Below is a transcript of our conversation with CMU Professor Jeffrey Weinstock:
David Nicholas:
I'm David Nicholas and this is Central Focus, a weekly look at research activity and innovative work from Central Michigan University students and faculty. Some people are good at telling a scary story around a campfire, but Gothic literature is so much more from a long European tradition that came to America and grew into its own art form. CMU Professor Jeffrey Weinstock from the Department of English Language and Literature is a writer and champion of the American Gothic. I heard his story in our studio.
Jeffrey Weinstock:
So, people who might know the American Gothic without even being fully aware of it, it's perhaps most connected to Edgar Allan Poe, the premier figure of the American Gothic tradition. But Nathaniel Hawthorne is part of that tradition, leading all the way up to people like Stephen King and Tony Morrison. So that's it's been central to the teaching that I've been doing, as well as the research that I have.
DN:
When you look at the history and the development of the American Gothic and you, you brought up that everything in Europe was already established. Were there initially or are there still influences that come down from that European tradition, or how much has have we seen a development that's very uniquely American when it comes to now creating the work that we do?
JW:
So, the Gothic as a narrative form, so as a way of storytelling is one that gives shape to an expression, to anxieties and desires that circulate in a particular time and place. So, in the early part of the 19th century, certainly there was an inheritance from the European and the British Gothic, but our early American Gothic writers attempted to put their own spin on it in ways that would reflect the American experience. So, in early American gothics there's a figure a guy named Charles Brockton Brown, for example, who's often regarded as the (the) first American Gothicism, and he makes central use of the frontier as a site of anxiety in his writings. I like to remind my students that prior to there being electric lighting, it's hard to imagine just how dark things would have been after the sun went down when you were walking into the woods without a flashlight or anything along those lines. So, the frontier plays a significant role in the early American Gothic. Somebody like Washington Irving, too, who's a well-known figure for legend of Sleepy Hollow. One of the things that he does in the legend of Sleepy Hollow is he kind of invents ghosts. For a new country, so the ghost of the (the) Headless Horseman in that story is the ghost of a German Hessian who was a fighting on behalf of the British during the American War of Independence. So, at the moment that the country comes into being in that story, we get our first ghosts.
DN:
Will the film makers or the television producers do you see a place for them within the society as (as) contributors seen as (as) peers or (or) equals alongside the writers or, (are) you looking to focus on those that are producing the written word?
JW:
We very much would like to include the creators in various different media to the fullest extent possible. So, at our symposium in March, we included an independent filmmaker who has been doing adaptations of American Gothic works. He did one called Veland, which was by Charles Brockton Brown, which is a fascinating novel from the early part of the 19th century, having to do with a gruesome mass murder that's taken place at the, a character who believes that it's a (a) divine command and it raises all kinds of questions about whether it actually is a command from God whether he is mad, whether someone tricked him at lots of ambiguity that's interlaced within the text and the next one he is planning to do is an adaptation of the Daniel Hawthorne's the Blithedale romance. So, we were pleased to be able to have that. We would certainly like to have a creative component to our symposiums. We had author Paul Trembly do a reading we would certainly. Other poets and authors do readings and we be very open to having creators in other media, such as podcasts participating as well.
DN:
Jeffrey Weinstock, thank you very much for sharing all of the information with us and congratulations on both the formation of the society and the launch of the journal. Best of luck with all of those and thank you very much for joining us.
JW:
Thank you very much.
