Gothic Infections: Arthur Schnitzler and the Haunted Culture of Modernism
/favicon.ico
Abstract

Abstract:

This article examines the intersection between Gothic elements and the theme of infection in two texts by Arthur Schnitzler, arguing that the re-emergence of the Gothic in modernist literature draws on the popularized scientific discourses of bacteriology around 1900 and their imagination of germs as invisible invaders and enemies. The theme of infection functions as a Gothic trope, used to negotiate the experience of increasingly blurred boundaries between self and ‘other’. Schnitzler's texts reveal how the fear of infection becomes linked to the protagonists' loss of their secured sense of self within the normative boundaries of a bourgeois masculinity.