Hey, I figured I'd start a thread about this, so that the tavern doesn't get clogged. Congratulations Steerpike on your Thesis and your defense of your PhD! I just wanted to ask if it would be possible to ever read your thesis, as that would be fascinating. I don't know the rules on that, but I figured there was no harm in asking. What was it like confronting educators an defending your thesis? I imagine that defending Lovecraftian Fiction from a board of Peers had to be an interesting experience.
Congrats Steerpike
Thanks LoA!
It should indeed eventually be possible to read my thesis after it is uploaded to an open access repository - probably some time next week.
Defending the dissertation was indeed interesting and challenging, although fortunately they did not saddle me with any substantive revisions or rewriting, which is a possibility during these things. I take that as something of a vote of confidence for the thing's quality, and it certainly earned its share of praise at the defence, although there are a number of details that still dissatisfy me about it. I hope to eventually turn a version of the dissertation into a monograph where I can clarify and develop a few of those loose ends. Overall, though, I'm pleased and really quite proud of the work as a whole. I deal with four authors in detail - Poe, Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft - over about 320 pages, so it's a fairly deep dive into their works, their ideas, their language, literary theory, and bits of philosophy, primarily aesthetics and metaphysics, particularly as practiced by the so-called "speculative realist" movement.
Major congratulations, Steerpike!
I'll once again echo my congratulations on the twin accomplishments of completing the dissertation and then successfully defending it to your committee (and with little/insignificant revisions too)! To clarify, since different countries run things differently, did you have to write and defend both a thesis (for a master's) and then a dissertation (for your doctorate)? If so, what was the topic of your thesis (versus the above explained dissertation)?
For the rest of you, I was able to secretly tape Steerpike's defense. Enjoy:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lrlro3YJ15o
I did not write a Master's thesis - some Master's programs have them, and some don't, and I did my Master's at an institution that rather discouraged them. I did write an "Honour's Thesis" in the final year of my Bachelor's degree which is a bit shorter than a Master's thesis but of some size, and for that I wrote on the grotesque and Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray.
Nice. So do you have any classes or remaining requirements before you get hooded into the PhD cabal?
The only remaining hoop I need to jump through is getting the dissertation formatting approved by the inscrutable wardens of the institutional repository, but that should be a formality (however due to weird deadlines this might mean I attend a ceremony in a few weeks or in six months).
Here, by the way, is the dissertation's abstract:
[ic=Abstract]"The Daemonology of Unplumbed Space: Weird Fiction, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of the Unthinkable" explores the aesthetic and metaphysical significance of disgust in weird fiction. Beginning with the weird's forefather, Edgar Allan Poe, the study traces the twisted entanglement of metaphysics, aesthetics, affect, and weird fiction through the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, considering along the way the myriad attempts of authors such as Arthur Machen, Algernon Blackwood, and H.P. Lovecraft to stage encounters with the unthinkable. Drawing on recent philosophical efforts to reinvigorate metaphysical thought – including speculative realism and new materialism – as well as affect theory, the dissertation argues that in contrast with earlier Gothic writers, whose focus on sublime aesthetic experience reified the importance and power of the human subject and entertained fantasies of spiritual transcendence, authors of weird fiction exploit the viscerality of disgust to confront readers with the impermanence and instability of a subject polluted by nonhuman forces which seep into it from the world around it. In doing so, weird fiction helps us to think about the nature of this queasy, nonhuman world, to glimpse an existence beyond the world merely as it appears to us. By investigating the intertwinement of the aesthetics of disgust and metaphysical speculation about the nonhuman world, the dissertation expands our understanding of weird fiction and the study of affect in literature. It thus contributes to a growing understanding of weird fiction as more than a pulp, essentially commercial genre, rather interpreting the weird as literature of ecstatic yearning for a non-anthropocentric reality, literature which dwells on questions of being, becoming, and the ultimate nature of the universe.[/ic]
I actually like how I put it in the conclusion better, where I get to let myself off the chain a bit and indulge in a less-stuffy prose style:
[ic=Wisdom of the Unhuman]This study has been an exercise in a form of weird criticism, blending together things which we might think disparate, mingling the strange aesthetics of the gross-out with metaphysical inquiry, reading pulp fiction alongside philosophy, finding something akin to the sublime or the numinous in worlds of putrescent slime and cannibal monstrosity. I have sought to articulate philosophical insights gleaned from the festering tongues of too-animate corpses or the hungry, myriad mouths of hybrid abominations – the wisdom of the unhuman.[/ic]
My external examiner referred to it as "DUS," which I quite liked.
For the record if Steerpike ever became a professor, I would gladly screw over my education to go to his college and take "Weird Fiction 101". Best non-existent course ever!
LoA, I know you're kidding, but as it happens I'm actually already planning to teach a version of a weird fiction course (contract faculty, not tenure-track yet). This summer I'm going to be teaching an "Approaches to Literature" course for first years - a "study of selected examples of poetry, fiction, and drama." Every instructor gets to do their own version of this course and there's a lot of leeway for choices. There's already one on the Gothic where they read Dracula and similar texts. Mine is going to be themed around the weird and will include:
Beowulf ("wyrd" fiction)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Shakespeare's Macbeth
Sheridan le Fanu's "Carmilla"
Stories from the Lovecraft anthology The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
China Mieville's The City & The City
That's awesome.
But I'm curious, what do you intend to do with that kind of study, exactly? Like, it must certainly be a passion for you, but can you translate that passion into something you can earn money with? Are you going to write books, then?
Quote from: Magnus PymBut I'm curious, what do you intend to do with that kind of study, exactly? Like, it must certainly be a passion for you, but can you translate that passion into something you can earn money with? Are you going to write books, then?
Essentially, English scholars who want to pursue a career in research are hired by universities to do a mixture of teaching and research. You're expected to publish academic articles and monographs, and, eventually, get tenured as a result. Tenure-track research jobs are hard to come by, but certainly not impossible (a friend of mine who I share an office with just got hired, for example; she works on disappointment and Romantic poetry, so we make a funny pair - disappointment and disgust). Universities hire professors and grant tenure on the basis of their research, which is where this kind of study becomes valuable, especially if I can get an academic publisher to turn it into a monograph i.e. a scholarly book. Sometimes these books can provide their own income-stream as well, but more often than not the books are primarily of interest only to students and other academics, so your salary comes not from the books directly but from the institution funding you. A lot of the time research projects are also funded by organizations like SSHRC in Canada (Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council) who give out grants for scholarly research in various disciplines.
The other career route - and one I find as-or-more appealing as pursuing a research career - is to get a primarily teaching-focused career at a university or community college (I'm currently teaching courses at one of each). While tenure-track research faculty do have to teach classes, they're also being paid to research. Teaching positions just pay you to teach instead of to teach and research, but obviously they still want qualified scholars to teach literature and composition courses. Community colleges sometimes just require a Master's degree, but a PhD is an asset. Often you do still get time off and possibly some funding to do research, or even creative work. I know quite a few community college English instructors who are also poets or filmmakers or writers; two actually play in my D&D game. It seems to be a slightly less frenzied life than that of research faculty, where the "publish or perish" adage holds true. The especially good news here for English PhDs is that English is almost always a required subject at Anglophone post-secondary institutions regardless of faculty, so there's a big demand for qualified instructors. Obviously, your abilities and experience as a teacher are more important than your research talents, which is why you spend a lot of time as a TA while completing a PhD. I managed to secure work as an instructor of record in my final year of the program, which gives me a bit of a leg up on this route.
The research positions can be more prestigious but are sometimes more highly paid, but often necessitate moving to a new city. You go where the jobs are, essentially. With teaching jobs there's a better chance of getting to choose your city. You're also not pressured to publish scholarly works in the same way, even if it's encouraged and/or rewarded.
Those are the most directly obvious career paths. So, essentially, you don't usually do a PhD in English to go into business for yourself, you do a PhD in English with an eye to becoming a professor or instructor at a college or university, who want qualified experts to teach their students and perform additional research.
That said, there are a number of other things that PhDs go off and do that don't explicitly require a PhD - working for governments and private companies, often. Usually your specialization doesn't matter as much here, it's your ability to write and research and organize large projects that's valuable. Mid- to higher-level university administrators also sometimes have PhDs. I know some people who got kinda burnt-out on scholarship and found decently paying and reasonably interesting work as administrators or other non-faculty university staff.
Ideally, I'd like my career to be primarily based in some combination of teaching and research at a post-secondary institution while I pursue creative projects on the side. My idols in this regard would be authors like China Miéville (who has a PhD in international relations and teaches at the University of Warwick) and Ada Palmer (who is a professor of history at the University of Chicago), incidentally probably my two favourite living authors. J.R.R. Tolkien or C.S. Lewis would actually also be very good examples of this kind of dream-career, albeit from an earlier era - both English academics who also wrote creatively.
So what you're saying is... you're going to write a book.
:D
:D
About how many publications does your field generally require for obtaining and then keeping a tenure-track position?
Congrats Steerpike!
Thanks Hoers!
Quote from: Rose-of-VellumAbout how many publications does your field generally require for obtaining and then keeping a tenure-track position?
I think there's quite a bit of variation, but a book and around five articles or so is pretty common as I understand it. Single author papers are generally the norm in English.
Quote from: Rose-of-VellumSo what you're saying is... you're going to write a book.
Yeah, I'd like to turn DUS into a book, and ideally I'd like to write a sequel about the New Weird. For a book I'm thinking of adding William Hope Hodgson into the mix, and possibly some combination of MR James, Vernon Lee, and Clark Ashton Smith; for the sequel, Thomas Ligotti, China Mieville, Jeff Vandermeer, and perhaps K.J. Bishop or Clive Barker might be possible authors of interest. Alternatively I've always wanted to write something about
Gormenghast, for obvious reasons, but maybe that'll be an article instead. I do plan on possibly writing some articles adapting parts of the dissertation. I've published several that weren't part of the dissertation, and presented bits of the dissertation at conferences, but not actually published any of the dissertation in journals, so I can start mining it for stuff soon.
I'll say one thing for the PhD (and I don't know if this has been your experience too, Rose) - it was hard, sure, and sometimes it was stressful, but it was frequently fun and intellectually rewarding, and while I think higher education has some serious structural problems it needs to address, I didn't have the cliche experience you sometimes hear about, where you enter graduate school and leave a penniless emotional wreck without any relevant "real-world" experience. I've occasionally read these miserable accounts of people's time in grad school, but mine really was nothing like that. Which isn't to say that grad school is for everyone, but it's also not the dystopian dead-end money-suck it's sometimes portrayed as being, or at least it wasn't for me.
Those projects sound amazing. Maybe we can crowd-source you a fellowship or endowment. :) Seriously, I would love to read your work, so keep us posted on your professional progress and pubs. Somewhat related to that, how do the Canadian programs regard English professors publishing fictional books pursuant to tenure? I know some professors here in the US who so publish, but I think they only did so after becoming Associate Professors.
As for my doctoral experience, I think clinical psychology PhD programs are pretty idiosyncratic as they are a mash-up of really two related but distinct degrees/educational experiences. The first is training you to be a scientist conducting medical-behavioral research, which means you become a research slave (er, research assistant); take tons of research design and stats classes; design, conduct, and present research; and chase publications and grants. The second aspect is training you to be an actual clinician, which entails clinical internships and practica, learning evidence-based therapies and assessment instruments, and providing therapy and assessment. Basically, it's like going to med school and getting a stat PhD at the same time. There's certainly overlap, but there's a lot of strain. Regardless, if you survive a clinical psych PhD program, there's no question you have "real-world" exoteric experience, as you've been seeing clients, working in hospitals, community mental health sites, and likely working with government agencies for several years. Even the more esoteric academic endeavors and skills tend to be quiet practical as clinical psychology research, unlike say social psychology, is inherently applied (e.g., did the clinical intervention reduce suicide rates in middle schools?). Now, as for penniless emotional wrecks, yes, that happens aplenty both with those who drop out and complete clinical psych PhD programs. Anyways, I digress.
Wow that sounds great! Exhausting I'm sure but totally great. The mash-up of science and professional training seems incredibly versatile.
I'm actually not too sure about the status of fiction when it comes to tenure. If I became an Assistant Professor though I would probably write less creatively till I was tenured for just that reason. You really have to hit the ground running once that clock starts ticking from what I've heard, and a novel seems less dependable as an end-product quite aside from the possibility of it not counting properly. Honestly my career priorities are probably the reverse of a lot of PhDs, who see teaching-centric jobs as their plan B; they're my plan A, and a tenure-track research position is more like a plan B for me.
A hearty congrats! That's awesome!
Thanks Xeviat!
The dissertation has now been accepted into the institutional repository, so it should be available to view in 5-7 business days. I'll post a link when it's up for anyone interested. I can't guarantee it'll be the most riveting reading, since it does a lot of things that dissertations have to do, but some might enjoy parts of it. The committee praised but were somewhat amused by the prose style, which is somewhere between academic and my own "natural" style.
Sounds good. Do you discuss slipstream at all?
Not by name, although the sort of dissonance that slipstream produces is pretty similar in some ways to the weird disgust I focus on, which is all about breaching or dissolving the boundaries of the subject/the human and the non-human world. That said slipstream seems potentially more sort of anti-realist in the philosophical sense, whereas I'm making the argument that weird fiction is deeply, powerfully interested in an intense form of realism of the metaphysical variety - that even though the weird is full of monsters and preternatural beings, it's fundamentally about the nature of reality, as opposed to the contents of the human mind. So for example I draw a significant distinction between the Gothic (fixated on the human past, on the psyche, on our human fears and desires, on subject-affirming "terror") and the weird (focused on the non-human past, on objects and the world, on the indifference or malignancy of the cosmos, on subject-obliterating "horror" or disgust). So I'm not sure exactly where slipstream would fit according to that framework.
Sounds to me like a follow-up manuscript/article.
:)
Quote from: Steerpike
Thanks LoA!
It should indeed eventually be possible to read my thesis after it is uploaded to an open access repository - probably some time next week.
Defending the dissertation was indeed interesting and challenging, although fortunately they did not saddle me with any substantive revisions or rewriting, which is a possibility during these things. I take that as something of a vote of confidence for the thing's quality, and it certainly earned its share of praise at the defence, although there are a number of details that still dissatisfy me about it. I hope to eventually turn a version of the dissertation into a monograph where I can clarify and develop a few of those loose ends. Overall, though, I'm pleased and really quite proud of the work as a whole. I deal with four authors in detail - Poe, Machen, Blackwood, Lovecraft - over about 320 pages, so it's a fairly deep dive into their works, their ideas, their language, literary theory, and bits of philosophy, primarily aesthetics and metaphysics, particularly as practiced by the so-called "speculative realist" movement.
Congratulations on a long journey well fought!
As an aside- where does Hawthorne's weird fiction, like "The Birthmark" and other pieces fall in relation to your scholarship on those above august luminaries of oddity? Especially considering that piece's involvement with disgust.
QuoteBeowulf ("wyrd" fiction)
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight
Shakespeare's Macbeth
Sheridan le Fanu's "Carmilla"
Stories from the Lovecraft anthology The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories
China Mieville's The City & The City
Will you have your students identify similar themes of disgust at the monster and the other throughout the series? (e.g. Grendel, Grendel's Mother, the witches who are apart from society, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth causing himself to become one, Cthulhu- different conceptions of the 'other's' power, etc.) Definitely seems as though your students may be producing some interesting essays.
QuoteSo for example I draw a significant distinction between the Gothic (fixated on the human past, on the psyche, on our human fears and desires, on subject-affirming "terror") and the weird (focused on the non-human past, on objects and the world, on the indifference or malignancy of the cosmos, on subject-obliterating "horror" or disgust).
Also, by your example there, would your course list be essentially- Gothic for Macbeth--never really considered it as being a Gothic novel-- moving toward the Weird for Lovecraft/Mieville?
Quote from: LDWhere does Hawthorne's weird fiction, like "The Birthmark" and other pieces fall in relation to your scholarship on those above august luminaries of oddity? Especially considering that piece's involvement with disgust.
Hawthorne sometimes creeps on the proto-weird, I think, but he often slips into Christian allegory in a way that isn't especially "cosmic," precisely. There's definitely stories of his that could be read as foreshadowing later weird efforts, though.
Quote from: LDWill you have your students identify similar themes of disgust at the monster and the other throughout the series? (e.g. Grendel, Grendel's Mother, the witches who are apart from society, Lady Macbeth, Macbeth causing himself to become one, Cthulhu- different conceptions of the 'other's' power, etc.) Definitely seems as though your students may be producing some interesting essays.
I will probably try to focus on a lot more than disgust, but it'll definitely come up. I've taught
Bewoulf before and Grendel and his mother are really great to teach with: you can read them in a lot of different ways, even depending on how you translate certain terms. So there's, like, a way of reading the monsters in relation to Anglo-Saxon culture, or to medieval theology, or psychology and sexuality, etc.
Quote from: LDAlso, by your example there, would your course list be essentially- Gothic for Macbeth--never really considered it as being a Gothic novel-- moving toward the Weird for Lovecraft/Mieville?
Macbeth precedes the actual "Gothic" proper by roughly 150 years and the English novel by about a century, but is often thought of (along with
Hamlet and the plays of John Webster) as foreshadowing the Gothic. I do think of it more as a classically Gothic text than a weird one, although the weird sisters commune with Hecate, and there's a very interesting "universe" developed in the play - Macbeth's world is this sort of fallen, ontologically corrupt, "sublunary" place of corruption and chaos, full of inversions of the "natural" order and disruptions of Renaissance metaphysics, rattling the Great Chain of Being as it were. So I do think there's some glimmer of thee weird's more "cosmic" qualities in Macbeth. The moral and metaphysical nature of the universe is something people think about in
Macbeth quite a bit.
Overall, I'm using a broader definition of weird in the course than I am in my dissertation, so there's certainly overlap with the Gothic; I tend to think of the weird as kind of a tumour growing out of the Gothic rather than an entirely new genre, though, so moving from the more-Gothic texts to the more-weird texts does make a certain amount of sense.
Quotebut he often slips into Christian allegory in a way that isn't especially "cosmic," precisely.
If I understand your statement properly, that is an interesting proposition... reference to Theist allegory prohibiting a work from being cosmic and non-understandable. Inherently, according to many Theist sects' dogmas, the faith's mysteries are not understandable. While I am open to a consideration that Theistical allegorical references that are present in some of Hawthrone's works could make them something other than "weird", what would you say about C.S.Lewis'
That Hideous Strength, a "Christian" novel that portrays cosmic evil--since the evil is "defeated" in the end (albeit only temporarily), does that mean the work cannot be weird fiction--even Lovecraft's novels saw "evil" being abeyed.?
Looking at your definition:
"weird (focused on the non-human past, on objects and the world, on the indifference or malignancy of the cosmos, on subject-obliterating "horror" or disgust). "
I can see why it may be difficult to place an allegorical work under it and if you see the above-mentioned novel as focusing on the salvation of Peter(?) the main male character, its focus is more on an individual's struggle, but the novel really is about the struggle of a few against a malignant actor that subverts the vast majority of indifferent humans. Further, the novel's focus on the angels' struggles is a focus on a non-human past. Maybe it's a type of "Theist-Weird Fiction", which has many, but not all the qualities of Weird Fiction?
QuoteOverall, I'm using a broader definition of weird in the course than I am in my dissertation, so there's certainly overlap with the Gothic
Thank you for the elaboration!
Quote from: LDIf I understand your statement properly, that is an interesting proposition... reference to Theist allegory prohibiting a work from being cosmic and non-understandable. Inherently, according to many Theist sects' dogmas, the faith's mysteries are not understandable. While I am open to a consideration that Theistical allegorical references that are present in some of Hawthrone's works could make them something other than "weird", what would you say about C.S.Lewis' That Hideous Strength, a "Christian" novel that portrays cosmic evil--since the evil is "defeated" in the end (albeit only temporarily), does that mean the work cannot be weird fiction--even Lovecraft's novels saw "evil" being abeyed.?
It's not so much theism as it is a specificallyt anthropomorphic theism, where God is imagined more or less in the image of humanity - that tends to suggest a universe where people are of particular significance, where the human soul and human endeavours and human failings and human perception and human structures of meaning are at the centre of things. I think of the weird as strongly antihumanist or posthumanist. There are versions of theism (a lot of mysticism for instance) that move away from a humanist, anthropocentric cosmos, though. A pantheistic god, for instance, seems to cut against that grain.
That Hideous Strength and the Space Trilogy generally does seem closer to the weird than, say, the
Chronicles of Narnia or something. The alien quality of Lewis' angelic figures certainly feels like it undermines a strictly anthropocentric universe. Some of Arthur Machen's fiction does a similar thing. That said human beings and the fate of the human soul do still seem very important in
That Hideous Strength in particular.
I do think that plenty of works are strictly one thing or the other - I'm primarily distinguishing Gothic and weird to help talk about a kind of aesthetic effect or way of thinking, and less about imposing strict category divisions on texts. There's quite a few works that have been classified as Gothic that seem to have weird elements or qualities, or vice versa. M.R. James for instance is really mixing the two a lot.
Quote from: Steerpike
It's not so much theism as it is a specificallyt anthropomorphic theism, where God is imagined more or less in the image of humanity - that tends to suggest a universe where people are of particular significance, where the human soul and human endeavours and human failings and human perception and human structures of meaning are at the centre of things. I think of the weird as strongly antihumanist or posthumanist. There are versions of theism (a lot of mysticism for instance) that move away from a humanist, anthropocentric cosmos, though. A pantheistic god, for instance, seems to cut against that grain.
I think I see what you're getting at in distinguishing between anthropomorphic theism as incompatible with weird fiction's conceptualization of humanity's inconsequential nature, as opposed to other theism types that could be compatible with an inconsequential humanity.
Quote
That Hideous Strength and the Space Trilogy generally does seem closer to the weird than, say, the Chronicles of Narnia or something. The alien quality of Lewis' angelic figures certainly feels like it undermines a strictly anthropocentric universe. Some of Arthur Machen's fiction does a similar thing. That said human beings and the fate of the human soul do still seem very important in That Hideous Strength in particular.
No arguments with your rhetorical thrust here, though as a follow-up, arguably, is not the human soul also important in Lovecraft's works like his piece with the Ghoul in the cave. In that piece, a statement is arguably being made about what happens to the soul when one dies.
Quote
I do think that plenty of works are not strictly one thing or the other - I'm primarily distinguishing Gothic and weird to help talk about a kind of aesthetic effect or way of thinking, and less about imposing strict category divisions on texts. There's quite a few works that have been classified as Gothic that seem to have weird elements or qualities, or vice versa. M.R. James for instance is really mixing the two a lot.
Thank you for the mention of M.R. James. I just finished reading, http://www.thin-ghost.org/items/show/136, based on your comment here. That Victorian literature (or others similar to it) seems to certainly have inspired Lovecraft.
Quoteand less about imposing strict category divisions on texts."
tl;dr of the following paragraph: The following is a stream of consciousness ramble basically stating that if you ever end up creating a teaching aid on the history of gothic and weird literature, please post it here. :D.
Fair enough; likely the best conclusion. I agree that deconstructionism has triumphed in critical conceptualization :p. The world, for the most part, is more a continuum of ideas than a hard-wired platonic world with forced categories and ideal forms. That said, and I do not think you would disagree since to some extent it's the traditional bread and butter of researchers writing theories (please correct me if you do disagree), the Victorian fascination with categories and quantification, phylum and genus, brings some structure to better analyze and visualize. If I was in a class on the subject, I would delight in seeing the venn diagrams of where certain literature falls--lots of elements overlapping for certain stories and not overlapping for others and viewing the years each literary piece debuted and seeing possible lineages of inspiration.
Quote from: LDNo arguments with your rhetorical thrust here, though as a follow-up, arguably, is not the human soul also important in Lovecraft's works like his piece with the Ghoul in the cave. In that piece, a statement is arguably being made about what happens to the soul when one dies.
Which story is that? "Pickman's Model" maybe?
There are definitely moments in early Lovecraft (pre-"Call of Cthulhu") where he's doing a lot of pastiches of previous authors, so sometimes his approach isn't quite worked out. So it could be that the souls "creeps in" during some of those early stories.
LD, given your interest in subgenre, you might enjoy something like Terry Heller's
The Delights of Terror, a very interesting monograph from awhile back, which happens to be available to read online, here. (http://www.public.coe.edu/~theller/essays/delights/contents.html) He's using a different classification system than I am, but he sketches out a whole series of subgenre types: the marvelous horror thriller, the fantastic/uncanny horror thriller, and the pure fantastic tale of terror. His approach is inspired by the structuralist Tzvetan Todorov, which leads to venn type diagrams like this one. (http://dinamico2.unibg.it/fa/imgs/fa_shin-05.jpg) For Heller and Todorov these distinctions are all about hesitations between natural and supernatural explanations for things. Something like
Harry Potter or
Lord of the Rings are pure marvelous, where Ann Radcliffe's novels, or most Scooby Doo stories, would be uncanny; the pure fantastic is when we're never sure if something is supernatural or natural (as in, say,
The Turn of the Screw). Then there are subtypes - so the marvelous horror thriller, for instance, is a genre where we're not sure if things are natural or supernatural but they turn out to be supernatural in the end.
Thank you for the link! I will attempt to get through it.
Thank you for the venn diagram :D.
As far as the Lovecraft story, I believe I was thinking of: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Outsider_(short_story).
To a lesser degree, I think https://lovecraftianscience.wordpress.com/2015/04/06/lovecrafts-beast-in-the-cave/, may also apply. (Also, I recommend the blog).
Oh, "The Outsider"! It does feel somewhat closer the Gothic - more psychological than cosmic. Would we call the main character human anymore? I didn't write on this one but it'd be interesting to think about. Disgust certainly plays a strong role.
For those interested, here it is: The Daemonology of Unplumbed Space: Weird Fiction, Disgust, and the Aesthetics of the Unthinkable. (https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0345621)
Ah, now I will have to prioritize getting through that work before Heller's(!) Thank you!
There's definitely things I plan to modify for a book version, but I think the overall argument is novel. It's long, so I encourage skimming... particularly in the Poe chapter, I feel I get a bit long-winded.
I have read about halfway through it!
Scattered comments.
p1- last 4 lines re: "non anthropocentric reality"... I see how the theist v. christian theist distinction was important for you to make.
p8- nice discussion of uncanny, fantastic/uncanny categories.
I considered myself fairly well read on philosophy but I somehow never encountered Schelling, so thank you for the introduction to him. Is he popular these days? Discussion of him was involved a great deal in the Poe section.
p120[111] Justifying the new scholarship angle I see. "Those who consider his mysticism in detail fail to consider the role of slime and the role of the disgusting in significant detail." :D. A striking sentence.
Hey thanks LD! Glad I could introduce you to Schelling. He's often really hard to follow but he has his moments. Much of his natural philosophy is totally refuted by modern science but he nonetheless has some interesting concepts of nature. In some ways I think of him as sort of mashing up Kant and Spinoza.
Out from the ether to give a well deserved congrats!
http://media2.giphy.com/media/dOJt6XZlQw8qQ/giphy.gif