Dystopic Diachronicity: Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene

Millette, Holly-Gale (2018) Dystopic Diachronicity: Gothic in the Age of the Anthropocene. International Gothic Studies Association (IGA): Gothic Hybridities: Interdisciplinary, Multimodal and Transhistorical Approaches, Manchester Metropolitan University, Manchester, United Kingdom. 01 - 03 Aug 2018. (Submitted)

Abstract

Since the turn of the last century, World’s End narratives and/or Human’s End narratives have proliferated. These have found their narrative and aesthetic politic in fictive rhetoric of decadence, difference and degeneration. We know that the resurgence of such representations occurs in periods of ontological and epistemological crisis (Seed, 1999). The political discourse of these ‘apoco-tainments’ are most often found in the oppositions between the Self and the Other and/or between the human Self and the non-human Other – discourses in which that Other is menacing, evil or the Darwinian survivor in a ‘ruined’ world. In exploring the dystopic and grotesque imaginings that arise from and express the darker side of our post-millennial life our evolution towards cataclysmic extinction, one finds Gothic trope taking a new and critically darker turn.

This paper sets the argument that there is a new direction in Gothic Studies, one that is centred by the critical acceptance of the degeneration and ruin that the human has wrought in its epoch – the age of the Anthropocene. Gothic preoccupations with social inequalities, racialized outsiders and dystopic politics are now extending to interstellar narratives (Netflix’s The Expanse, e.g.). Tropes of decay and post-apocalyptic subterranea are being played out on multiplayer gaming platforms such as Metro (4A Studios, 2010 and 2013) and The Secret World (Funcom, 2015-present). Mash-ups of neo-urban horror are being re-design into graphic novels such as Moore’s From Hell (1989 – 1996) and then re-aestheticized for filmic release (2001). In all of these, the shadow of the Anthropocene is observed. This paper connects the Gothic trope found in the New Urban story-worlds to our period of the Anthropocene and argues that the next, critical and aesthetic reinterpretation of the Gothic trope is emerging in the aesthetic narration of the Anthropocene and how it is speeding towards a self-inflicted Armageddon.ed in international journals and critical collections and is
committed to considering the aesthetic and political new directions of the Gothic in the millennium.

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Contributors

Author: Holly-Gale Millette

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