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SOURCE: "Learning the Hard Way: Gothic Pedagogy in the Modern Romance Quest," in Comparative Literature, Vol. 36, No. 2, Spring, 1984, pp. 146-61.
In the following essay, Merivale focuses on "Gothic pedagogy," or learning by fear.
A series of works—from Mozart's The Magic Flute (1791) through Goethe's Faust (1806, 1832), Flaubert's La Tentation de St. Antoine (1856), James Branch Cabell's Jurgen (1919), David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus (1920), and Hermann Hesse's Steppenwolf (1927) to John Fowles's The Magus (1966)—employ the devices of what I call "Gothic pedagogy" in their dramatic or narrative structures. Inner artifacts—pageant, vision, performance—provide the hero of each of these "internalized romantic quests"1 with an astonishing, terrifying, yet phantasmagorical sequence of lessons, made up of separate episodes chiefly connected with each other by the fact that the hero experiences them. These "Gothicized" hero-quests, or Bildungen, are also Gothicized godgames, for a Magus, devil-god and stage-director, has devised and produced them to...
This section contains 6,963 words (approx. 24 pages at 300 words per page) |
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