Description
Literary Nonfiction. James Pate examines Gothic poetry and poetics by bringing the dream world, the material world, history, and critical theory into a vibrant discussion. Pate resists the traps of discourse that the Gothic aesthetic have fallen into by arguing for a new development in contemporary verse, one that runs counter to many 20th century trends in US poetry. These works are haunted by a Gothic ethos, being anti-foundationalist, anti-human-centric, and not afraid of facing nihility head-on. Drawing from contemporary works by Sade Murphy, Feng Sun Chen, and others, these meditations on the Gothic infect and distort the reader's canonical understanding of what this concept actually is, and how it operates within the flux of today's poetry.
Author Bio
James Pate is an Assistant Professor of English at Shepherd University. He earned his BA in English at the University of Memphis and his MFA at the Writers' Workshop at the University of Iowa. He also has a PhD in English with a creative writing dissertation from the University of Illinois at Chicago. Dr. Pate is a poet and fiction writer whose work has appeared in La Petite Zine, storySouth, Cream City Review, Black Warrior Review, Blue Mesa Review, Berkeley Fiction Review, Pembroke Magazine, Juked, and Bayou Magazine, among other places. He is the author of The Fassbinder Diaries (Civil Coping Mechanisms, 2013), a poetry collection inspired by the films of Rainer Werner Fassbinder.
Author City: SOUTH BEND, IN USA