FICHAMENTO – GÓTICO

(Passagens escolhidas por mim)

CROW, Charles L. Southern American Gothic. In: WEINSTOCK, Jeffrey Andrew (ed.). The
Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. p.
141-168.
RINGEL, Faye. Early American Gothic (Puritan and New Republic). In: WEINSTOCK, Jeffrey
Andrew (ed.). The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2017. p. 15-30.
WEINAUER, Ellen. Race and the American Gothic. In: WEINSTOCK, Jeffrey Andrew (ed.).
The Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
2017. p. 85-98.
WEINSTOCK, Jeffrey Andrew. Introduction. The American Gothic. In: ______ (ed.). The
Cambridge Companion to American Gothic. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. p.
1-12.

- O Gótico é extremamente importante para a literatura estadunidense. Fiedler assume

que esta é, quase essencialmente, uma tradição gótica. O Gótico está impregnado na
cultura estadunidense: “An understanding of American culture and character, therefore,
must include as part of its consideration the Gothic impulse as it manifests in both
literary and popular culture.” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 1)

. “In Leslie Fiedler’s seminal study of American literature, Love an Death in the American
Novel1, first published in 1960, […] He asserts […] that ‘It is the gothic form that has been most
fruitful in the hands of our best writes’ (28), that the tradition of American literature ‘is almost
essentially a gothic one’ (142), and that ‘Until the gothic had been discovered, the serious
American novel could not begin; and as long as that novel lasts, the gothic cannot die’ (143)
[…] ‘our greatest writers sought out gothic themes’ (142)”. (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 1)

“The Gothic, he [Fiedler] observes, ‘was the West’s chief method for dealing with the night-
time impulses of the psyche’ (140), the vengeful psychic return of the repressed truths of the
American [and Brazilian] experience” (WEINAUER, 2017, p. 85)

1
FIEDLER, Leslie. Love and Death in the American Novel. New York: Anchor Books, 1992.
. Quais podem ser as relações entre uma literatura com histórias ambientadas na Idade Média,
com castelos e mosteiros em ruínas e com barões, marqueses, duques e todo o resto da nobreza
ter parte em uma cultura do Novo Mundo?
“What correspondences then could a literary form emphasizing medieval history, ghosts in
crumbling castles, emotional extremes, and a debased aristocracy possibly have in the late
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with a new country lacking an entrenched class structure
and founded on the principles of Enlightenment rationalism, and why does it retain its hold over
the American imagination today?” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 1)

- O Gótico é obcecado pelo poder e pela transgressão: “[...] the Gothic takes as its focus
transgression of cultural boundaries” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 2)

. “The Gothic [...] is an artistic form fascinated with transgression.” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p.
2)
. “The flirtation with the taboo is, of course, a large part of the appeal of the Gothic – we read
breathlessly or hold our hands over our eyes while peeking through our finger as the Gothic
hero or heroine confronts the horrifying monster or uncovers the dark history of murder, incest,
and/or usurpation on which the present order rests. We enjoy the frisson of that which is almost
– but not quite – too horrible to be shown or described.” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 2)

. “[…] Gothic narratives give shape to culturally specific anxieties and tabooed desires, and that
anxieties and desires will always have to do with power and prohibition” (WEINSTOCK, 2017,
p. 6)

. GÓTICO ESTADUNIDENSE/AMERICANO: “[…] the American Gothic tradition arguably

clusters around four interconnected primary loci, each with its particular boundaries: religion,
geography, racial and sexual otherness, and rationality. While far from all-inclusive, anxieties
and desires related to God, the devil, and the legacy of Puritanism; the frontier; racial otherness
and sexual otherness; and the capacity of individuals to draw logical and accurate conclusions
based on sensory dare are structuring preoccupations of the American Gothic tradition”
(WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 6)
. “[…] leaving civilization behind and traversing the frontier in the American Gothic
imagination imperils one’s safety by putting one at the mercy of powerful forces ranging from
natural threats such as panthers and waterfalls and whales to supernatural monsters including
witches and the devil” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 6)

. O Gótico Americano se destaca pelo uso da temática da escravidão: “[...] anxieties about race,
White/black miscegenation, and the legacy of slavery may in fact function most immediately
to differentiate the American Gothic from other Gothic traditions.” (WEINSTOCK, 2017, p. 9)
 o mesmo pode ser dito sobre a tradição gótica brasileira.

. “The treatment by European settlers of New World’s inhabitants became one of America’s
Gothic secrets; African slavery was the other” (RINGEL, 2017, p. 15). No Gótico do Brasil,
em vez da visão dos colonizadores europeus sobre o novo mundo, temos a perspectiva da cidade
sobre o meio rural.  “The native inhabitants of the New World were literally demonized by
the settlers. The Puritan vision of Indians as devil-worshippers lasted into the eighteenth
century” (RINGEL, 2017, p. 21)

- Alguns eventos recorrentes nas narrativas góticas: “an encounter with (and entrapment
by) mystifying, monstrous ‘others’, the association of those others with supernatural
power, the frightening descent into otherness […], and an often incomplete restauration
to the [88] previous social order.” (WEINAUER, 2017, p. 87-88)

- RURAL GOTHIC: “The tradition of what Bernice Murphy calls ‘Rural Gothic’ almost
always set in the [American] South, shows the backwoodsman as a figure of a menace”
(CROW, 2017, p. 142).

. O homem estadunidense do interior, na primeira metade do século XIX, deveria ser civilizado
para não postergar o desenvolvimento da nação: “Rude frontiersman might be tamed or
displaced by the advance of settlements and agriculture. The continuance of such backwoods
folk and their brutish ways, however, disrupts the national, as well as Southern, narrative of
progress, and suggests the inversion of progress: atavism or degeneration. They would be
shown as objects of amusement, or fear, or sympathy.” (CROW, 2017, p. 142)