Abstract
Metropolis a serious, full-length, utopian feature, is arguably the first science fiction film.1 While this genre problematises current reality and therefore belongs to modernity, it insists, against scientific reason, on the danger of the new. Seeking menace within the familiar, and educing dread in exploration of the unfamiliar, science fiction shares Gothic obsessions with the uncanny. Both invert perceptions, create ambivalence, and transgress binary oppositions by acknowledging the repressed negative within every positive.
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Notes
Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism ( Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 1986 ) p. 52.
Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, The Coherence of Gothic Conventions ( New York: Arno, 1980 ), pp. 9–10.
Paul M. Jensen, The Cinema of Fritz Lang ( New York and London: A. S. Barnes and Co. and A. Zwemmes, 1969 ), p. 66.
David Punter, The Literature of Terror, Volume 2: The Modern Gothic ( London and New York: Longman, 1996 ), p. 203.
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© 2001 Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited
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Morris, N. (2001). Metropolis and the Modernist Gothic. In: Smith, A., Wallace, J. (eds) Gothic Modernisms. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985236_12
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780333985236_12
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-42365-1
Online ISBN: 978-0-333-98523-6
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