It is critical common knowledge that domestic narratives and the structure of traditional domesticity are subverted in Gothic fiction (Smith 2013). The household and its apparent security are threatened from within by unknown supernatural forces. What seems familiar becomes upsetting, strange and 'unfamiliar'. Both Charlotte Perkins Gilman in "The Yellow Wall-Paper" and Edgar Allan Poe in "The Black Cat" give comparable views on American domesticity, both questioning two important aspects of domestic life (family and a blissful household). The two writers create a mad discourse in which the inexplicable and the uncanny infiltrate into reality and the sentimental domestic narrative is undermined.

My paper examines the interplay between the sophisticated postmodernist techniques of intertextuality, parody, metafiction and a return to orality or better said of pseudo-orality, a simulated-oral discourse or what the Russian Formalists called “skaz”, brought about by much postcolonial, ethnic or feminist literature.

From its onset, the Gothic has attempted to challenge established norms and conventions, either for sensational effects or to question their homogenizing and reductive tendencies. The questioning or reinforcing of received notions of femininity in Gothic fiction has been much debated by critics, with the concept of masculinity coming second. The present paper discusses normative masculinity as it was perceived in the 19th century and how E.T.A. Hoffmann, Edgar Allan Poe and Guy de Maupassant challenge its validity by creating male characters who adopt a hysterical, almost feminine voice, contesting the belief that hysteria was a “female malady”. The characters expose their unconventional masculinity, which resists the model of the ‘ganzer Mann’ in Germany, ‘marketplace man’ in US and the ‘conjugal heterosexual’ in France.

The present paper attempts to see what determines Marlow’s difficulty to turn his Congolese experience into language. Therefore, I argue that Marlow’s storytelling collapses because at the core of his discourse there is the unknown semantic universe of the other. In the “heart of darkness”, on the banks of the Congo River, there stands an unknown language, the language of the natives which is known only by Kurtz. Thus it becomes impossible for Marlow to translate it and incorporate it in his story.

No abstract