Gothic Technologies in Postmodern Fiction: Reading J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Mark Z. Danielewski

Alexander, Vadakkan Neethi and Nandini, Ramesh Sankar (2020) Gothic Technologies in Postmodern Fiction: Reading J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and Mark Z. Danielewski. PhD thesis, Indian Institute of Technology Hyderabad.

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Abstract

Through the works of J.G. Ballard, Angela Carter, and, Mark Z. Danielewski, this dissertation maps key postmodern contexts that reinvent the Gothic tradition. Texts such as Ballard’s The Drowned World (1962) and Crash (1973), Carter’s The Infernal Desire Machines of Doctor Hoffman (1972), and Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves (2000) take familiar Gothic themes into a fundamentally postmodern arena marked by the terrifying dominance of technology and mass media, increasingly alien urban spaces, and violent neo-imperialist adventures. The novels of Carter, Ballard, and Danielewski present distinct filtrations of the massive changes within Britain and America in a post-war context. While Ballard’s own experiences as a child of the Second World War and his intense sense of disengagement with large-scale environmental changes result in a tepid, strained, and deeply ironized response to technology and modernization in the late-twentieth century, Carter provides a quintessentially postmodern narrative that offers a unique, if contentious, feminist response to the technologized world of the ’60s and the’70s. Danielewski’s work formally represents an enthusiastic embrace of the possibilities of Postmodernism and the technology of new-media as a creative mine for spatialized horror, while simultaneously succumbing to the temptation of sentimentality at the cost of genuinely addressing its historical context. This dissertation proposes that in each of these texts, the concepts of the mechanical and the technological constitute the central problematic through which postmodern Gothic horror seeks to comprehend itself.

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