Peripeteia

Joseph Wolfreys offers an elegant way of looking at textuality as phantasmatic. As much as "the spectral" is neither alive nor dead (ceases to exist), the idea (or the materiality) of the book "seems to keep us in the here and now by remaining with us from some past".
The book, thus, "haunts". The act of reading "is to bear witness to the existence of something other", which need not be real nor fictive, representative nor unrepresentative. Wolfrey uses the phrase "once-live presence" to describe the localisation of such a "haunting".
Is the Gothic genre thus a 'hideous progeny', progenising itself? Does the act of reading in Gothic undermine positivist interpretations, and instate text as an object?

Wolfreys, Julian. Preface: on Textual Haunting. in: Victorian Hauntings: Spectrality, Gothic, the Uncanny and Literature. Palgrave, Basingstoke, Hampshire, 2002, doi:10.1007/978-1-4039-1358-6.

Thanks Leo. Could you please clarify what you mean by your question, putting it into the simplest possible language? What, for example, do you mean by 'self-progenising' or by 'positivist interpretation' or by 'instate'?

Thank you, Mr Bowen, for the very advice. I will give it a try!

Mary Shelley's bid for her "hideous progeny" to "go forth and prosper [in its literary life, or substantially]" implies effects of the subject on both itself and the external world. From Wolfreys’ argument, both the text and the literal ghost could be seen as acting as "once-lived presence" in different realms. The question, in simpler terms, would be does the Gothic always defers onto metonymic "presence". In which case, would the term Gothic represents a resisting force against signification itself, with its conjured fear arising from the lack of sufficient metaphorical connections? Thus, Freudian and Jungian reading retains their original psychotherapeutic purpose by providing projections onto sex and sexual activity which each possesses a wide range of metaphorical connections.

I do apologise for the non-existence word “progenising”, it should be progenerating.

A positivist reading here denotes the philosophical assumption that there are empirical laws which are systematically valid, or there is something beyond the literal. For example, Gothic writing, by the above argument can be thought of as resisting such assumption.