Chapter 11, Rock and Romanticism, Palgrave Macmillan

Chapter 11 of Rock and Romanticism: Post-Punk, Goth, and Metal as Dark Romanticisms: “‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” (pp. 199-213) by Christopher Stampone, Ph.D., Southern Methodist University.

• Chapter summary
  • Christopher Stampone’s “‘I possess your soul, your mind, your heart, and your body’: External and Internal Gothic Hauntings in Eminem’s Relapse” focuses on Eminem’s pivotal albums Relapse (2009) and its follow-up, Relapse: Refill (2010), as instances of contemporary Romantic Gothic. Defining these albums as attacks on American consumer culture, Stampone employs Sayre and Löwy to describe the features of that attack, much of which takes the form of resigned Romanticism, so that resignation can be a form of resistance. Stampone also describes how Eminem’s alter egos, such as Slim Shady, represent his drug-ridden self, one that is implicated in capitalist-consumer culture but for which Eminem now takes responsibility. Overall, Eminem’s Relapse albums hold up a mirror to modern US consumerism in which “all become monsters whose identities are constructed by what they consume.”
• Music
  • Eminem
    • “Dr. West (Skit)”
    • “We Made You”
    • “Paul (Skit)”
  • Eminem & Paul “Bunyan” Rosenburg, “Paul (Skit)”
  • Eminem, Dr. Dre & 50 Cent, “Crack a Bottle”
  • Eminem,
    • “Stan”
    • “3 A.M.”
    • “Insane”
    • “Medicine Ball”
    • “Underground”
    • “Buffalo Bill”
    • “Music Box”
    • “Stay Wide Awake”
    • “My Mom”
    • “Cleaning Out My Closet”
  • Eminem featuring Nate Ruess, “Headlights”
  • Eminem
    • “Hello”
    • “My Name Is”
    • “Same Song & Dance”
    • “Déjà Vu”
    • “Mr. Mathers (Skit)”
    • “My Darling”
    • “The Real Slim Shady”
    • “White America”
    • “Elevator”
    • “Careful What You Wish For”
• Literature
  • Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads
  • Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto
  • Nathaniel Hawthorne, The House of the Seven Gables
  • Samuel Taylor Coleridge, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner“
  • Mary Shelley, Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus 
  • William Beckford, Vathek
  • Byron
  • Thomas De Quincey, Confessions of an Opium Eater
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