passing alone,
on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract
of country; and at length found myself, as the
shades of the evening drew on, within view of
the melancholy House of Usher" (also: gloom
dungeons, etc.)
"The room in which I found myself was very
large and lofty. The windows were long, narrow,
and pointed, and at so vast a distance from
the black oaken floor as to be altogether inaccessible
from within. Feeble gleams of encrimsoned light
made their way through the trellissed panes,
and served to render sufficiently distinct the
more prominent objects around ; the eye, however,
struggled in vain to reach the remoter angles
of the chamber, or the recesses of the vaulted
and fretted ceiling. Dark draperies hung upon
the walls. The general furniture was profuse,
comfortless, antique, and tattered. Many books
and musical instruments lay scattered about,
but failed to give any vitality to the scene.
I felt that I breathed an atmosphere of sorrow.
An air of stern, deep, and irredeemable gloom
hung over and pervaded all."
The Gothic is about
"doubles" or "doppelgangers"
—Roderick and Madeleine Usher as doubles:
"Having deposited
our mournful burden upon tressels within this
region of horror, we partially turned aside
the yet unscrewed lid of the coffin, and looked
upon the face of the tenant. A striking similitude
between the brother and sister now first arrested
my attention ; and Usher, divining, perhaps,
my thoughts, murmured out some few words from
which I learned that the deceased and himself
had been twins, and that sympathies of a scarcely
intelligible nature had always existed between
them."
—Roderick as his own uncanny double (or
avatar):
"We sat down
; and for some moments, while he spoke not,
I gazed upon him with a feeling half of pity,
half of awe. Surely, man had never before so
terribly altered, in so brief a period, as had
Roderick Usher! It was with difficulty that
I could bring myself to admit the identity of
the wan being before me with the companion of
my early boyhood. Yet the character of his face
had been at all times remarkable. A cadaverousness
of complexion; an eye large, liquid, and luminous
beyond comparison; lips somewhat thin and very
pallid, but of a surpassingly beautiful curve
; a nose of a delicate Hebrew model, but with
a breadth of nostril unusual in similar formations
; a finely moulded chin, speaking, in its want
of prominence, of a want of moral energy; hair
of a more than web-like softness and tenuity
; these features, with an inordinate expansion
above the regions of the temple, made up altogether
a countenance not easily to be forgotten. And
now in the mere exaggeration of the prevailing
character of these features, and of the expression
they were wont to convey, lay so much of change
that I doubted to whom I spoke."
—The imagery of doubling:
"It was possible,
I reflected, that a mere different arrangement
of the particulars of the scene, of the details
of the picture, would be sufficient to modify,
or perhaps to annihilate its capacity for sorrowful
impression; and, acting upon this idea, I reined
my horse to the precipitous brink of a black
and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre
by the dwelling, and gazed down — but with
a shudder even more thrilling than before —
upon the remodelled and inverted images of the
gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and
the vacant and eye-like windows."
—The relationship of the narrator to his
story
"A Rape in Cyberspace" as a New
"Fall of the House of Usher":
LamdaMOO as a scene of irrationality: "surreality
and magic" (including irrational architecture)
LamdaMOO as a scene of identity doubling:
—the "voodoo doll" that doubles
online identities
—the doubling of VR and "RL"
identities: p. 203
The Nature of Identity in
Cyberspace, According to "A Rape in Cyberspace"
In RL, a grid of dualisms positions our identity
in ways that enforce social divisions:
Cf., Donna
Haraway, "A Manifesto for Cyborgs":
" . . .
certain dualisms have been persistent
in Western traditions; they have all
been systemic to the logics and practices
of domination of women, people of color,
nature, workers, animals—in short,
domination of all constituted as others,
whose task is to mirror the self. Chief
among these troubling dualisms are self/other,
mind/body, culture/nature, male/female,
civilized/primitive, reality/appearance,
whole/part, agent/resource, maker/made,
active/passive, right/wrong, truth/illusion,
total/partial, God/man. . . .
High-tech culture challenges these dualisms
in intriguing ways." (pp. 36-37
in Trend)
In cyberspace, released from the normal constraints
of body, gender, race, age, etc., people are
free to create "doubles" of their
RL identity.
However, only "psychotics" try to
maintain a complete break between their RL and
VR selves:
—Mr. Bungle as psychotic: p. 209
—But compare the attitude of the "wizards"
(pp. 205, 209-10)
Other people enter a magical, playful, or
disturbing space of blurred relationships between
identities: VR/RL, male/female, etc.
In sum, according to this perspective, computers
"make a difference" in identity. They
help people play out/imagine different or other
selves. They help people internalize the experience
of difference.
The
Literary Gothic Page (literary Gothicism
of the 18th and 19th centuries; includes
some resources in modern Gothic) (Jack G.
Voller, Southern Illinois U. at Edwardsville)
