Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula's World-system and Gothic Periodicity

Shapiro, Stephen

doi:10.7227/gs.10.1.5

Cited by 39 publications

(9 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…As Stephen Shapiro notes, 'Gothic's troubled historical recollection and precognitive prolepsis occurs because the conjuncture of a contracting economic long-wave and a newly expansive one simultaneously enables a synoptic retrospection of the past cycle's arc, while also foreshadowing the resurrection of its dynamics.' 16 In the grip of an anxious cultural and traumatic present, brought about by the tentacular, networked, and contaminating erosion of social cohesion under the yoke of neoliberalism, the market's ghostly 'invisible hand' informs a version of the future that looks uncertain, gloomy, if not doomed by automation and economic degradation. Nostalgia-inflected programming, then, provides a strategy to consolidate and/or critique myths about the past prior to the moment of the 'wrong turn in history'; in Stranger Things, this feature of return drives the audience towards a socially shared desire for a promising future that reassures and re-orientates viewers, and urges them to seek out these social goals to counteract the distracting horrors of the precarious present.…”

Section: The Return Of the 1980s 'Past'mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things

Fhlainn

2022

Gothic Studies

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The Netflix series Stranger Things (2016–) is one of a host of recent 1980s-set texts that returns to the decade through the lens of cultural nostalgia. Recalling and resituating its viewers in the Reagan era, the series presents a contemporary Gothic narrative by returning to the 1980s as a period of profound cultural importance, setting its secondary Gothic space, The Upside Down, as a Gothic neoliberal shadow world that conveys profound implications for a terrifying future. Examining the 1980s as a nexus point for socio-political anxieties and nostalgic recall, which has dominated the economic landscape and many Hollywood films and shows in the twenty-first century, this article argues that Stranger Things situates its characters at the precipice of a wrong turn in history, a period in which its youthful band of heroes, like their 1980s counterparts in its science fiction and fantasy cinema before them, must chase down their own futures to prevent a terrible fate. Through ‘reflective nostalgia’, this rift between the 1980s onscreen and the shadow future of the Upside Down is presented as a diachronic narrative, a return to the past to identify and critique the 1980s as a point of origin for numerous socio-economic anxieties and ills in our contemporary neoliberal Gothic world. Stranger Things, alongside other 1980s retro-texts, articulates our own Gothic terrors in the contemporary moment. Moreover, this article argues how and why the Gothic 1980s is a revisited site of return from which we need to learn, particularly following the post-2008 financial crisis, to overcome the necro-economic consequences of the ‘Upside Down’ neoliberal wasteland of the twenty-first century.

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Section: The Return Of the 1980s 'Past'mentioning

confidence: 99%

A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things

Fhlainn

2022

Gothic Studies

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“…By juxtaposing the historical moments in which these generic fictions are produced, then, we can discover economic continuities between periods that would otherwise appear to be completely distinct. For example, Gothic fictions tend to cluster at moments when the world‐system is passing “between two phases of long‐wave capitalist accumulation” (Shapiro , 31). This coincidence suggests that the Gothic form may mediate the violence communities experience when they are coopted into new capitalist regimes, dramatizing economic upheavals as a clash between fantastical peasant/folk beliefs and an all‐consuming modernity (Shapiro ).…”

Section: Periodizing the World‐systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…For example, Gothic fictions tend to cluster at moments when the world‐system is passing “between two phases of long‐wave capitalist accumulation” (Shapiro , 31). This coincidence suggests that the Gothic form may mediate the violence communities experience when they are coopted into new capitalist regimes, dramatizing economic upheavals as a clash between fantastical peasant/folk beliefs and an all‐consuming modernity (Shapiro ). Similarly, “allegorical” tales recounting violent reversals in “order and force” often prevail during moments of transition from one imperial center to another (Hensley 278).…”

Section: Periodizing the World‐systemmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Literary History of World‐Systems, II: World Literature and Deep Time

Eatough

2015

Literature Compass

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This essay is the conclusive piece of a two-part series on the use of world-systems theory in literary studies. In it, I continue my discussion of literary world-systems by turning to the field of world literature. As I show, world-systems theory owes much of its current popularity in literary studies to the "new" world literature, which has borrowed part of its conceptual language from world-systems theory. This language includes such key terms as longue durée, circulation, cyclical history, and center and periphery. These terms have helped to revolutionize literary history in a number of ways, three of which I focus on: (1) the pursuit of a more abstract, quantitative account of literary genres; (2) the attempt to reposition European literature within a longer history of global literature; and (3) the theorization of cyclical models of literary history. Taken together, these projects have helped scholars to rewrite the history and geography of world literature in important ways -by reimagining the novel form as a response to risk and insecurity rather than power; by emphasizing Europe's competition with non-European cultural centers; and by identifying a temporal limit to European and American hegemony.This article is the conclusive piece of a two-part series on world-systems theory and literary studies. In the previous installment, I examined Marxist literary theory's engagements with worldsystems theory, from the Subaltern Studies group's ambivalent approach to the methodology to Jamesonian Marxism's more laudatory responses. In this article, I continue my discussion of literary world-systems by turning to the field of world literature. While Marxist literary studies may have been the first approach to engage with world-systems theory, few would argue that the methodology's recent vogue has more to do with the interest generated by a "new" brand of world literature and its appropriations of key world-systems theory concepts. From the moment when David Damrosch, Franco Moretti, and Pascale Casanova all published revisionist accounts of world literature within a short span of a couple years, we have seen an explosion of articles, monographs, edited collections, and conferences concerned with "world literature" and its historical, theoretical, and ontological foundations. Many of these discussions have revolved around the conceptual language the "new" world literature has borrowed world-systems theory, from the sociological nature of its analyses of texts' circulation and reception to its dividing of literary space into centers and peripheries to its focus on literary history's longue durée. As numerous scholars quickly recognized, such concepts promise to revolutionize both the "older" world literature of Auerbach, Leo Spitzer, and Ernst Robert Curtius and more recent nation-based modes of literary history. But many also recognized that these concepts raise pressing questions about the lenses through which we read global literary history and the way in which these lenses reveal, distort, and construct the objec...

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“…Within this purview, DeLillo's novels offer an aesthetic representation of the new social relations proper to a financial regime and its attendant “structure of feeling” (Williams, 122). Specifically, a pre‐eminently financial economy gives rise to a new social reality and a new social materiality based on a “structured forgetting” (Shapiro; , 33) of labour, which renders invisible “the social content of economic relations” (Aglietta; , 9) embodied within the commodity form. As a result, the behaviour of the class agents operating within the circuits of finance are grounded in what Keynes defined as the “fetish of liquidity” (De Marco; , 3).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

Marco

2014

Literature Compass

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Over the years, few scholars have focused on the centrality of finance capital and its workings within Don DeLillo's fiction. Indeed, not only does the world of finance capital serve as a background to the actions and the events of some of DeLillo's most famous novels (i.e. Players and Cosmopolis), but it plays a much more systematic and structural role in his entire oeuvre. The present article seeks to offer an overview of DeLillo's works as an expression and critique of the financialization of the US and world economy and to highlight the significance of finance capital as an interpretative paradigm for understanding DeLillo's fiction through the work of mourning and melancholia. The article wishes to contextualise such a materialist reading of DeLillo's oeuvre within a broader, but still very small, strand of 'DeLillian' scholarship, which recognises the novelist's preoccupation with the social and cultural effects of a predominantly financial era. Ultimately, this paper stresses that a financial reading of DeLillo's fiction does not only constitute a valuable contribution to DeLillo's scholarship, but that such an investigation of the relationship between literary fiction and economic, especially financial, regimes, can provide a significant insight into the long-term effects that the global ascent and crisis of finance capital over the last 40 years has had on the current US social and cultural condition.

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Transvaal, Transylvania: Dracula's World-system and Gothic Periodicity

Cited by 39 publications

References 5 publications

A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things

A Rift between Worlds: The Retro-1980s and the Neoliberal Upside Down in Stranger Things

The Literary History of World‐Systems, II: World Literature and Deep Time

Don Delillo's Fiction of Finance Capital

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