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of potential and the suppression of the object’s definitive conclusion finds echoes in the absences and narrative ruptures which characterise the post-war period’s treatment of bombs as cultural objects. In this chapter I will argue that atomic culture resonates with anxieties about objects and intimacy, and that this motif crosses and re-crosses the threshold between traditional explosives and nuclear technology. In the first chapter of this book, we saw how bombs created new ecosystems of undead life, and left behind object-witnesses and rubble that told human
The introduction to Part II of this volume has already established that, like the teenpic or the undead horror film, the biopic is not an entirely new phenomenon in cinema history, and yet at the end of the millennium it has made a spectacular return to public awareness. Shakespeare biopics provide an eminent example: while a few films with William Shakespeare as a character had already been made in the first half of the twentieth century, it is only since the 1990s that any biopic proper can be associated with his name. Earlier films which include images of
The gothic and death is the first ever published study to investigate how the multifarious strands of the Gothic and the concepts of death, dying, mourning, and memorialization – what the Editor broadly refers to as "the Death Question" – have intersected and been configured cross-culturally to diverse ends from the mid-eighteenth century to the present day. Drawing on recent scholarship in Gothic Studies, film theory, Women’s and Gender Studies, and Thanatology Studies, to which fields it seeks to make a valuable contribution, this interdisciplinary collection of fifteen essays by international scholars considers the Gothic’s engagement, by way of its unique necropolitics and necropoetics, with death’s challenges to all systems of meaning, and its relationship to the culturally contingent concepts of memento mori, subjectivity, spectrality, and corporeal transcendence. Attentive to our defamiliarization with death since the advent of enlightened modernity and the death-related anxieties engendered by that transition, The gothic and death combines detailed attention to socio-historical and cultural contexts with rigorous close readings of artistic, literary, televisual, and cinematic works. This surprisingly underexplored area of enquiry is considered by way of such popular and uncanny figures as corpses, ghosts, zombies, and vampires, and across various cultural and literary forms as Graveyard Poetry, Romantic poetry, Victorian literature, nineteenth-century Italian and Russian literature, Anglo-American film and television, contemporary Young Adult fiction, Bollywood film noir, and new media technologies that complicate our ideas of mourning, haunting, and the "afterlife" of the self.
globally ubiquitous popular-cultural trope of zombie apocalypse. For unlike dramas such as The Walking Dead (AMC, 2010–), which focuses on a group of vastly outnumbered survivors subsisting in the ruins of an infrastructurally devastated nation, Mitchell’s undead are the minority, who have been pharmacologically returned to sentient consciousness and, at the drama’s opening, are
After the discussion of classical Hollywood genres and their appropriation of Shakespearean narratives, Part II of the volume investigates three genres that represent more recent colours on the cinematic palette. While the three genres included in these chapters – teen films, undead horror and biopics – are not regarded as classics of commercial cinema, it is undeniable that they also had antecedents either in the pre- or post-war decades of filmmaking. They have typically (re)gained popularity and thus significance in and around the 1990s, the great decade of
melancholia and its obsession with the undead’, as Peter Walmsley aptly characterises it, partook of ‘a tradition of nationalist discourse about death’ that became pronounced in the late eighteenth century ( 2009 : 53). Recognition of the prevalence of what I have elsewhere called the Gothic’s necropoetics – comprised of death-focused symbols and tropes such as spectrality
contradiction of Gothic choreography, where one must die in order to dance? What rubric can we find to explain our fascination with the un-dead, most alive because they are least alive? And what might all of this have to do with a specifically queer Michael Jackson? The tension between the quick and the dead as a mode of our desire inevitably takes us to Freud, whose speculations on the death instinct begin to
theatrical practices and their formal results that give rise to the form in the first instance. Postdramatic spectres and undead figurations are more than simply self-reflexive metaphors for complex formal experiments and citational practices; their real importance derives from their links to extra-theatrical discourses such as neoliberal economics, labour relations and migration. I
have praised its uniqueness. In her review of the film in the New York Times , Janet Maslin calls it ‘a very stylish and sophisticated Mexican variation on some age-old themes’ that proves ‘the vampire film is resoundingly undead’ (Maslin, 1994 : 16); Jonathan Romney, who reviewed Cronos for New Statesman and Society, refers to it as ‘a vampire film with a difference’ (Romney
characters have had to get used to their brutal new reality. Equally slowly, this has enabled the show to begin to play with the boundaries between zombie and human, suggesting that interpretations can vary, that appropriate treatment is contentious, and that a spectrum of positions is apparent, rather than a hard binary divide between those who are human and those who are not. This blurring, and the questions it raises, help to mark out The Walking Dead as a great show and one of pedagogical and political value. Gradually, the undead become a background condition: an