IS THERE A CORRECT WAY OF READING “GOTHIC FICTION”?
If you think that gothic writers have to be careful, I do not know whether you are right or wrong. Gothic writing poses two controversial issues: the language vs. the content, and the function vs. the form. To me, in gothic narratives as in many others, language would be equal to the function each linguistic sign has one after another, whereas content would be the form we give to the gothic narrative after having seen all the functions that the language, we are reading, has built through the text. This issue may seem to be simple, nonetheless it is rather problematic. Is there harmony between form and content in the gothic narrative? Or is the form against the content? Well, if one speaks from a formal point of view, there must be coherence between both since we need a beginning, followed by a liminal part leading up to the end of the story, (all covered by a plot). In this sense, so to speak, our expectations perfectly fit within the belief that there is harmony, or a ki...