Огнян Ковачев

Virtual Communities vs. Imaginary Communities. Festivities. Reading. Chatting This text is an introduction to the next two articles ("Virtual Communities vs. Imaginary Communities. Festivities. Reading. Chatting" and "Gothicizing the Electronic Web") and offers their basis and their context

This paper observes the play of the Real and the Imaginary, actualized in a parallel dimension of cognitive and aesthetic ruptures. The ruptures are caused by two disparate phenomena: the Gothick Literary Revival (1764-1820) and the World Wide Web culture nowadays. Besides their external dissimilarities the two phenomena have important common places. Both the Gothick and the Web might be described as hosts of fictions haunting multidimensional architectural metaphors: the Gothick edifice and the Web site. My observations aim at naming and visualizing the modifications of such a powerful ghost-fiction as the Sublime. They are based on the back-and-forth oscillation between its (pre)romantic Burkean mode, the Kantian and the Romantic ones, and the (post)modern technological frames. The rise of the Gothick more than 200 years ago can be defined in terms of Wolfgang Iser's literary anthropology as a new kind of explanatory fiction, which grants primary importance to the instruments of fantasy and imagination. By means of them human beings stage out the strife between Nature and Culture crucial for the late 18th and the early 19th century. The Gothick fiction also acts as an anti-hierarchical and decentring agent disguised in the trappings of a faked or mock medievalism. As a result of the epistemological shift the inability of the Gothick writers/readers "to be present to themselves" is being transformed in a desire to produce uncanny fictions, in which the Imaginary considerably transgresses and even conquers the realms of the Real. This kind of fictionalizing of the unnameable in my essay is referred to as "Gothicizing". Its ultimate borderline is the Sublime. In the long run from the Gothick to the Web the Sublime has passed through various frames: The Burkean, the Gothick, the Kantian, the Romantic, the Lyotardian and the technological ones, to mention a few of them. Whether in the former more private and transcendental modes, or in the latter predominantly public.

The kind of laughter that I call gothic is to be heard or produced primarily in literary works belonging to the British Gothic Revival (1764–1820). The peculiarities of such laughing are result of its paradoxical amalgamation with fear. Due to this mixed character it is akin to the dark romantic grotesque described by Wolfgang Kayser and Mikhail Bakhtin. Within the uncanny mixture of joy and grief, of laughing and crying, I differentiate a variety of roles played by the gothic laughter. We can observe the humour of the servants in Walpole’s and Radcliffe’s novels, the rebellious humour of the Freudian super-ego, the daemonic or Satanic laughter of Maturin’s Melmoth, the laughter caused by automated bodies, mechanical or ghost simulacra in M. G. Lewis’s The Monk and E. T. A. Hoffmann’s Der Sandman. In the analysis are applied concepts from theories of laughter by Baudelaire, Henry Bergson, Freud, and Helmuth Plessner. Self-reflective and eccentrically positioned, gothic laughter is a symptom of painful personal self-observation and self-knowledge, as well as of the insuperable cognitive, aesthetic and existential anxieties.

In this paper essential aesthetical, ethical and social topics and motives in Tzvetan Stoyanov’s last novel, his article ‘Gangs’ and his essay ‘Homespun Intelligentsia” are subjected to critical scrutiny. Some of them are explored in other novels by the same author. Particular attention is paid to the questions of genre, literary formation of characters, the historical contexts of the novel’s creation and the fictional world created inside it, and to a contents structure based juxtaposition with Ilija Trojanov’s novel The World Is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner. Moral and ideological dilemmas in the world outlook and the works of Tzvetan Stoyanov provide another subject of analysis.