CFP: Gothic Technologies/Gothic Techniques

Biennial Conference of the International Gothic Association, 2013
August 5-8, 2013: University of Surrey, United Kingdom

Confirmed Keynote Speakers: Professor Roger Luckhurst (Birkbeck College, University of London), Professor Fred Botting (Kingston University), other Keynotes TBA

Call for Papers

Recent Gothic studies have foregrounded a plethora of technologies associated with Gothic literary and cultural production. Its presence is witnessed in how techno-science has contributed to the proliferation of the Gothic: the publishing and print culture disseminating Gothic texts, eighteenth-century architectural innovations, the on-line gaming and virtual Goth communities, the special effects of Gothic-horror cinema.

One question raised by these new developments concerns the extent to which they generate new Gothic techniques. How does technology generate a new Gothic aesthetic? We are particularly interested in addressing how Gothic technologies have, in a general sense, produced and perpetuated ideologies and influenced the politics of cultural practice. However, we also want to reconsider the whole idea of what we mean by a Gothic ‘technique’ which arguably underpins these new formations of the Gothic. To that end we invite papers that question not only what we might constitute a Gothic aesthetic from the eighteenth century to the present day, but how that is witnessed in various forms such as the Female Gothic, models of the sublime, sensation fiction, cyberpunk as well as the various non-text based media that the Gothic has infiltrated. We also invite proposals which address how various critical theories help us to evaluate either these new technological trends or critically transform our understanding of the intellectual space occupied by earlier Gothic forms. Papers which explore the place of science, writing, and the subject are thus very welcome.

We thus seek to explore how Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques textualize identities and construct communities within a complex network of power relations in local, national, transnational and global contexts.

Papers exploring any aspect of Gothic technologies/Gothic techniques in writing, film and other media are welcome. Topics could include, but are not limited to, the following:

• Gothic Architecture and Technology
• Printing, Publishing and Gothic Disseminations
• Terror, Terrorism, Technology
• The techniques of philosophy – the sublime
• Colonizing Technology and Postcolonial Gothics
• Technology of Monsters
• Gothic Art
• Enlightenment Gothic and Science
• War, Violence, Technology
• (Neo)Victorian Gothic
• Gothic poetry
• Gothic Bodies: Modifications, Mutations, Transformations
• Weird Science, Mad Scientists
• Staging the Gothic
• B-movies, Laughter and Comic Gothic
• Demonic Technologies / Demonizing Technology
• Theorising the Gothic
• Gothic Geography – mapping the Gothic
• Cloning, Duplicating, Doubling
• Hybrids, Cyborgs and Transgression
• Digital Gothics and Uncanny Media

Abstracts (350 words max.) for 20 minute papers may be submitted to the conference convenors. The submission deadline is February 1, 2013. We also welcome submissions for panels (consisting of three papers) that address specific topics.