• Joyce Carol Oates Revisits the Schoolhouse Gothic

    Author(s):
    Sherry Truffin (see profile)
    Date:
    2016
    Group(s):
    American Literature, Gothicists, Horror
    Subject(s):
    American literature, Education, Arts, Gothic
    Item Type:
    Book chapter
    Tag(s):
    education, gothic literature, Gothic
    Permanent URL:
    http://dx.doi.org/10.17613/M6CR38
    Abstract:
    The “Schoolhouse Gothic” represents teachers, students, and academic institutions using Gothic tropes such as the monster, the curse, and the trap. Joyce Carol Oates’s 2013 novel The Accursed both exemplifies and deviates from this tradition. Like other Schoolhouse Gothic works, The Accursed portrays the university as a place of mystified power, physical isolation, social stress, and emotional disintegration. Unlike these works, however, school does not leave its primary student-figure, Josiah Slade, permanently damaged, vengeful, and monstrous. Like his literary ancestor Quentin Compson of William Faulkner’s The Sound the Fury and Absalom, Absalom, Josiah neither experiences abuse at the hands of his professors nor victimizes others in retaliation. Comparing Josiah’s story with Quentin’s brings into focus the political and economic implications of the Schoolhouse Gothic. Harvard represents for Quentin an accursed capitalist future of loss and failure that must be avoided, while Princeton represents for Josiah an accursed capitalist past that can be replaced with a more promising socialist future. Quentin’s breakdown is permanent and irrevocable, while Josiah’s enables the development of a new, more ethical consciousness. In Josiah, enlightenment values such as intellectual curiosity, unsentimental objectivity, and faith in human reason—typically monstrous in the Schoolhouse Gothic—are recuperated and redirected, but only after being severed from their customary but accursed educational, political, religious, and economic entanglements.
    Metadata:
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    Published as:
    Book chapter     Show details
    Publisher:
    Edinburgh University Press
    Pub. Date:
    2016
    Book Title:
    American Gothic Culture: An Edinburgh Companion
    Author/Editor:
    Jason Haslam and Joel Faflak
    Chapter:
    6
    Page Range:
    110 - 125
    ISBN:
    9781474401616
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    6 years ago
    License:
    All Rights Reserved
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