Introduction
Introduction
monstrous media/spectral subjects
Monsters and spectres might seem to be opposites: one embodied, tangible, chthonic; the other incorporeal, insubstantial and ethereal. They may conjure different fears too: horror, visceral shock and corporeal repulsion or uncanny sensations of psychic displacement, temporal disturbance and haunting. Yet both figures circulate around emergent media from the nineteenth century to the present, colliding with and contaminating one another. This chapter provides an introduction to the themes of the volume as a whole, showing how Gothic figures flourish, cross-contaminate and multiply, emerging in gaps and breaks, in ruptures between being and appearing, reality and representation, past and future. The media in question are, furthermore, crucial to this process: whether voice, writing, type, image, projection, vibration, hand, body, or something else, the modes that spectrally body forth or conjure up the Gothic articulate the crises, emergences and ruptures of which they are born(e).
Keywords: Monsters, Monstrosity, Spectres, Spectrality, Haunting, Teratology, Technology, Gothic media
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