AustLit

'Twitch Gothic is a creative practice-based PhD consisting of fifteen short stories, a short film and a creative practice exegesis. This project contemplates the creation of female (sexed and/or gendered) characters and related tropes in contemporary Australian Gothic short fiction. The short stories, described as Twitch Gothic short stories, draw on or are infused by the Gothic genre to provide moments of shudder, overlap, shock, repulsion and mutation. These short stories are arranged to reflect four theories central to the Gothic genre: Edmund Burke’s sublime, Sigmund Freud’s uncanny, Tzvetan Todorov’s fantastic and Julia Kristeva’s abject. Twitch Gothic examines some of the Australian social, political and cultural impacts on the Gothic short story. This mode of creative practice engages in genre overlaps and experimental character creations. The project encompasses liminal spaces, identity intersections and everyday provocations. Twitch Gothic explores the multiplicities that exist within the dialogue between the stories and the generative, rhizomatic context of a Gothic-infused creative writing practice. This process has led to the adoption of a hopeful “radical and” in my practice'