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van Eiferen, Isabella. Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny. Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 2012. 229 pp. Paper. ISBN 978-0-7083-2513-1. $35.00.
Isabella van Elferen's Gothic Music; The Sounds of the Uncanny is a welcome addition to Gothic literary studies, media studies, and critical theory that joins texts by Fred Botting, Jeffrey Sconce, Robert Spadoni, Stefan Andriopoulos, and Caetlin Benson-Allott as a thought-provoking monograph for scholars working in the area of "the fantastic," as well as for a wider audience. It is a literary and cultural history that challenges and updates our general understanding of the Gothic tradition across a range of media and orthodoxies, including literature, film, television, computer games, Goth club nights, and festivals.
Gothic Music is divided into six chapters, beginning with "The Sound of Gothic Literature" and followed by van Elferen's interrogation of Gothic film music ("Gothic Film Music: The Audiovisual Uncanny"), Gothic TV sound ("Gothic Television Music: The Unhomely Home"), the "haunted hyperreality" of Gothic game music, sonic Gothicism as musical style and function ("Gothic Music: Uncanny Embodied"), and the relations between Gothic being and time ("The Unthinkable Sounds of the Uncanny"). The critical framework of Gothic Music is bracketed by a quartet of sonic dimensions relating to style, theme, mediality, and performativity: the sounds of the uncanny as an aural manifestation of the cultural repressed (style); Gothic music in relation to the uncanny evocation of memory, emotion, and listening experience (theme); the sounds of the uncanny as a hauntographical evacuation of musical signification (mediality); and Gothic music as liturgical participation in the transgressive work of genre (performativity).
Van Elferen's intellectual prowess is matched by her omnivorous taste for Gothic culture. The theoretical vocabulary of Gothic Music, impacted by Jacques Derrida and his deconstructive interpretation of spectrality as a pervasive cultural condition in Specters of Marx: The State of Debt, the Work of Mourning and the Ne tv International (Routledge, 2006), is leveraged against a vast and heterogeneous archive. According to van Eiferen, the Gothic, beyond literary convention and motif, is a language or form...