Gothic Nation: Hawthorne, Ligotti, and the Absent Center of the Nation-State. Issue 2 (1st November 2015)

• Record Type: Journal Article
• Is Part Of: Gothic studies. Volume 17:Issue 2(2015)
• Page Start: 106
• Page End: 121
• Publication Date: 2015-11-01
• Subjects: 9/11 -- nation-state -- nationalism -- Hawthorne -- Ligotti -- American literature; Gothic revival (Literature) -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Gothic fiction (Literary genre) -- History and criticism -- Periodicals; Goth culture (Subculture) -- Periodicals; 809.38729
• DOI: 10.7227/GS.17.2.7
• Languages: English
• ISSNs: 1362-7937

Abstract

Abstract : Although composed before 9/11, Nathaniel Hawthorne's 'My Kinsman, Major Molineux' and Thomas Ligotti's 'The Shadow at the Bottom of the World' are both prescient in their critique of the impulse of American communities following 9/11 to monumentalise and concretise the nation-state and in particular the remains at Ground Zero. In this essay I discuss Ground Zero as a suggestive trope for the illusiveness of the nation as an' imagined community'. These complementary Gothic short stories operate as allegory and offer a way of reading how patriotic communities cohered around what remained at Ground Zero and (re)produced it as a site of patriotic performance. A new Gothic trait in our age of terror(ism) is the anxiety over the absence of a stable centre that anchors national continuity. This article places these short stories in conversation with Benedict Anderson, Étienne Balibar and other theorists who engage critiques of nation-building in order to draw out what is Gothic about the nation-state and to further substantiate how 9/11 revealed the nation-state as a principally Gothic phenomenon.