Siting horror: Place and space in American Gothic fiction

In "Siting Horror: Place and Space in American Gothic Fiction," I direct Michel de Certeau's discussion of hegemonic "place" and popular "space" toward an understanding of Gothic literature and film as a site of contest between warring visions of architecture. I contrast Benjamin Franklin's and Edgar Allan Poe's respective assertions of authoritarian place with the spatial subversions evident in the works of George Lippard, Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Bob Kaufman, and Thomas Pynchon. While these literary artists dramatize the struggle of Gothic protagonists against what Michel Foucault terms heterotopic and panoptic places, later 20th century mass cultural texts such as the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer suggest an undoing of the revolutionary potential found in popular uses of space. I conclude with a discussion of Albert Wendt's "Prospecting" and Victoria Nalani Kneubuhl's Ola Na Iwi (The Bones Live): each of these texts evokes the exoticist "Polynesian Gothic" subgenre in order to shed light upon the ways in which indigenous peoples of the Pacific have made colonizers' cultures and locations into their own "practiced spaces."...