As part of our goal in "rethinking" what Shirley Jackson scholarship looks like, Robert Lloyd, Joan Passy, and Eric Savoy each re-read Hattenhauer and wrote a new review of the work, looking at it ...from this moment of Jackson Revival. What is it that this work offers us? What is worth keeping? What needs rethinking? These reviews were then exchanged, and each person responded the other two, teasing out potential avenues of further inquiry, thinking, or research. Where do we go from here? What might rethinking get us?
While the family unit in the Gothic novel has been widely discussed, the figure of the Gothic cousin has largely been relegated to the periphery of critical scholarship. This paper contends that the ...cousin occupies a particularly unheimlich position in the family unit: a cousin might be of the same age, or so distant in age that they are almost a stranger; they might be entirely unfamiliar, or raised from childhood with their cousins; they might be an acceptable romantic interest or an entirely taboo one. While clearly a flexible, shifting figure within the family unit, in many Gothic novels the arrival of a cousin causes significant upheaval - either immediate or generational - that undermines, dismantles, or enacts a renegotiation of the domestic order. The intrusions of Charles in Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle and Rachel in Daphne du Maurier's My Cousin Rachel both reflect and reinforce this trajectory. In this paper, we consider the ways in which Rachel and Charles support our interpretation of the cousin as a disruptive figure within Gothic texts.
Gothic literature is frequented by haunted texts particularly outlining a ruinous spatial relationship between the female and the haunted spaces. Using Shirley Jackson's Haunting of Hill House as ...primary text, this paper studies how haunting spaces, underlying anxieties, and prejudices against women manifest the dark atmosphere that threatens and eventually engulfs the female. Chapter by chapter, the spatial hauntings are coupled with supporting ideas of the uncanny. The article explores how the uncanny exhibits itself in a haunted space and how gender is connected to suppressed fears in women. The conclusion drawn lays emphasis on the recognition of reasons backing gendered hauntings and how women extract fears from their repressed past and embed them within domestic borders. Though the hauntings that happen around women are not untrue, this article argues how women are more likely to suffer from hauntings due to repressed traumas and fears.
Nowhere is American author Shirley Jackson’s (1916-1965) social and political criticism is so intense than it is in her seminal fictional masterpiece “The Lottery”. Jackson severely denounces ...injustice through her emphasis on a bizarre social custom in a small American town, in which the winner of the lottery, untraditionally, receives a fatal prize. The readers are left puzzled at the end of the story as Tessie Hutchinson, the unfortunate female winner, is stoned to death by the members of her community, and even by her family. This study aims at investigating the author’s social and political implications that lie behind the story, taking into account the historical era in which the story was published (the aftermath of the bloody World War II) and the fact that the victim is a woman who is silenced and forced to follow the tradition of the lottery. The paper mainly focuses on the writer’s interest in human rights issues, which can be violated even in civilized communities, like the one depicted in the story. The shocking ending, the researchers conclude, is Jackson’s protest against dehumanization and violence.
Shirley Jackson is most known for her haunting fiction, but her memoir works, which brought her the most success in her lifetime, are often overlooked due to their status as “housewife humour” books. ...Readers often find it difficult to reconcile these lighthearted family memoirs with the uncanny fiction that Jackson’s name has been associated with in the years since her death. I argue, however, that these memoir works portray a more sinister home beneath their surface, and that Jackson’s fiction and memoir works are much more similar than they first appear. My study analyses Jackson’s two memoirs, Life Among the Savages and Raising Demons, along with her final three fiction novels, The Sundial, The Haunting of Hill House, and We Have Always Lived in the Castle, in order to reconcile the two seemingly contrasting depictions of the home and argue that the home in her warm memoirs and the home in her haunting fiction is, in fact, one and the same. In order to do this, I read Jackson’s work against their genre - reading her memoirs for horror, and her fiction for the warm, affectionate sentiment expressed towards the domestic in her memoirs. I conclude that Jackson’s refusal to adhere to categorization of any kind allows her to create an honest depiction of the home as a place of simultaneous comfort and terror
When I played my first interactive fiction game in graduate school, I was totally hooked; it reminded me of the Choose Your Own Adventure books I had devoured in the '90s. The game I played was a ...text...based, interactive, branching narrative, where the player was asked to read, make choices, and some...times solve problems along the way. Though I had never heard about interactive fiction before then, I loved the sense of possibility: that there were seemingly infinite stories contained within one text. I loved feeling that I could help shape the narrative I read and also loved discovering the limitations of that control. An additional question that I wanted students to consider was how interactive the process of reading is. In making interactive fiction, students were invited to think about what expectations they brought to the genres of both short stories and games. How do we read a short story, and how do our identities and experience help shape our understanding of a text?
In her classic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House, Shirley Jackson appropriates Shakespearean romantic comedies and tragedies for the purposes of lesbian gothic. Shakespeare's plays provide ...signposts for leading (as well as misleading) protagonist Eleanor Vance through the fraught terrain of restrictive gender expectations, patriarchal persecution, and queer desire in Fifties America. The present article develops a queer reading of Eleanor's relationship with Theodora. This essay pays particular attention to the ways Jackson uses Shakespeare to structure and complicate the erotic subtext of The Haunting of Hill House.
On Laughter and Trust SHULTS, LIZ
English journal,
03/2020, Letnik:
109, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Do you remember the first time you accidentally drew a phallus on your whiteboard in front of a group of teenagers? I do. We were annotating the poem In a Station of the Metro by Ezra Pound. It was ...the first class of the day at my private, Christian school in the spring of my sixth year of teaching. Students had copies of the poem accessible on their iPads. My iPad was mirrored to my projector screen, which displayed my rapid annotations, as we analyzed the two lines of verse. At this point in my career, I would by no means consider myself a seasoned teacher. My skin had thickened, however, and while first-year-me might have attempted a Keep Calm and Carry On moment, sixth-year-me was able to have a moment of laughing at my own gaffe with my students. After a few minutes, we were all able to pull ourselves together and continue with the annotation.
Patricia García’s article, “A Geocritical Perspective on the Female Fantastic: Rethinking the Domestic” approaches the question of the “female fantastic” from a spatial angle. Proponents of the ...female fantastic (for example E. Moers, S. Gilbert and S. Gubar and A. Richter) often coincide in a leitmotif that characterises this tradition: the haunted house. This leads to a great deal of studies centred on how female authors employ domestic spaces as a means to give voice to the lives of women invisibilised by patriarchy and, through the irruption of the supernatural, as a way to subvert domestic ideology. Whereas these studies have done much to give visibility to the work of female authors, they have also generated, as this article will argue, a limited understanding of the female fantastic. The first section of this article is of a theoretical nature and reflects on the methodological and conceptual limitations of such approaches to the female fantastic centred on domestic space. Instead of asking what the spaces of the female fantastic are, this section shifts the focus to: “which spaces are overlooked by placing such emphasis on the domestic?” The second part offers an alternative reading of the trope of the haunted house in female-authored fantastic fictions. Haunted urban apartments by Rhoda Broughton and Charlotte Riddell, and well-known haunted houses by Shirley Jackson, Ann Rivers and Patricia Esteban Erlés are employed as case studies to develop a feminist geocritical method that goes beyond domestic interiors and engages with a critical reflection on other spatial elements, such as external frames, scale, location and movement.
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