In coordination with the 2024 Modern Language Association convention theme, “Joy and Sorrow,” the MLA Gothic Studies Forum is pleased to propose a paired set of sessions with the themes of “Gothic Pain” (guaranteed) and “Gothic Pleasure” (non-guaranteed). This proposal is for the non-guaranteed “Gothic Pleasure.” It will consist of four speakers, each giving 15-minute presentations, followed by open discussion.

Among the most fundamental questions of Gothic Studies is that of enjoyment. Since we usually seek to avoid being afraid or disgusted, and these are presumably the emotional responses the Gothic seeks to provoke, how then can we explain the appeal of Gothic horror? Why would anyone intentionally seek to experience painful or unpleasant emotions?

This question of the “paradox of horror”—and of deriving pleasure from “negative emotions” in general—has been one that has preoccupied philosophers, cultural critics, and consumers of the Gothic for millennia. With attention to tragedy and sorrow, the pleasure elicited by negative emotions was taken up by Aristotle, Hume, and Schiller; with a focus on horror, the question pursued by Anna Laetitia Barbauld and Anne Radcliffe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries has been taken up by philosophers and critics including Noël Carroll, Robin Wood, Linda Williams, and Mathias Clasen in the twentieth and twenty-first—with explanations ranging from psychoanalytic ones (the lifting of repression is pleasurable) to biocultural ones (Gothic horror stimulates the nervous system and helps us rehearse responses to dangerous situations). The session proposed here, “Gothic Pleasure,” will extend upon existing considerations and break new ground through four fifteen-minute presentations exploring how and why we take pleasure in Gothic narrative.

Using philosopher Alison Jaggar’s concept of “outlaw emotions,” as well as Cathy Caruth’s framing of trauma, Alexa Broemmer will start off the session by investigating the tabooed theme of female hunger. With a focus on British novelist Claire Kohda’s 2022 Gothic novel, Woman, Eating, Broemmer's analysis will show how the journey of the novel’s protagonist, a young vampire named Lydia, inverts the familiar pattern of punishment of female hunger as exemplified in Le Fanu’s Carmilla and Stoker’s Dracula. Lydia’s hunger, satiation and pleasure, proposes Broemmer, in the end are shared by the reader as female hunger is validated rather than demonized.

With Senior Lecturer Jason Ray Carney’s “A Diachronic Analysis of the Validity of Gothic Pleasure,” the session will shift from outlaw emotions to “ugly feelings.” In Sianne Ngai’s Ugly Feelings, a study of emotion and literature, Ngai argues that literary works change our neurochemistry by rendering unreal simulations that function as what neuroscientists call "external activators." Literary representations, propose Ngai, work on the same neurobiology as real stimuli. With a focus on Matthew Lewis’s The Monk, Lovecraft’s "Shadow Over Innsmouth," and Panos Cosmatos's 2018 film, Mandy, Carney will use Ngai’s propositions to consider the ideological dilemma of deriving pleasure from scenes of horror.

Picking up the theme of the complications of Gothic pleasure will be Assistant Professor Rhi Johnson who in “Gothic Pleasure and the Embrace of Mortality in José de Espronceda” will consider two major narrative poems by Spain’s José de Espronceda. El estudiante de Salamanca and Diablo mundo, explains Johnson, feature vignettes that “pull together death and eroticism in the Gothic’s friction between fear, desire, and repulsion.” Through a consideration of these scenes, Johnson will argue that their constructions of Gothic pleasure demonstrate how elements that go beyond the natural can create space for both a heightening of affective response and (with connections back to Broemmer’s opening presentation) the interrogation of underlying societal anxieties about autonomous and agentive female sexuality.

To round out the session, graduate student J. Blackwood will shift our attention inward in a literal sense. In “Lovely Viscera and the Symbiotic: On Body Snatching,” she will explore the “pleasure of surrender” in Gothic horror narratives that complicate human autonomy by introducing human/non-human symbiotic relationships. Using Jack Halberstam’s writings on the Gothic genre as a frame, she will examine how narratives of “intimate proximity” contemplate “surrender as a pleasure-seeking activity for human hosts” in works such as Jeff VanderMeer’s Annihilation and Guillermo del Toro’s Cabinet of Curiosities.

These four presentations will thus explore the “paradox of horror” from different perspectives extending upon and also questioning psychoanalytic and biocultural explanations through insights gleaned from trauma studies, affect theory, feminist epistemology, and cultural criticism.