Author: Coumba Diawara

The Enormous Radio can be considered gothic because instead of listening to normal music from the radio, the Westcotts discover themselves listening  to their neighbors’ conversations and arguments. Mrs Westcott can’t seem to enjoy this.. One day, she discovers that a neighbor  is experiencing domestic violence. She asks her husband to go and help her but he believes that they should just stay put and mind their business. Mr Wescott notices his wife gradually becoming interested in the conversations of their neighbors that the radio is playing. He thinks that his wife should stop listening but she continues. Jim addresses Irene about her past sins and also their family’s financial difficulties. Jim, refusing to remain involved in Irene’s delusionary ideas, forces Irene to admit her dishonest attempts to keep up appearances.

The Enormous radio may be considered not gothic because of the setting, time and events taking place. Gothic fiction usually has something to do with horror, terror, suspicions, etc, and the Enormous Radio doesn’t have much of this going on.Nothing tragic happens to any of the main characters Irene and her husband. There are no unusual events that will have the reader in a state of terror or at the edge of their seat. 

It is assumed that gothic fiction began as a lurid offshoot from a dominant tradition of largely realist and morally respectable fiction. (Page 3)

Strict interpreters of the Gothic as a genre would perhaps agree with Maurice Lévy’s insistence that the true period of Gothic, and its cultural, aesthetic, religious, and political background, was from about 1764 to 1824, the period of the first Gothic Revival, and the culture of Georgian England.° Lévy acknowledges however that the term has now become of much broader application and popular understanding, and has been used to describe texts ranging from Wuthering Heights (1847) to William Gibson’s Neuromancer or Buffy the Vampire Slayer. (Page 4)

The Gothic deals in transgressions and negativity, perhaps in reaction against the optimistic rationalism of its founding era, which allowed for a rethinking of the prohibitions and sanctions that had previously seemed divinely ordained but now appeared to be simply social agreements in the interest of progress and civic stability. (Page 5)

Freethinking characters appear frequently in the Gothic, and they are generally up to no good, disbelieving in the significance of virginity, for example (while obsessively eager to deflower those who maintain it), and proclaiming their own superiority and inherent freedom as rational beings above the shibboleths of convention and religious faith. Their prey are innocents who put their trust in the benevolence and right thinking of others, and it is not difficult to see in these contrasts that the Gothic is in essence a reactionary form, like the detective novel, one that explores chaos and wrongdoing in a movement toward the ultimate restitution of order and convention. (Page 5)

Among the extremes and taboos that the Gothic explores are religious profanities, demonism, occultism, necromancy, and incest. This can be interpreted as a dark side of Enlightenment freethinking or the persistence of an increasingly excluded occultist tradition in western culture, one which paradoxically insisted on an acknowledgment of the continuing existence of magic, religious, and demonic forces within a more and more secular society. (Page 6)

After Reading all of the readings so far my most favorite text to read which was very interesting was “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allen Poe. I enjoyed reading this because as I was reading the author kept me engaged firstly by using a first person narrative, and secondly by making the narrators actions very blunt, it makes the reader want to know what takes place next. In the text the narrator explains that a black cat that was once his pet scratched him and in return he cut the cats eye out and hung the cat. From these details that the author provides throughout the text for some it might be too graphic but on the other hand for people like me who gets uninterested quickly when it comes to readings it immediately grabs my attention and makes me eager to want to continue to read. The story continues to tell us that the narrator found a black cat with a white mark and when he tried to kill it his wife stopped him and he went on to murder his wife. Poe makes it that the narrator is committing more crucial crimes now and as I mentioned grabs more attention from a reader. The narrator then went on to hide his wife’s body. This may bring a question to the readers mind on whether or not this man has ever murdered someone else, or did he feel guilt after killing his wife. So overall one of my favorite things from reading the text is the authors ability to continuously attract the reader to his story and not only that the reader is actively thinking throughout the read and in a way thinking ahead to what’s coming next.