Gotham and its discontents: The post-industrial civilisation and the outsider in light of the Gothic discourse

The aim of the thesis is to identify the function of the 'outsider' in Gotham City with the help of The Notes from the Underground by Fyodor Dostoyevsky and Albert Camus' The Stranger. The main argument of the thesis is that society and its mechanisms shaped by the post-industrial civilisation likens to a punitive parent figure from the past of the cast out individual; and the outsider's enacting of this early relationship with the punitive parent in the social plane – mainly in the form of reactive aggression – can be viewed as a request for acceptance. After a brief discussion in the introductory part on the relevance of a comparative analysis of popular art Batman comics with two high artworks from the western canon, the first chapter provides an insight into the building blocks that have shaped the post-industrial civilisation and suggest that the dominant ideology of the post-industrial society operates primarily on controlling people by means of stigma, determined by the extent how much they comply with social norms and values. The second chapter evaluates the personal dynamics of the outsider by means of the object relations theory of psychoanalysis and posits that the outsiders constitute an example to the 'fragmented self', while the authority figures of the society may stand for reflections of an internalised bad parent that is supposed to be attacked and eliminated to sustain self-cohesion. The final chapter explores the relationship between the outsider and the society by means of the Gothic discourse and proposes that each work can be read from the perspective of the Urban Gothic. In that respect, the outcast individual is depicted as a grotesque body that functions as a transgressor, who stands in opposition towards well-established social norms and conventions of the post-industrial society and manifest an alternative reality to these, thereby asking for a share in the system. Keywords: ideology, technocracy, stigma, the fragmented self, paranoid-schizoid position, projective identification, depressive position, the grotesque body, abjection, monster narrative.