Pre-Dissertation Colloquium with Kirstine Kastbjerg
Raitt 314

Danish Gothic has gone unexamined despite canonical writers’ frequent and consistent use of Gothic conventions, renegotiated for a Danish context. Gothic conventions of evil, decay, fragmentation, perverse desire, supernatural spectacles, and sensory disorientation represent an onslaught of destructive forces, threatening to demolish the modern subject as it emerges in Romanticism. Ingemann, Andersen, Blixen and Høeg engage with nineteenth-century Danish discourses of identity and self formation, using the excesses of Gothic surface mechanisms, theatrical effects and cheap thrills to articulate ideas about the production of identity that ties into the Gothic aesthetic and ontology of the present day.