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If the conventional critique of the Gothic explores the abnormal – the supernatural, taboo and fantastic – it may be said to be a ‘Gothic of the Deviant’. By contrast, the ‘Gothic of the Normal’ underlines anxieties regarding what it means to be normal, to be oppressed by social pressures. It highlights our unease within hegemonic structures as we observe characters ‘reading’ their situations normatively, to the extent that they are unaware of the dangers of the deviant, unable to ‘think outside the box’. Focusing on normative speech within ‘The Cask of Amontillado’, a story that follows a typical Poe structure of thesis followed by demonstration, a disjunction is evident between what is said by Montresor throughout the central narrative and its murderous context. The reader experiences what Leon Festinger calls Cognitive Dissonance – the struggle to hold two contradictory ideas relating to a single phenomenon simultaneously, resulting in a negative emotional state. Such failures of normative world views are apparent in the texts handling of speech interactions. At times either Montresor or Fortunato create a benevolent reality at odds with the actual situation; at others, both protagonists use identical vocabulary but with different conceptual understandings of what they are describing. Fortunato‘s screaming indicates a point where both characters share a reality beyond representative speech. The text is structured by its various verbalizations of ‘normality’, and the tensions between them.
The Island of Doctor Moreau is the most Gothic of all Wells‘s scientific romances. Wells generates Gothic atmosphere by playing the positions of the opposing sides in the late-Victorian vivisection controversy against each other, making both seem true at the same time. In its use of the agony of vivisection as a metaphor both for biological evolution and socialization, this story reveals a physical disgust associated with the process of evolution itself, the full implications of which the characters will not acknowledge. The scientific objectivity championed by Moreau attempts to suppress the psychological problems implicit in the concept of animal inheritance, which would later be explored in Freud‘s metapsychology. Prendick, the narrator, cannot resolve his ambivalence both toward Moreau and his grotesque products, the Beast People. Prendick‘s uncertainty becomes the final horror of the story. Usually Wells‘s fantasy supports a scientific world-view, but here his normative, scientifically-minded narrator falls apart in a story which gives the true voice of science to a Gothic dominator.
structures consisting of particular beliefs and practices related to the supernatural realm ( Smith, 1995 : 893). The term religion encompasses institutions, systems consisting of organisational structures, codes of behaviours, symbol systems defining assumptions/beliefs designed to create powerful, comprehensive, enduring world views and attitudes. Religion can operate at different levels, as organised hierarchical institutions as well as at the individual and social levels
This is the first book in a two-volume set that traces the evolution of the Labour Party's foreign policy throughout the twentieth century and into the early years of the new millennium. It is a comprehensive study of the political ideology and history of the Labour Party's world-view and foreign policy. The set argues that the development of Labour's foreign policy perspective should be seen not as the development of a socialist foreign policy, but as an application of the ideas of liberal internationalism. The first volume outlines and assesses the early development and evolution of Labour's world-view. It then follows the course of the Labour Party's foreign policy during a tumultuous period on the international stage, including the First World War, the Russian Revolution, the Spanish Civil War, the build-up to and violent reality of the Second World War, and the start of the Cold War. The book provides an analysis of Labour's foreign policy during this period, in which Labour experienced power for the first time.
Service to others was integral to medieval and early modern European culture. It played a prominent role in the Christian world view. People tend to think of state service as the typical male form of work. However, this notion does not do justice to the early history of states and their servants, and it obscures the role of women and gender entirely. Teasing out these entanglements, this book shows how early modern state formation was subsidized by ordinary people's work and how, the then changing relationship between state authorities and families shaped the understanding of work and gender. It introduces the people, the period, the urban environments and the state administration under consideration. The book then analyses the role of violence and hostility in state servants' working lives and the expectations of servants to behave in certain ways. It demonstrates the vital role of small-scale market relations and of cooperation and mutual help among women. The book also analyses the relationship among lower state servants' families, discussing how social control and contact were parts of daily life and how society was knit together through these many practices. It discusses why early modern state formation created more opportunities for men than for women, when another outcome seems equally possible. The history of state formation throws new light on how different forms of service for others were understood and gendered over time, while people's everyday activities elucidate the mechanisms by which states were formed.
7 Conclusion: documentary world views In this concluding chapter I want to revisit an issue that has been raised intermittently throughout the book, and continues to appear in ongoing debates around screen documentary. This is the thorny question of the social and political potential of the mode, grounded in its promise to re-present something of the world to its viewers. Of course, it cannot be assumed that this potential is always and unproblematically realised. Furthermore, any attempt to explore the orientations towards the world proposed via documentary
great pains to try to clarify his perspective on photography, but even then Cavell’s thoughts are not entirely clear. Perhaps this is merely an outcome of what Roland Barthes referred to as the ‘photographic paradox’: that when we see a photograph of a thing, we see, at one and the same time, the photograph and the thing itself (Barthes 1977a). This is a far more difficult argument to accept than the one, even more common now than it was when Cavell was writing The World Viewed, that argues that the camera lies or that ‘there is no way in which a photograph really
The imperial world view, with all its attendant belief systems, has frequently been referred to as a ‘core ideology’. In The Dominant Ideology Thesis Abercrombie, Hill, and Turner attacked the concept of the core ideology, taking as examples three historical periods, medieval feudalism, the years 1790-1850, and the present day. 1 The choice is a strange one. In the case
forebears had done. This raises important issues, still current in our own time, about the relationship between commerce and the public sphere, entertainment and information, pleasure and politics. Another aim of this book is to disentangle the various threads of Priestley’s world-view, which can at times seem contradictory, often only because they defy conventional expectations. Priestley was no great theorist, but he was an acute and sensitive observer, and a more complex thinker than he has been given credit for, his ideas lucidly expressed and firmly rooted. Their
indigenous peoples as objects of their concern, to whom or what are they referring? If we observe that the fabric of human rights could be stretched to accommodate indigenous world-views, whose world-views are they? Where is our perimeter of sense–signification in the employment of language?11 And, if a large and growing indigenous network hammers at the doors of international organisations claiming recognition and justice, are they to be dismissed as self-deluding? The questions call for an examination of the concept of indigenous peoples, the subject of chapter 2. Point