American Horror Story Textual Analysis

Societies and cultures often contain one thing that can exponentially affect one’s life: stereotypes. Brent Staples, author of “Just Walk On By” creates the message that many are being held to certain stereotypes that often make life difficult. He conveys this message through the persona he creates along with his emotional appeal.

The horror story is a uniquely interactive genre. Its main objective is to make the reader feel something, whether that be fear, anxiety, suspense, or any combination thereof. These feelings are evoked with the use of a monster, depending on the story it can be an external source, like a vampire or werewolf, or it could be something inside one of the characters, something in their psyche. In her story, “The Grave”, P.D.Cacek utilizes the literary elements of symbolism, imagery, and point of view.

The film Carrie (Brian De Palma, 1976) follows the protagonist Carrie White, Sissy Spacek, who is a shy high school student residing in a small town. After receiving her first period, she acquires telekinetic powers, which turns her world around; especially since she did not understand what the change meant for her as a new woman. Although Carrie is a horror film, the underlying meaning points to feminism as it embarks on the discovery of power, and threatening the patriarchal order. Carrie is a feminist film where fear comes not in blood or telekinesis, but the fears of a strong woman. The film uses cinematic techniques to further push this implicit meaning by ways of cinematography, mise-en-scene, and editing.

The gothic and romantic themes in Batman Begins hold a strong parallel to the themes presented in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. To the romantic views of nature and the gothic themes that made up most of the film. These themes set and add to the tone, of a piece of entertainment, may it be an archetypal gothic novel or a movie about a comic book

Wayne Dyer once said, “The highest form of ignorance is when you reject something you don 't know anything about.” In the novel Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, ignorance is a common theme portrayed throughout the novel. It sets the impression of how all of the characters feel due to a society that has outlawed books. Guy Montag is a firefighter, whose job is to burn the books. Yet, he often steals them without the chief firefighter, or anyone else knowing. This is until the day he meets Clarisse, who looks at the world in a different way than anyone else. Then, shortly after, he has to burn down a house full of books and burn the woman inside also because she refuses to leave. This causes Montag to realize that books should not be burned and have great significance in the world. He then shows his wife the abundance of books that he has collected from his job, and his wife, Mildred, becomes concerned. This later causes her to make up lies to cover the fact that Montag is breaking the law of owning books. The ignorance shown in the novel is greatly illustrated on page ninety-five, due to the encounter of the

Have you ever read a story that causes chills or your emotionally invested in a character. The story’s Frankenstein by Mary Shelley and The mysteries of udolpho by Ann Radcliffe are literature that are centered in fear. These story’s cause suspense or has ghost or some type of monster. A gothic is a great example of fear in literature. The settings, characters, and story line has a way of making the reader invested by hooking to their emotions. Literature can be put into categories but it does not mean that all stories are the same.

The novel “The Haunting of Hill House,” written by Shirley Jackson, closely follows the traditional tropes of an American Gothic. The main character of the novel, Eleanor, begins her journey to self growth after accepting an offer to live in a suspected haunted house for the summer. Moreover, Eleanor meets three other people that have an important effect on her development as a person. These characters slowly begin to question their own sanity due to the house’s destructive nature. Jackson appeals to fans of the American gothic through her particular description of the house and how the characters interact with it in order to show the environments foil of an absolute reality.

In Laura Mulvey’s article, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” she writes about the relationship between voyeurism, cinema, and gender. She begins by describing the concept of scopophilia, which means to gain pleasure from looking. She writes that scopophilia is inherently active/masculine, and that pleasure is derived from looking at other people as mere objects. On the other hand, the passive/feminine is derived from the experience of being looked at (pg.188). Mulvey sees this binary relationship between viewer and object being viewed as a part of our culture, and the greatest example of this is found in cinema. She argues that the act of moviegoing satisfies these voyeuristic desires in people. She writes, “The mass of mainstream film portray a hermetically sealed world which unwinds magically, indifferent to the presence of the audience, producing for them a sense of separation and playing on their voyeuristic fantasy,” (pg. 186). In this essay, I will further discuss her viewpoints on cinema and voyeurism, and how it connects to the film Rear Window by Alfred Hitchcock.

In Gothic literature, authors use ambiguity to create suspense and add scary details to their stories. Ambiguity defines the Gothic genre by developing questions and have the audience wanting more. The author of “Where is Here?” uses ambiguity more effectively than other Gothic authors like Edgar Alan Poe and Josie Couterez because of the use of fear of the unknown and the frustration of unanswered questions.

“The Catcher in the Rye” is a novel written by J.D. Salinger in 1951. The book is one of the most controversial books ever written and its popularity comes from the author’s rough attitude towards society from the perspective of a teenager. “The Catcher in the Rye” is thought to be J.D. Salinger’s masterpiece and it is listed as one of the best novels of the 20th century. In 2009 Finlo Rohrer affirmed that even 58 years later after the book has been published it is still considerate “the defining work on what it is like to be a teenager”. (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Catcher_in_the_Rye)

The classic short story of “The Tell-Tale Heart”, written by one of the all time masters of horror, Edgar Allen Poe, has always been used as an excellent example of Gothic fiction. Edgar Allen Poe specialized in the art of gothic writing and wrote many stories that portrayed disturbing events and delved deeply into the minds of its characters. In "The Tell-Tale Heart," Poe revolves the plot around a raving individual who, insisting that he is sane, murders an old man because of his` “vulture eye”. The three main gothic elements that are evident in this story are the unique setting, the theme of death and decay, and the presence of madness.

Hitchcock Etudes were composed by Nicole Lizée in 2014, and released on her album Bookburners. With a combination of disjointed soundtrack music and dialog with similarly altered video segments, Lizée reconstructs a whole new experience of the Hitchcock films. Watching Lizée’s composition I really appreciated and enjoyed the way she deconstructed and recreated the works. As a Hitchcock fan I really enjoyed the new sense of terror and romance she brought to the piece.

The Gothic seems to be disordered and a self - contradictory form, without a clear determination of its aim or implication. Many criticisms were denoted concerning the gothic, which reflected its contradictory nature. Some modern critics assert the psychological influence of the gothic ,as Robert Keily who points out that the subordination of the character to the setting enables the gothic “ to explore the whole concept of individual identity”, to view “human personality as essentially unstable, inconsistent ” 7,or revealing the dark side of human nature and destructive, primitive

The gothic literature of the nineteenth century has undergone various transformations . A major shift in Victorian gothic is in term of the setting. The gothic is shifted from pastoral, wild countryside to urban setting . The urban gothic relocates the traditional gothic castles to the city which became popular in the 1830 and was applied on gothic fictions throughout the rest of the century. As the southern European was the setting of the first wave of the gothic , London becomes typical setting of the dark fictions in nineteenth century because of its cultural, financial state in the world. Besides, the conflicting situation of the city wealth and industry interwoven with the crimes and poverty helps to symbolize the conflict between the modern and the primitive. 49 The instrument of evoking horror was changed to suit the constantly changing

‘Once upon a time’ a short story by Nadine Gordimer transports the reader through the narration of an interpretation of Apartheid in South Africa. The author used the story of a white family whose members at first “Loved each other very much and were living happily ever after” (Gordimer, 1). Yet, at the end trying to find more happiness away from the black population end up living a tragedy with the death of their son. This misfortune was due to their obsessive fear of the black world. During apartheid, white identity has schemed as power over the blackness of the rest of the population which was segregated. The essay through a literary analysis and a close reading of the text ought to bring out this