ABSTRACT
What is Gothic about cyberspace? Posing this question requires the connection of two categories, the combination of which risks a variety of epistemic problems: we might easily commit categorical error by yoking together a literary movement with an information technology visualization, or fall afoul of current trends, depending on the currency and popularity of both terms at stake. Yet the analytical and historical intersection of these two domains, at a site which I have elsewhere called the cybergothic (Alexander 2000), constitutes a productive approach to understanding how we have acculturated and responded to digitally networked communications. Identifying the ways in which fiction and nonfiction use Gothic conventions to describe cyberspace reveals a series of critical tropes by which we collectively think through new technologies.
