In the age of #MeToo, the Female Gothic rises from the critical crypt once again. Examining the educational narrative of Emily St. Aubert in Ann Radcliffe's
The Mysteries of Udolpho
, I argue that ...the Female Gothic has always vividly portrayed emotional invalidation – a term borrowed from cognitive psychologist Marsha Linehan – as a tool to silence righteous, yet naïve, voices and perpetuate imbalances of social power. As the recent #MeToo movement in academic culture demonstrates, the fourth-wave feminist critique of workplace discrimination targets not only sexual misconduct, but also intellectual misconduct. I propose that, often, discrimination in academic spaces uses the very same tool portrayed in the Female Gothic. In this paper, I look to the Female Gothic as well as to feminist pedagogical theory to offer solutions to the problem of emotional invalidation in the Grad School Gothic.
New Zealand author Bernard Beckett’s young adult novel Genesis (2006) blends classical philosophy and Gothic tropes in a dystopian novel about the nature and ends of humanity. It is a curious work, ...presented in the form of philosophical dialogue and set in a future world known as The Republic, in which robots have triumphed over humanity and formed a new society based on rational order. Yet sinister underpinnings to their society and their emotional origin-story, which forms the core of this novel, show both that their rational world order is built on lies, deception, and murder, and that the human soul is harder to be rid of than they imagine. The clash between robots and humans is depicted as a clash between reason and passion, and also as a clash between a classical calm (seen in the Republic’s emphasis on classical philosophy) and the Gothic emotions associated with the dark, but emotional, side of humanity. Genesis is a compelling reflection on the nature of the human soul, aimed at young readers. This paper will trace how that reflection plays out through Beckett’s use of classical and Gothic ideals in an unusually thought-provoking dystopian work for young readers.
The semantic range of ditransitive verbs in Modern English has been at the center of linguistic attention ever since the pioneering work of Pinker (1989.
. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press). At the same ...time, historical research on how the semantics of the ditransitive construction has changed over time has seriously lagged behind. In order to address this issue for the Germanic languages, the Indo-European subbranch to which Modern English belongs, we systematically investigate the narrowly defined semantic verb classes occurring in the ditransitive construction in Gothic, Old English and Old Norse-Icelandic. On the basis of data handed down from Proto-Germanic and documented in the oldest layers of the three Germanic subbranches, East, West and North Germanic, respectively, we show that the constructional range of the ditransitive construction was considerably broader in the earlier historical stages than now; several subclasses of verbs that could instantiate the ditransitive in early Germanic are infelicitous in the ditransitive construction in, for instance, Modern English. Taking the oldest surviving evidence from Germanic as point of departure, we reconstruct the ditransitive construction for an earlier proto-stage, using the formalism of Construction Grammar and incorporating narrowly defined semantic verb classes and higher level conceptual domains. We thus reconstruct the internal structure of the ditransitive construction in Proto-Germanic, including different levels of schematicity.
Nature is omnipresent and ecological questions are often problematized in Gothic fiction produced in the Nordic region during the last two decades. By developing the concept of eco-Gothic in ...combination with theory related to the concept of the uncanny, this article will discuss how contemporary Gothic texts can be understood as dealing with different notions of nature, place and identity in a time of ecological crisis. The analysis will focus on John Ajvide Lindqvist´s Handling the Undead (2005), a novel that can be understood as dealing with the issue of solidarity with the nonhuman or unhuman other, the undead people who transgress the boundary between life and death, but also with matters of climate and environmental politics. The discussion will be concentrated mainly on three aspects of the novel of relevance to ecology and the uncanny: the depiction of character, place and climate; the motif of mind reading and mind-altering experiences, and the importance of melancholia and death.
In 1691 Augustin-Charles D’Aviler published his Cours d’architecture qui comprend les ordres de Vignole. Ostensibly one of the many extended editions of Vignola’s Regola delli cinque ordini ...d’architettura (1562) that would appear over the course of the 16th and 17th century, D’Aviler’s Cours is in fact an expansive and not always systematic compendium on design and construction, covering subjects ranging from the design of locks to the layout of the princely residence. Still, the Cours opens with a short biography of Vignola and is dedicated for its first part to the five orders discussed by the Italian architect. But before D’Aviler dives into the proportions of the Tuscan order, the first and lowest of the five, he treats an altogether different subject: mouldings. Over three sections D’Aviler develops a small design theory of the subject: “des moulures, et de la manière de les bien profiler”, “des ornemens des moulures” and “du choix des profiles”.
A closer look at these sections will show how D’Aviler deals with concerns and anxieties related to the two foundational creative acts of classicism: imitation and invention. The moulding is an architectural element that allows D’Aviler to explore the tension between these two creative acts, thanks to its intricate composition and its capacity to articulate the surface of a building. He does so in the pages of a printed treatise. This medium frames the matters of imitation and invention in terms of literacy and replication. D’Aviler constructs in words and image a vocabulary that allows for the reproduction of the principles he proposes. Thanks to the medium of the treatise, these principles can be taught and reproduced, an effect most apparent in the considerable afterlife of his theory of mouldings.
The load carrying capacity of a typical greenhouse film used as covering for a Gothic-type greenhouse was investigated under negative wind pressure. The film was simulated as a membrane through ...appropriate shell elements and analysed with the finite element method (FEM). The design wind pressures were calculated based on the provisions of Eurocode 1 and EN13031. The FEM model boundary conditions corresponded to the real film supporting conditions of an industrial type greenhouse structure. The film was pre-tensioned at its initial state in the longitudinal direction, and then subjected to uniform negative wind pressure. The nonlinear elastic analysis with large deformations results showed that, as the wind pressure increases, the principal tensile stress in the film increases and gradually reaches the material stress at yield value. Plastic deformation is expected to take place and the film loses its capacity to return to its initial undeformed state. Consequently, the plastically deformed film loses its prestress state and its proper elastic behaviour. Depending on the final wind pressure intensity and the degradation condition of the film, premature failure may therefore occur. The analysis revealed that the film failure is due to insufficient supporting of the film on the steel structure. This behaviour was verified by examining a real greenhouse film failure case. Various supporting systems of the greenhouse covering films with additional intermediate supports were analysed and optimal design solutions are proposed. The proposed optimised supporting systems of greenhouse films covers a gap in the current European standard for greenhouse design.
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•Analysis of load carrying capacity of greenhouse covering films under wind action.•Premature failure of greenhouse films is due to insufficient supporting systems.•Numerical analysis results are verified by a real gothic type greenhouse case study.•Methodology proposed for optimised design of supporting systems of greenhouse films.•The proposed methodology covers a gap in European standard for greenhouse design.
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