Me vs. the Gothic

I'm beginning to think there's a common reason for some of the difficulties that I'm encountering with my two projects. (I think maybe I'll just start calling them the Victorian and the Romantic, though I've mentioned the specific authors / texts here frequently enough that it probably doesn't matter.) On the surface, they don't have a lot in common: the Victorian project has me reading books on live burial and playing around with what I can see of popular periodicals of the nineteenth century, while for the Romantic project I am mostly still treading water with philosophy--lots of Kant, some Hegel, and a smattering of more recent people like Nancy and Lyotard. (Derrida, as I was discussing with some faculty from my department last week, is oddly absent from both of my bibliographies right now, though I think that "No Apocalypse, Not Now" may end up having some relevance to the Victorian project.)

In both of these projects, however, I keep running up against The Gothic. And it's making things hard. The Gothic has always sort of skirted the edges of the work I do--last summer at this time I was working on an earlier version of the Romantic paper and it was centered around the theme of humiliation. I did a fair bit of coursework around early Romantic / late eighteenth century texts (particularly those by Godwin and Wollstonecraft) from the perspective of the discourse of sensibility, and the best thing I ever read in the last American lit class I took (more than three years ago now--it was my first year in grad school) was Brockden Brown's Edgar Huntly, which I still plan to teach and publish on someday. Dealing with these kinds of texts and just generally being someone who works on long nineteenth century literature means that I have to have a decent working knowledge / awareness of the Gothic and how it works.

But that doesn't mean, on the other hand, that I'm particularly interested in it. Okay, that sounds more horrible than I meant it to. I mean, I do like a good Gothic potboiler every now and then, and I feel like I can certainly appreciate what it is and how it does what it does, why it was important at the time, and so on. I guess it's more that my own critical investments are elsewhere right now and have been for a long time. What seems to be happening right now, though, is that the texts, concepts, and passages that I'm working on, have all largely been labeled as Gothic, and I'm finding that this makes reading them against that particular grain to be something of an uphill battle. And it's not even that I find myself wanting to argue that these texts are not Gothic (I mean, premature burial, yo), but rather that calling a poem "Gothic" or identifying its sites of sexual guilt or whatever doesn't actually constitute an interpretation these days. While the work of people like Eve Segdwick and Judith Halberstam (both of whom I've been skimming madly since last week) is aimed at showing the Gothic to be worthy of study and complex in itself, I wonder if the term as used by others is falling back into a critical shorthand. Not one used to dismiss entire passages--about 22 years ago, my adviser dismissed the passage at the center of my Victorian project as being "luridly gothic"--but certainly as a way to imply that there is a certain group of texts whose readability (and even whose unreadability) is assured according to this set of codes. And so the question for what I'm doing largely becomes one of the supplement, the so what, and the why bother. And I find myself wanting to say, "because it's just more interesting," but I do feel like I'm fighting against the weight of a historicist juggernaut here. But I soldier on.

The other common thread between these two projects, by the way, if the feeling that I'm completely behindhand on my de Man.

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Mostly unrelated, before I go scavenge myself some lunch: a "Dickensian" toilet policy? Really?