نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

نقد زبان و ادبیات خارجی

No Substitute for the Soul: Melmoth, Kierkegaard, and the Existential Gothic

نوع مقاله : مقاله علمی پژوهشی

نویسندگان
1 گروه زبان انگلیسی، دانشکده زبان ها و ادبیات خارجی، دانشگاه تهران
2 گروه زبان انگلیسی، دانشکده زبان‌ها و ادبیات خارجی، دانشگاه تهران، تهران، ایران
چکیده
This essay reads Charles Robert Maturin’s Melmoth the Wanderer through Søren Kierkegaard’s conceptions of subjectivity, despair, and faith in order to maintain that Maturin’s novel refashions Gothic damnation as a drama of existential self-relation. The essay suggests that the bargain which Melmoth strikes offers substitution instead of salvation, deliverance instead of inwardness, possibility without responsibility. The work’s structure of contained narratives, its scenes of temptation, the cruelty of its institutions, and its eventual dissolution, together demonstrate a world where social Christianity only exacerbates despair, without removing personal answerability. Ultimately, the essay contends, Melmoth the Wanderer articulates a specifically existentialist Gothic, a form of terror born not only from otherworldly vengeance, but from the soul’s longing to withdraw itself. Kierkegaard assists in revealing why Maturin’s most terrifying insight should be that an individual may truly wish to disappear from all suffering while still responsible for the form his disappearance will take.
کلیدواژه‌ها
موضوعات

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