Programa de Pós-Graduação em Inglês presents:
Postgraduate Symposium: The Gothic in Literature and Film
Monday 21 November. Auditório Henrique Fontes. CCE bloco B.
Universidade Federal de Santa Catarina
PROGRAMME
9:30 - 10:00 * Opening Speech: What is Gothic?
Dr. Daniel Serravalle de Sá (introduction by Professor Anelise R. Corseuil)
Session 1
10:00 -10:20 * Hyde and Seek: Mr. Hyde’s Game of Shadows in Stevenson’s The Strange Case
of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Fernando Antonio Bassetti Cestaro
10:20 -10:40 * The Gothic Closet: Queer Monsters in Horror Films
Diogo Brügemann
10:40 -11:00 * What a Nice Vampire! The Deconstruction of the Gothic Vampire: A Study About
Bill Compton, from True Blood
Fernanda Farias Friedrich
11:00 -11:20 * Lesbian Gothic in Graphic Form: Retrieving the Tropes of the 'Haunted House'
and the 'Double' in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Renata Lucena Dalmaso
11:50 - 14:10 Lunch
Session 2
14:10 -14:30 * You Call It Madness but I Call It Love: The Relationship between Young
Audiences and Vampires
Lívia Maria Paschoal
14:30 -14:50 * The Gothic Apocalypse: Gothic elements in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse
Now
Alexander Gross
14:50- 15:10 * Malleus Mysticorum: the cult of the macabre and the unknown in Andrew
Leman's The Call of Cthulhu
George Alexandre Ayres de Men
15:10 -15:30 * Homer and The Raven – The Terror in Poe's and in the 90s generation
Gustavo Moschini Salich
16:00–16:20 Coffee break
Session 3
16:20-16:40 * Cannibal Madness or The Lurid Horror of Survivor Type
Matias Corbett Garcez
16:40- 17:00 * The Gothic as an aesthetics of evil on The Twilight Saga
Sofia Mosimann Caubet
17:00- 17:20 * Beware the ballerina...She has not been quite HERSELF lately:
the Doppelgänger in Black Swan (2010)
Sarah de Sousa Silvestre
17:20- 17:40 * Genre and Gender: Clover's ‘Final Girl’ in the films Halloween, Friday the 13th
part 2 and Nightmare on Elm Street
Raphael de Boer
18:10- 18:40 * Keynote speech: O Gótico como Ficção de Crime
Professor Julio Jeha – UFMG (introduction by Professor Susana Bornéo Funck)
18:40- 19:30 * Cocktail
Each participant will make a 20-minute presentation and the floor will be open for 30-minute
discussions.
ABSTRACTS
What a Nice Vampire! The Deconstruction of the Gothic Vampire: A Study About
Bill Compton, from True Blood
Fernanda Farias Friedrich
The vampire figure has taken on a new meaning as the living dead creatures have turned
into a popular character nowadays. Once seen as Gothic characters inside plots of literature and
audiovisual domain, now some vampires are portrayed more often as humanized creatures. Bill
Compton - from the television show True Blood - is an example of how the living dead are
portrayed in fiction along with human characteristics. Born in Southern United States of America,
during the eighteenth century, Bill was turned against his will into a vampire, when returning
home from the Civil War. Later on, as the years 2000 arrive, a synthetic blood is created and the
vampires start to live among humans. As True Blood attempts to show what it would be like for
vampires to reveal themselves and face the prejudice from society, the series acknowledges that
the living dead are similar to human – not all are good, not all are evil. Bill is shown throughout
the beginning of the television series as a cordial and romantic vampire, who stands for many
human principles. Thus, Bill Compton represents a different type of Gothic vampire that does not
harm humans and just wants to co-exist in peace.
Homer and The Raven – The Terror in Poe's and in the 90s generation
Gustavo Moschini Salich
E.A. Poe is one of the most famous American writers of terror and The Raven, his
masterpiece, was a popular success when it was published in 1845. A hundred and fifty five years
later the first Simpsons Treehouse of Horror appeared on television and the third episode of the
show was called The Raven. This research deals with the elements of terror and its popularity in
the adaptation of the American Gothic poem The Raven from E.A. Poe into the homonym
Simpson’s Halloween episode. Was The Raven a Gothic poem of horror? If it was, why it became
so popular? And how to explain its appearance in a comedy cartoon a hundred and fifty years after
the death of its author? Within these questions and historical analysis of the context, popularity
and purposes of the original and the parody this research has the objective to pursuit a better
understanding of the Gothic and the Terror, what was perceived as terrifying and/or dark, what
changed and why. In Lisa's words: “maybe people were easy to scare back then.” Maybe. This
will focus on the 90s generation and the end of the so-called modern era.
The Gothic as an aesthetics of evil on The Twilight Saga
Sofia Mosimann Caubet
The purpose of this presentation is to identify the Gothic elements on the ‘bad vampires’
from the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book became a five movies sequence. At
the present moment the third movie of the sequence was the last one to be released. In this movie
the ‘bad vampires’ family is revealed to the public. The main subject of the story is the romance
between Bella who is human and Edward as a vampire. The author humanizes the ‘good vampire’,
Edward. He and his family mix up with humans living their reality. Only very observer eyes such
as Bella’s can realize what Edward really is. Thus, the ‘bad vampires’ of the story are
contextualized in a different way. Using Gothic elements, as the ones been studied by the group at
classes through texts and debates; the author brings them to reality. The Volturi family lives in a
castle in Italy and their appearance is very different from the Cullen family, which Edward is a
member. The ‘human’ clothes used by the Collins are replaced by Middle Age costumes and dark
capes. The human side of the ‘good vampires’ and specially the Gothic side of the ‘bad vampires’
will be discussed and analyzed in this paper.
The Gothic Closet: Queer Monsters in Horror Films
Diogo Brügemann
The purpose of this is study is to identify the similar characteristics monsters of horror
films and television series share with real life sexual minorities, especially LGBT people. Since
the first horror films were produced, usually adapted from literary works, the relation between
monsters and different people could be traced. Monsters have always been a portrayal of the odd,
the abnormal, and sometimes the abject. Early examples are the foreigner Dracula from the 1931
homonymous film, who was from a distant country and carried a strong accent and Frankenstein’s
creature from the 1931 film Frankenstein, who was mentally disable and physically eccentric.
Those two examples demonstrate how monsters were constructed based on the image of the
“other”. More recently examples of monsters in fiction have showed beautiful and attractive
monsters, such as vampires in Interview with The Vampire and in the television series True Blood.
Although these monsters may look like normal people, their behavior is quite different, abnormal
and even queer. Through the analysis of scenes from several films and television series I intend to
show the similarities between the treatment monsters and LBGT people have received in cinema
and television, making a parallel with postcolonial concepts, gender studies and mainly queer
theory, in order to show that many of those monsters can be consider a metaphor for real life
social relations.
Hyde and Seek: Mr. Hyde’s Game of Shadows in Stevenson’s The Strange Case of
Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
Fernando Antonio Bassetti Cestaro
The present work aims to analyse, under the scrutiny of Gothic features, Mr. Hyde’s key
participation in Stevenson’s novel as shaping the reader’s perception of this work as a Gothic
novel. For that intent, I initially support my proposal with definitions of the word Gothic as seen
on its dictionary acceptation. Also, as a base for my proposal of analysis, I utilize grounding
definitions of Gothic novel and Gothic fiction. Allied to the aforementioned concepts, I employ
Adrian Poole’s (2009) study on Robert Louis Stevenson’s life and context of writing The Strange
Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, as well as the uniqueness of the character Mr. Hyde as a
representative of the Gothic in the novel. Complementary to this study, I aim to analyze the
description from the city of London functioning as the suitable Gothic scenario for Mr. Hyde to
execute his deviant acts. Finally, I consider important to bring into discussion the Lombrosian
Criminal Anthropology Studies with which I intend to discuss the novel’s registers of Mr. Hyde’s
physical features as suiting a somber suspect of malicious acts. With this approach at hand I aim to
support Stevenson’s written depiction of Mr. Hyde as a Gothic being.
Malleus Mysticorum: the cult of the macabre and the unknown in Andrew Leman's
The Call of Cthulhu
George Alexandre Ayres de Men
Andrew Leman, with his film The Call of Cthulhu, tries to create an obscure and sinister
atmosphere equivalent to the source material, the homonymous short story by the American writer
H. P. Lovecraft. The film, released in 2005, makes use of the silent film aesthetics to achieve the
weird nature of horror so appreciated by Lovecraft. With the present study, I intend to investigate
the cult of the macabre and the unknown, one of the main themes of the original story, in the film
adaptation by Andrew Leman. Lovecraft, with his cosmic horror, explored the unknown and the
alien not only as a source of terror for human beings, but also as awe and worship, which brings
many possibilities of understanding on the use of literature to interpret human fears and
deifications of outer entities. I intend to use the concepts of the Gothic traditions presented by
David Punter in his book The Literature of Terror: A History of Gothic Fictions from 1765 to the
Present Day as a basis for my analysis, especially the explored concepts concerning the Gothic in
cinema. In addition, in order to help with the understanding the narrative features found in the film
that may broaden the tools of investigation of the present study, I intend to use John Desmond and
Peter Hawkes’ book Adaptation: studying film and literature. All in all, this study is expected to
provide the academic community with more material on the Gothic tradition in literature and
cinema, as well as with broader knowledge on H. P. Lovecraft’s work and ideas.
The Gothic Apocalypse: Gothic Elements in Heart of Darkness and Apocalypse
Now
Alexander Gross
Conrad's Heart of Darkness (1902) is one of the great journeys into the unknown,
underscored by a constant feeling of dread and self-doubt, in an exotic and unnerving location.
The author's explicit description of horror is allied with the moral terror that his narrator Marlow
endures increasingly throughout. As such it shares several key characteristics with the Gothic
tradition, not least the thematic concept of a capacity for evil in humankind, and the psychological
torment we endure when faced with horror. An investigation of the Gothic features in Heart of
Darkness can help to reveal the universal themes it contains, which transcend boundaries of race
and nation. Coppola's Apocalypse Now (1979) helped to expose such universal concerns by
reimagining Conrad's tale in the contemporary context of the Vietnam War. The Gothic features of
the novel are manipulated by the film director and visually reproduced in order to highlight the
central concern of both texts: the horror of the human response to an absence of social and moral
constraint. The full extent of the psychological implications of this process is represented by the
enigmatic destination of both narratives, Kurtz. The principal focus of the study will be the
relationship between the novel and its film adaptation specifically in terms of the visual and verbal
reconstitution of Gothic elements in Conrad's writing. The study will draw on Linda Cahir's
discussion of narratological parallels between the two texts and Jeniffer Lipka's analysis of Heart
of Darkness as a Gothic novel.
Cannibal Madness or The Lurid Horror of Survivor Type
Matias Corbett Garcez
A critical analysis which aims to discuss and describe certain aspects of Gothic literature
found in the Stephen King’s short story Survivor Type. The aspects of Gothic literature which this
research focuses on are: the distinction between terror and horror which Ann Radcliffe presents in
her essay On The Supernatural Poetry, the different interpretations of the word ‘monster’
throughout history, as described by Sérgio Bellei in his book Monstros, Índios e Canibais, and the
relation between monstrosity and madness in present days. The short story is written in the form
of a diary and as it unfolds the main character slowly goes mad. The main character, a once
famous New York surgeon called Richard Pine, out of necessity, embarks on a dangerous trip to
sell heroin, but the ship he was traveling in sinks and he is stranded in a tiny and deserted island –
“190 paces wide,” and “267 paces long” – with no food. In a short time he is forced to eat his own
body parts to survive. The initial terror atmosphere which King creates by placing the reader in a
distant and unpredictable place, the deserted island, gradually becomes a site of unimaginable
horror, as Pine eats another body part. Pine makes a monster of himself, and the combination of
the physical and mental changes he undergoes through the most abhorrent forms possible, makes
him lose his mental stability.
You Call It Madness but I Call It Love: The Relationship between Young Audiences
and Vampires
Lívia Maria Pinto Paschoal
Vampires, these iconic Gothic characters, have always had the power of fascinating
audiences throughout the world. However, the popularity these mysterious characters have gained
in recent times knows no precedent. Today, different types of medium offer to the public a distinct
portrait of the vampire figure. Such depiction departs from the ‘monstrous’ character, whose
tradition began in the nineteenth century with John Polidori’s The Vampyre (1819) and was
epitomized with Bram Stoker’s Dracula (1897) to become a loving hero and object of affection of
many mortals - fictional or not. A case in point are the young bloodsuckers Edward Cullen from
Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight Saga (2005 - 2008) and its filmic adaptations (2008 - ) and the
brothers Damon and Stefan Salvatore, from the hit TV show The Vampire Diaries (2009 - ), which
is loosely based on the novels written by L.J. Smith between 1991 and 1992. In addition to
Twilight and The Vampire Diaries, there is P.C. and Kristin Cast’s The House of Night Series
(2007 - ) and Richelle Mead’s The Vampire Academy Series (2007 - 2010) which also portray
vampires in a similar character construction to Edward and the Salvatore brothers. The enormous
success this new batch of vampire-themed works arguably shows that the night wanderers have
found in younger audiences the pathway to eternal glory. In this sense, this presentation aims to
explore the relationship between vampires and their young followers which is forged with
madness and undying adoration.
Beware the ballerina … she has not been quite HERSELF lately: the Doppelgänger
in Black Swan (2010)
Sarah de Sousa Silvestre
The issue of duplicity or the doppelgänger, this long-standing Gothic theme, appears firstly
in the literature of James Hogg is his work The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified
Sinner (1824), then again in Edgar Allan Poe’s William Wilson (1839), and Robert Louis
Stevenson’s chilling novella The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886), to mention but
a few. Usually presented in male characters, recent works have changed the focus on male
doppelgängers such as the American TV series The Vampire Diaries (2009- present), and the film
Black Swan (2010) directed by Daren Aronofsky to depict female characters as having doubles or
having two extreme different personalities. This presentation will investigate how the conception
of the doppelgänger is presented in Aronosfky’s latest film Black Swan. In addition, this study
aims at identifying other Gothic elements that guide the plot of the film. The presentation will be
guided by theories from Psychoanalytical Studies, Film Studies, and Gender Studies in order to
investigate the protagonist’s construction and behavior. Gothic elements in the film will be looked
at by analyzing the mise-en-scène whilst gender studies will help to understand whether the female
character may represent changes in the portrayal of women in literature and films, since they are
generally shown as being flat characters or belonging to only one extreme of Manichaeism (either
good or bad).
Lesbian Gothic in Graphic Form: Retrieving the Tropes of the 'Haunted House' and
the 'Double' in Alison Bechdel's Fun Home
Renata Lucena Dalmaso
Gothic motifs are common in queer narratives, a case in point is Paulina Palmer’s Lesbian
Gothic: Transgressive Fictions and many of her subsequent works. This paper will focus on
Lesbian Gothic, more precisely, the way those motifs are used when it comes to Graphic Novels.
This paper will attempt to investigate the possibilities of Alison Bechdel’s graphic novel Fun
Home as an articulation of both Lesbian and Gothic tropes in graphic narratives. Bechdel's
autobiography deals mostly with her coming out process and the discovery, around the same time,
that her father was a closeted homosexual. Her father's personality is described as having always
been problematic at best. The surfacing of this news brings a new layer of complexity to the
character, whose death may or may not have been suicide. Two main elements in the graphic
novel support this articulation between the Lesbian and the Gothic trope in graphic narratives: the
use of the 'double' as a characterization of Alison's relationship with her father and the setting of
the novel - which gives the pun to the title Fun Home - a Funeral Home, the family business.
Genre and Gender: Clover's ‘Final Girl’ in the films Halloween, Friday the 13th part
2 and Nightmare on Elm Street
Raphael de Boer
This presentation seeks to discuss the representation of women in the films Halloween
(1978), Friday the 13th part 2 (1981) and Nightmare on Elm Street (1984), in the light of film
genre theory. The selected films have drawn much attention from media and specialized criticism
on feminist and film genre theory due to their depiction of women as well as the construction of
horror in slasher films. Once horror movies are considered to be a male-oriented genre, likewise,
in the three movies, the figure of the final girl and her consequent encounter with the killer serves
as a means of male identification for the spectator since the girl becomes boyish in the end.
Through Carol Clover’s perspective for the final girl I will focus on four main questions in this
paper: a) How are the three final girls represented in these films? b) What are the differences and
similarities between them? c) How are the representations of the final girls relevant to
problematize the necessity of mainstream cinema to portray women in a stereotyped manner? d)
How can we relate the three aforementioned films to Gothic features? My hypothesis is that in the
selected films the three final girls are represented in a stereotyped manner, in the sense that they
are presented in a western society perspective from the dichotomy of good/bad and also seen as
objects of identification from a male-oriented viewpoint. My intention is that with this study I will
be able to raise relevant debate over biased women representations in mainstream horror films.