The bridges catch silent fire and swallow themselves into the sea. Silence speaks the language of size. So far out, the explosions come only as a faint rumble. But as all lines of communication go down, another resonance carries direct, without diminution or loss, on the historical ether of pure nothing. In Gotham City’s crashing bridges, there, once more, are the falling towers.

Sarah Phillips, the Deputy Head of English at Godalming College, a state sixth form college in Surrey, England, has had an excellent conference idea. Her students are studying the Gothic; they are considering as well the possibility of continuing their studies, in English, next year in higher rather than further education. So Sarah has decided to convene a conference at her College, on ‘Studying the Gothic’, at which there will be invited representatives from universities in the region as the speakers. The beauty of this idea is that it ticks a lot of boxes. The students studying th

A one-day Symposium for Postgraduates and Early Career Researchers at the University of Stirling, Scotland Saturday 24th November 2012 Plenary Speakers: David Punter and Linnie Blake Since the eighteenth century, the Gothic aesthetic has been intimately tied to the experience and representation of trauma, be it personal, historical, cultural or otherwise.  Early writers of the Gothic continuously rehearsed their preoccupations with familial violence and rupture, while the chaotic historical events of the French Revolution inscribed their traces in some of the mode’s most enduring c

St Mary's University College, situated next door to Walpole's Strawberry Hill in Twickenham, London, will host a two-day Conference  on the theme of 'Gothic: Culture, Subculture, Counterculture'  from Friday 8th to Saturday 9th March 2013  For more details, click here.

Torchlit walks, hillside candlelit poetry readings, maypole dancing - it can only be the bi-annual festival of Gothickry that is the Coleridge Summer Conference ... - concluded

  ‘Where Were the Humans?’ A film of Guy Debord’s Society of the Spectacle would make an excellent Gothic science-fiction movie. The very notion of ‘spectacle’ as the accumulation of capital ‘to the point of image’ resonates with several motifs from the Gothic imagination. Think of the narrative movement into the Other’s space (with a voice-over intoning Debord’s line ‘All that was once directly lived has become mere representation’). Or think of the twists and turns in the plot occasioned by frenzied fighting over property possession, all amounting to a specta

Torchlit walks, hillside candlelit poetry readings, maypole dancing - it can only be the bi-annual festival of Gothickry that is the Coleridge Summer Conference ... - again ... Vying in dilatoriness with the man himself, this will now be part two of three – my excuse, 21st century Porlock syndrome in the form of jetlag from a (literal) flight to China ...

  www.listal.com                 The season finale of the current season of The Walking Dead is broadcast on British television on August 6th, 2012. This is a short blog to mark the occasion. It is dedicated to Lauren Cohan for her strong performance as the tomboyish, but also romantic, Maggie Greene in the second season of The Walking Dead. In the mid-nineties Lauren was a student at Winchester, where I teach English. It has been great to see her starring in a high profile role (adding to similar film and television roles in the horror genre – Supernatu