Grad School Gothic

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Footnotes

2:07 – “Critics have historically maligned the Gothic for being too over-the-top”

In his “Preface” to the 1802 edition of Lyrical Ballads – now widely considered to be the manifesto for early Romanticism – Wordsworth implicitly contrasts his new brand of poetry with the Gothic, claiming that “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulants” (99).

2:09 – “…too provocative of base emotions…”

See, for instance, “The Terrorist System of Novel Writing,” The Monthly Magazine, August 1797, 102-104.

2:12 – “…too black and white in its portrayals of good vs. evil”

See, for instance, Leslie Fiedler’s chapter on the Gothic in Love and Death in the American Novel (1960).

3:19 – “At a social level, [castles and monasteries] mean the persistence of a past which we’d wished in our desire for modernity to be long-since dead. But that power still seems to go on.”

Chris Baldick (1992) and Jerrold Hogle (2002) also promote Punter’s interpretation of the Gothic as a genre concerned with the machinations of a societal institution losing grasp of its cultural authority.

6:08 – “The humanities threatens to become, as last year’s MLA president Russell Berman noted, ‘a service provider within the academy.”

This quotation comes from Smith’s “Big Thinking” lecture at the 2012 Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences at the University of Waterloo. It represents arguments that were later published in her 2015 Manifesto for the Humanities. 

6:57 – “My Gothic dissertation is more like a Gothic novel…”

In this dissertation, I employ intertextuality as a method for literary criticism. Intertextuality was first defined by Julie Kristeva in Desire in Language as “the transposition of one or more systems of signs onto another, accompanied by a new articulation of the enunciative and denotative position” (15). More broadly, it can be understood as the shaping of the meaning of one text by means of another text. In my work, I conceive of intertextuality as a weaving together of two strands that mutually inform one another: a reading of Gothic fiction and a report on the lived conditions of doctoral training in the humanities. In the former strand, I argue that Gothic fiction —and in particular, fiction that fits within the tradition of the Female Gothic—is concerned with themes of education and pedagogy that have been overlooked by previous critics. In the latter strand, I report on recent research from the sociology of higher education to show the “Gothic” side of doctoral training, incorporating first-person accounts from personal interviews in the style of literary journalism made popular by Ira Glass. (For more on the methodology of literary journalism, particularly in the medium of radio, see Jessica Abel’s Out on the Wire [2015] and John Biewen/Alexa Dilworth’s Reality Radio [2017].) Here I deem this intertextual dissertation “more like a novel” because, as Jack Hart attests in StoryCraft (2011), Glassian literary journalism shares many techniques with novelistic storytelling, including “scene setting, characterization, and plotting” (6). Intertextuality is itself a novelistic device—one that is akin to the way of reading Rita Felski deems “recognition” in Uses of Literature (2008), thus making it method of reader response literary criticism as well.

7:12 – “…a multi-volume one that tells the story of protagonists struggling against traditional forces cleaving desperately to life in the modern world – ‘threaten[ing],’ as Gothic scholar Chris Baldick tells us, ‘to fix [their] dead hand[s] upon us.’”

In Literature of Terror, Punter asserts that “Gothic stood for the old-fashioned as opposed to the modern […] Gothic was the archaic […] that which was prior to, or opposed to, or resisted the establishment of civilized values and a well-regulated society” (5). In my argument, the “civilized values” and “well-regulated society” that the Grad School Gothic resists are the democratizing principles of intersectional feminist pedagogy. 

7:20 – “As in the tradition of the bildungsroman, the protagonists in this Gothic novel are on an educational journey…”

Although there has never been a major study to examine the educational aspects of the Female Gothic, a few of the field’s prominent critics have alluded to the need for one. As Eugenia DeLamotte puts it in Perils of the Night (1990), it is ‘not surprising’ that in the Female Gothic ‘education tends to play an important role’, because the ‘enlightened mind’ and ‘eloquence’ are the heroine’s ‘chief weapon[s] against tyranny’ (52). In “From Emile to Frankenstein: The Education of Monsters” (1991), Alan Richardson has also noted the ‘thematization of pedagogy’ in the Gothic, in ‘its opposition of naïve heroines and knowing villains, who often (like Montoni) assume a paternal position, suggesting that the line between pedagogy and tyranny is an uncomfortably fine and unstable one’ (148).

7:42 – “In the novels of Ann Radcliffe and her imitators—a tradition known since the 1970’s as the ‘Female Gothic’…”

The Female Gothic is a sub-strain of the Gothic first theorized by Ellen Moers in a 1974 article for the New York Review of Books. While she defines it as “the work that women writers have done in a literary mode that, since the eighteenth century, we have called ‘the Gothic,’” other feminist scholars have expanded on that definition. See Robert Miles’ introduction to the special edition of Women’s Writing devoted to the Female Gothic (1994), Gary Kelly’s introduction to Varieties of the Female Gothic (2002), and Andrew Smith and Diana Wallace’s introduction to the special issue of Gothic Studies devoted to the Female Gothic (2004).

13:58 – “The Gothic heroine typically starts her life under the care of such an engaged pedagogue, developing a baseline of trust and mutual respect for the authority figures around her.”

To use the examples that will be cited later in this dissertation: although they may have their flaws, Radcliffe’s M. St. Aubert, Shelley’s Alphonse Frankenstein, and Brontë’s Mrs. Bretton do display special regard for their charges’ individuality and overall wellbeing early in their lives. 

14:39 – “According to Gary Kelly, Distinguished Professor of English at the University of Alberta and editor of the scholarly edition Varieties of the Female Gothic, that ‘subjective merit’ is the heroine’s sense of self-worth that comes from her ‘sensibility,’ or fine feeling.”

Eugenia Delamotte discusses a similar archetypal characteristic of the Female Gothic heroine in her 1990 study Perils of the Night. She deems it the heroine’s “conscious worth” (34).

16:19 – “But often, she finds when she gets there it isn’t quite what she expected—especially compared with her earlier, more nurturing educational environment.”

In “PhD Candidate Expectations: Exploring Mismatch with Experience” (2014), Holbrook et. al. conducted interviews with over one hundred Australian Ph.D. candidates and found that the majority experienced a negative mismatch between their expectations and their experiences of doctoral study (342). A significant number reported their experiences of supervision as one of the factors for their negative mismatch: “when candidate satisfaction with supervision is examined in relation to comments about mismatch, it is evident that they are strongly indicative of low satisfaction − a finding that supports previous re- search that emphasizes the importance of supervision in student experience” (342).

16:38 – “In the original Female Gothic, part of this precipitating event often involves her becoming orphaned. Which, in the most basic sense, means she’s irreparably severed from those who cared for her in her early life—a common, if socially constructed consequence of the Grad School Gothic too.”

Sverdlik, Hall, McAlpine, and Hubbard offer a sweeping review of factors influencing the doctoral experience in “The PhD Experience” (2018). Among those discussed include the frequent occurrence of Ph.D. candidates becoming isolated from their old friends and family members, resulting in social isolation and mental health struggles (372). In a 2007 article for the Journal of Research Practice, for example, Carlos Andres Trujillo writes about the “lonely path” of doctoral studies (par. 2).

22:17 – “But for now, I just want to point out that [Birmingham’s] comments gesture toward what many researchers of doctoral training have found to be the greatest ‘menace’ of all to grad students (whether they mean to be or not): the Ph.D. advisor.”

In their recent, comprehensive review of the research on doctoral students’ completion, achievement, and wellbeing, Sverdlik et. al (2018) note that there is “extensive literature linking dissatisfaction with supervision to doctoral student attrition,” however “faculty are often unaware of their potential role in student dropout” (370). See also Isabelle Skakni, “Doctoral studies as an initiatory trial: expected and taken-for-granted practices that impede PhD students’ progress” (2018).

28:15 – “Maybe that’s why so many of the Ivory Tower’s most powerless are beginning to assert their right to say ‘me too’ in the astounding, if underrecognized #MeToo movement in academia.”

A quick gloss on #MeToo discourse in academia: citing K.A. Amienne’s viral article ‘Abusers and Enablers in Faculty Culture (The Chronicle of Higher Education, Nov. 2017), well-known Ph.D. advocate and author of The Professor is In Karen Kelsky created a Google Doc in December 2017 titled ‘A Crowdsourced Survey of Sexual Harassment in the Academy’, inviting readers to anonymously contribute. Within a month, nearly 2,000 respondents had shared their stories of abuse in academia. (https://theprofessorisin.com/2017/12/01/a-crowdsourced-survey-of-sexual-harassment-in-the-academy/). See also the Chronicle of Higher Education’s interactive feature titled ‘The Awakening: Women and Power in the Academy’. (https://www.chronicle.com/interactives/the-awakening). 

38:45 – “Researchers of the doctoral training process have concluded the same thing—that often, the so-called ‘violence’ occurs out of pedagogical ignorance, the product of Ph.D. advisors themselves being trained to be scholars, not teachers.”

See, for instance, Isabelle Skakni, “Doctoral Studies as Initiatory Trial” (2018).

39:21 – “Even though they almost always mean well, Ph.D. advisors often don’t recognize how much power they have over their advisees’ self-esteem and future careers…”

A recent study published in Nature Biotechnology (March 2018) reports that, compared to the general public, graduate students are six times more likely to experience depression and anxiety than the general public. The researchers deem their findings evidence for a “mental health crisis” in graduate education and go on to state that “it is alarming” how much graduate students’ mental health relies on the stability of their relationships with faculty advisers and mentors (283).