The Architecture of Evil: H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House

CounterText ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 4 (3) ◽  
pp. 406-423
Author(s):  
Ljubica Matek
Keyword(s):  
Literary Canon ◽  
Traditional Architecture ◽  
Use Of Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Concentric Circles ◽  
The Witch ◽  
The Hill

This paper proposes that H. P. Lovecraft's ‘The Dreams in the Witch House’ (1932) and Shirley Jackson's The Haunting of Hill House (1959) embody the Gothic idea of subversion through their use of space. Specifically, both texts are set in a house that is shaped according to a scale unknown and repulsive to humans, suggesting that the architecture of evil is out of scale literally and metaphorically. Walter Gilman's room in the Witch House is strangely shaped and represents a passage into a parallel world which Gilman, a mathematician firmly set into the world of scale, first believes to exist only in dreams. Similarly, the interior of the Hill House is off centre and disjointed. People get physically lost as the rooms are set in strange concentric circles which defy traditional architecture; more importantly, characters’ subjectivity is consumed and appropriated by the house. By depicting protagonists as scientists deeply invested in the research of the occult, both Jackson and Lovecraft juxtapose science, which is marked by taxonomies, systems, and scales, with entities and rituals that transcend scalable knowledge. As their projects fail, the perceived harmony and knowability of life is revealed as false. The collapse of scale in both texts unsettles the reader, as it suggests that evil refuses to comply and be contained within a specific human-designed system of measurement or value. With this, the texts confirm the Gothic genre's countercultural position within the literary canon.

PROBLEMS OF PLASTIC PARKING SOLUTIONS IN THE URBAN ENVIRONMENT

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
A.G. Shipilov ◽  
◽  
T.S. Kuzmenko ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Urban Environment ◽  
Use Of Space ◽  
The World ◽  
Characteristic Features

This article deals with the problem of designing car parks in the modern urban environment. Special attention is paid to the search for architectural expressiveness. The article reveals the methods of achieving architectural expressiveness. The characteristic features of plastic solutions for car parks based on the world experience in the construction and construction of such buildings and structures are highlighted and described separately. The author's solution of car Parking on the selected site with the use of space-rod construction of the coating, as one of the techniques of plastic solutions, is given.

scholarly journals Ecotourism and Ecolodge Accommodation

2017 ◽  
Vol 7 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Dr.Sc. Dragan Bulatović
Keyword(s):  
Protected Areas ◽  
National Parks ◽  
Alternative Energy ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Traditional Architecture ◽  
Specific Content ◽  
Mass Tourism ◽  
Alternative Energy Sources ◽  
The World ◽  
Unique Experience

In ecotourism, as a specific form of tourism, conscientious individuals and groups participate, who by its influence on nature are trying to reduce effects produced by so called mass tourism. Ecotourism product should be developed on the contemporary tourism trends, with full respect of local specificity which represent commitment in regard to competitive destinations. Existence of receptive factors, such as facilities for accommodation, nutrition, entertainment and recreation, represent one of the basic prerequisites for the development of any ecotourism destination. Ecotourists seek accommodation which is ecologically acceptable, modest but cozy at the same time and provides unique experience in natural surroundings. In accordance with these demands protected areas all around the world offer its visitors high quality Ecolodge facilities, which are fully submerged into nature. During their construction and management strict criteria of protection of the environment are followed with optimal waste and energy management. Montenegro has enviable spacious potential for this kind of accommodation in protected areas, especially in its five national parks, so this form of accommodation has to find its place in the future development of tourism. Designing and construction of ecotourism facilities has to be strategically planned and the fact, that it is not enough just to have attractive location but also specific content it has to offer, has to be respected. Ecolodge facilities should be designed and built in accordance with traditional architecture and surrounding materials, to influence as little as possible on the environment and to use alternative energy sources. In other words, it is necessary to provide sustainability of these facilities.

THE METAPHOR LONDON-AS-THE-WORLD AS A KEY METAPHOR IN THE STRUCTURE OF THE LONDON TEXT OF ENGLISH LINGUISTIC CULTURE

2020 ◽  
pp. 202-216
Author(s):  
Aleksei V. Sosnin ◽  
◽  
Yuliya V. Balakina ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Semantic Analysis ◽  
Deep Structure ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
Semiotic Analysis ◽  
Linguistic Expression ◽  
The World ◽  
English Speaking ◽  
The Universe ◽  
Civilized World

The article examines the metaphor London-as-the-World in the structure of the London text of English linguistic culture (i.e., an emic or invariant text for a group of texts related to the British capital). Such an analysis makes it possible to update the most important dimension of the London text: its objects turns out to be a key component of Englishness, being conceptualized as a model of all-English and world processes, as an analogy of the civilized world and the universe. The metaphorical realizations of the London text are seen as the result of conceptual fusion. The research cited in the article is carried out at the junction of the cognitive and semiotic approaches, according to which socially significant mental entities are examined via a semantic analysis of corresponding supertexts. The integration of the cognitive and the semiotic is effected within the framework of unified semantics. Thereby a semiotic analysis of text consists in singling out propositions of diverse degrees of similarity in it, in the selection and classification of predicates with which characters and “things” are endowed in the text, and in the inclusion of individual entities from the text in the general categories, what reveals the picture of the world deep structure from the standpoint of that text. The article draws on the literary canon of New English, and a study into that material educes a continuity in the metaphors and the means of their linguistic expression that were used by the English-speaking community to structure the reality. The article thus postulates the relative stability of London text as a supertextual entity.

War, Labor, and Gasoline in “Carcassonne”

2019 ◽  
pp. 15-30
Author(s):  
Michael Zeitlin
Keyword(s):  
Great War ◽  
Personal Privacy ◽  
The World ◽  
The Hill ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Poetic Vision

The story's poetic vision of a young man who sees a horse has often been associated with Faulkner's personal privacy, a mysterious and opaque realm that Faulkner criticism has long attempted to penetrate. In this chapter,Michael Zeitlin reads the story's representation of privacy and poetic subjectivity as an "ideological reflex and echo," in Marx's phrase, of material and economic realities dominated by the Standard Oil Company.A young vagrant, a veteran aviator of the Great War, lies in his garret and dreams of "a buckskin pony with eyes like blue electricity and a mane like tangled fire, galloping up the hill and right off into the high heaven of the world."The Pegasus pony, the knight-aviator, the dream of soaring free from earth toward apotheosis-these motifs from Faulkner circa 1918-1927 all promise a transcendence that never fully arrives, ultimately yielding to the exigencies of the mundane, the immanent, the economic:earthbound labor, earthbound energy, earthbound modernity.

Poetosphere and mythopoetics of the estate in A.A. Blok’s dramatic poem “Song of Fate”

2020 ◽  
pp. 186-205
Author(s):  
Ekaterina V. Kuznetsova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Russian Literature ◽  
Open Spaces ◽  
White House ◽  
Modern City ◽  
The Past ◽  
The World ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Xix Century ◽  
The Hill ◽  
As If

As it noted by the researchers, the “Song of fate” accumulates painful thoughts of A.A. Blok about the fate of Russia and about his personal fate associat ed with the past, present and future of the Motherland. In addition to the ideological problems raised in it, the poem is interesting in an attempt to escape from the specifics of historical and national-cultural realities through their symbolization, combining the plans of life and being. The white house with a garden on the hill, in which the action of the play begins and the return to which is implied at the end, incorporates the most important features of Russia as a cultural, natural and spiritual space. The world of the estate is opposed by the space of the modern city and the big world of Russian open spaces. However, the estate for Blok is Russia the same. Therefore, Elena, the keeper of the estate, and Faina, the personalization of the world element, are two parts of one whole, as if the projection of an ideal Russia. The plot of the “Song of fate”, accord ing to D.M. Magomedova, I.S. Prikhodko, etc., is an artistic realization of the Gnostic myth of the captive Sophia, the Soul of the world. The imposition of the Gnostic myth in the “Song of fate” on the entire existing in Russian literature of the XIX century poetosphere of the estate leads to the creation of the author’s myth about Russia, the transformation of poetosphere in the mythopoetics.

“Look!! Look!!! at This!!!!”: The Radical Typography of David Walker's Appeal

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 55-72 ◽  
Author(s):  
Marcy J. Dinius
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
African American ◽  
Print Culture ◽  
The United States ◽  
Literary Canon ◽  
The World ◽  
Printed Word

From the first publication of David Walker's Appeal to the Coloured Citizens of the World in 1829 through its incorporation into the contemporary literary canon, readers have recognized it as a fiery indictment of slavery and of the contradictions in Christianity and in the United States' founding. Yet the striking typography of Walker's Appeal has become invisible in our critical focus on the text's relation to African American oratory and even in considerations of the pamphlet's significance in early black print culture. An analysis of this graphic text reveals how it materially registers Walker's impassioned voice and argument and how it visually directs readers to voice his call to the illiterate. Walker attempts to resolve the opposition of the spoken and the printed word by exploiting his text's typography.

The Great Patriotic War in Soviet and Post-Soviet Collective Memory

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roger D. Markwick
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Soviet Union ◽  
Collective Memory ◽  
Former Soviet Union ◽  
World War ◽  
The World ◽  
Great Patriotic War ◽  
State Of Mind ◽  
The Hill ◽  
Personal Trauma

World War II has never ended for the citizens of the former Soviet Union. Nearly 27 million Soviet citizens died in the course of what Joseph Stalin declared to be the Great Patriotic War, half of the total 55 million victims of the world war. The enduring personal trauma and grief that engulfed those who survived, despite the Red Army's victory over fascism, was not matched by Stalin's state of mind, which preferred to forget the war. Not until the ousting of Nikita S. Khrushchev in October 1964 by Leonid Brezhnev was official memory of the war really resurrected. This article elaborates a thesis about the place of World War II in Soviet and post-Soviet collective memory by illuminating the sources of the myth of the Great Patriotic War and the mechanisms by which it has been sustained and even amplified. It discusses perestroika, patriotism without communism, the fate of the wartime Young Communist heroine Zoya Kosmodemyanskaya, the battle for Victory Day, the return of ‘trophy’ art, the Hill of Prostrations, and Sovietism without socialism.

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