In traditional Gothic and romantic literature, the theme of infiltration takes on various forms such as sounds, voices, tremors, gas, and more. These elements highlight the interactions between the external world and private, psychological, social, political, or economic entities, shedding light on the concept of "otherness," which is a significant issue of our time.


Eerie tales by authors like Edgar Allan Poe exemplify the underlying conditions for the formation of one's identity through the infiltration of "otherness." Works such as Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights and Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre are sites of infiltration, transgression, mixture, and recovery. Similarly, Herman Melville, in works like Moby-Dick, Benito Cereno, and Pierre, explores transgression as unification and unification as transgression, much like Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher." Mainstream thinkers and writers such as Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Walt Whitman, and Henry James also explore the profound impact of the "other" on both real and otherworldly characters.


Modern and contemporary cultures also offer numerous examples of infiltration as transgression, as seen in works like William Faulkner’s Sanctuary, Absalom, Absalom!, and late trilogy, Truman Capote’s “other voices,” Toni Morrison's Ghosts, Haruki Murakami’s “Parallel worlds,” and Kazuo Ishiguro’s transgressive memories. For instance, Faulkner’s novel Absalom, Absalom! uses the infiltration of dust motes into secluded spaces of houses as a metaphor for the infiltration of sexual and racial "otherness" into Southern white households. Moreover, films also reflect the relevance of the theme, such as the infiltration of American commercial cultures after World War II in Jean-Luc Godard’s early films, the visual infiltration of the sinister in film noirs by Alfred Hitchcock, and the infiltration of liquids, visions, and eerie materials in Andrei Tarkovsky’s films. Contemporary filmmakers like David Lynch delve into the infiltrations of other dimensions, identities, and memories in their surrealistic vision.


This seminar investigates various aspects of Gothic and other infiltrations in traditional and contemporary literature, films, and art. It examines the implications of infiltration in different theoretical frameworks, seeking possible, yet indefinable, definitions for it following the perspectives of thinkers such as Julia Kristeva and Jacques Derrida. By shifting our viewpoints and investigating (in)filtration as nonexclusive topos, we can uncover the mechanisms at work in cultures from the perspectives enabled by our globalized contexts.