Abigail Lofrese

Abigail Lofrese is a Literature major minoring in Journalism. She will be presenting her senior project titled, “‘When she jumped, she probably thought she’d fly’: Suburban Gothic and the Destructive Potential of Aestheticism.” Her project explores the potential consequences of aestheticism through the lens of American Suburban Gothic fiction, including David Lynch’s 1986 film Blue Velvet, Jeffrey Eugenides’s 1993 novel The Virgin Suicides, Vladimir Nabokov’s 1955 novel Lolita, and the work of musician Lana Del Rey. She explains how several important facets of the Suburban Gothic mode namely, duality, abjection, the grotesque, and the uncanny, exist in relation to the harmful aestheticization of the American Dream. She demonstrates how the  Suburban Gothic reveals the nightmarish consequences of suburbia’s attempt to deny history/time: more specifically, the politics, cruelty, and suppression of identity and ethnic differences that have contributed to the creation and maintenance of the suburbs.