Abstracts

 

Kai-Uwe Werbeck

The Thing that Eludes Us: John Carpenter, Abject Horror, and the Shapeshifting of Cold War Cinema

 

This essay reframes the viral organism at the center of The Thing as an exhibitionist intruder that utterly confuses its opponents’ sense of identity to the point of self-negation: “Not me. Not that. But not nothing either. A ‘something’ that I do not recognize as a thing” (Kristeva, Powers of Horror, 2). Rethinking the monster as one that aggressively performs its radical difference, this essay investigates the ways in which The Thing perpetually sabotages any attempt at identification. This essay examines the various hermeneutical gaps that permeate The Thing on multiple levels, arguing that they eventually collapse John Carpenter’s text into formal and narrative ambiguity. Through his constant refusal to allow the Thing to settle into the reliable position of the Other while having it showcase its colonial aspirations on multiple occasions, Carpenter implicitly critiques the fear of dissolution of national identity by intimating that the American-centric body may be uncompromised, but it is still the site of the uncanny, for the survivors could already be foreign. Thus, it is not exclusively the Other that scares, but rather the concept of alterity itself, an intangible fear of a potential alien-ness that erases already fragile communal ties and thus diminishes the chances for survival, whether the alien actually exists or not. This climate of distrust toward the designated Other leads to the gradual dissolution of the American body-politic from within.

 

Michael Veenstra

Power and Madness in Fantasy Fiction

 

This essay’s perspective on madness, power, and Fantasy serves to introduce a conversation about what Mad Studies has to offer the analysis of one of English literature’s most popular genres. Depictions of madness in the works of Robert Jordan and Patrick Rothfuss both subvert and reinforce ableist genre conventions addressing madness and mad characters. Both Jordan and Rothfuss give mad characters a place of importance in their writing and in doing so present fantasy worlds where there is “a place in society for madness” (Adame 462). Jordan’s work largely positions madness as a consequence of obtaining power, and any positives of madness are exceptional and incidental.  Rothfuss shows a different side of madness and resilience.  The Kingkiller Chronicle allows mad characters to lean into and embrace their experience as a means of access to power, allowing madness to be a positive character trait rather than an affliction to be cured. By making the madness of the hero a necessary part of the ultimate triumph of the hero—and subsequently of good over evil—madness is redeemed.  Madness and magic are deeply intertwined, and power seems to have some correlation to the ability to withstand—or in some cases, lean into—madness.  Leaning into one’s madness can be the sanest and most effective way to approach it. Not only is madness the crack through which the light shines, it is the gateway to greater harmony with the world if one can lean into it and listen to “the subtle language the world is whispering” (Rothfuss, The Wise Man’s Fear 255).  Elodin and Auri of The Kingkiller Chronicle lean into their madness to create harmony in themselves and with the world. Their madness is the gateway to their power, and they are not embarrassed by it or written in such a way as to make them seem apologetic for their madness; they are not broken.  Some authors choose to portray madness as an affliction—a distortion of character rather than a part of it.  Mad Studies offers a different perspective on that characterization in Fantasy. Madness is madness; it is not moral or immoral, good or bad. Madness is a category of experience. This Mad Studies lens helps the reader to see more clearly and to identify portrayals of madness or mental difference as evidence of corruption as ableist and problematic.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Alexis F. Viegas

Beyond Worlds: Music, Literature, and the Fantastical in H.P. Lovecraft and E.T.A Hoffmann

 

This article explores the intricate relationship between music and literature within the fantastical. It introduces an intermedial expansion of the way music and literature are thought of, and, more importantly, how the fantastical may be approached. Building on Irina Rajewsky’s prior research on intermedial connections, this essay delves into the enduring ties between music and literature across genres and artistic movements, as argued by Michael Allis. Emphasizing German Romantic perspectives, particularly E.T.A. Hoffmann’s arguments in “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music” (1813), this essay recontextualizes Tzvetan Todorov’s and Rosemary Jackson’s theoretical approaches to the fantastical. This analysis extends to H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Music of Erich Zann” (1922), employing a comparative approach with Hoffmann’s “Ritter Gluck: Eine Erinnerung aus dem Jahre 1809.”  The essay explores how German Romantic notions of music intersect with the fantastical, shedding light on the potential for new readings and interpretations of uncanny narratives through an intermedial and intertextual approach. In doing so, it explores the potentialities of engaging the subject within the confinements of the fantasy genre—especially concerning the influence of German Romantic notions of music in fantastical tales. By applying these tools to discuss Hoffmann’s “Beethoven’s Instrumental Music,” Todorov’s The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to A Literary Genre, and Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion, a discursive resemblance between Hoffmann’s romantic notions of music and Todorov’s and Jackson’s descriptions of the fantastical emerges. In Lovecraft’s tale, the unheimlich (uncanny) is invoked through and by the romantic notions of music that the author utilizes to wrestle with language’s limitations in expressing the abstract, thus showcasing the importance of a musical approach to the fantastical.

 

 

 

 

 

Aya Vandenbussche

The Unmuted Golem: Golem and Language in Terry Pratchett’s Feet of Clay and Michael Chabon’s Kavalier and Clay

 

The golem is a mute creature given sentience, agency, and mobility through the power of written language.¹ The close relationship between the mute creature and language remains largely unexplored. This essay will examine Terry Pratchett’s and Michael Chabon’s reimagination of the golem legend in the universe of literary composition. Golem narratives lend themselves to elaboration. Through Dorfl, the golem who gains a voice in Feet of Clay, Pratchett explores the tension and reciprocity between writing and speaking. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, Chabon employs the Golem of Prague as a metaphor for storytelling and as a touchstone defining the identities of his two main characters.

 

Alfie Howard

W*ndigos and Tricksters in Tomson Highway’s Kiss of the Fur Queen and Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal

 

It is important for non-Indigenous scholars to engage with the fact that a traditional Algonquian figure has become an established part of Anglophone culture. This cannot be done without discussing the windigo in both Indigenous and non-Indigenous contexts. This essay begins by discussing Indigenous Canadian Tomson Highway’s novel Kiss of the Fur Queen, a semi-autobiographical novel that tells the story of two Cree brothers. The brothers are sent to a residential school where they suffer abuse and cultural repression at the hands of priests. Highway links the violence of the windigo to the violence of colonialism and forced cultural and religious assimilation.  In Highway’s novel, the figure of the windigo is contrasted with that of the eponymous Fur Queen, an apparently benevolent figure.  The great peril of the trickster seeking to infiltrate and destroy the windigo is that they may become like the monster they fight against—that it may be the windigo that reshapes the trickster to its own liking, rather than the other way around. This is a peril that arises in the next work considered in relation to tricksters and windigos: Bryan Fuller’s Hannibal.  In the show, Hannibal not only seeks to turn his patients and colleagues into murderers; he also makes those around him into unwitting cannibals. The juxtaposition between Hannibal’s brutal murders and his sophistication is comedic as well as ironic.  In the real world, the windigo itself seems to be transforming, changing its appearance to adapt to this foreign culture that has appropriated it.  Perhaps this tendency of windigo stories to incite laughter as well as horror is a further sign of the figure’s merging with the trickster—of savage crimes masquerading as sophistication and refined tastes.  The windigo has been altered by its entry into non-Indigenous culture, but it is still the windigo.  By exploiting audiences’ morbid fascination with that which supposedly repels them, the figure of the windigo has expanded its domain into non-Indigenous horror media, where its presence silently calls attention to the disturbing obsessions of allegedly civilized colonial cultures.

 

Jason Dorwart

Chariots of Fear: Empty Wheelchairs as a Locus of Horror, Disability, Race, and Eugenics in The Changeling and Jessabelle

 

Wheelchairs inhabit an uncanny position between freedom and confinement, and between immobility and movement, making them a metaphorical locus of the embodiment of incorporeality. The wheelchair is a freeing tool for physically impaired users but becomes a marker for nondisabled persons’ fears of disability. The horror film genre uses physical markers of otherworldly fears to evoke a viscerally frightful response, often tapping into fears of impairment by using empty wheelchairs to embody imminent danger, foreboding, and the knowledge that death and disability loom. The empty wheelchair becomes a site for fantastical ghosts of all kinds to sit—including the ghost of the eugenics movement upon which so much of horror is rooted. This essay contends that as eugenics died out in popular discourse, its ghost remained and was exemplified in the changes that developed in the horror genre. The empty wheelchair suggests a problem-to-come, rather than a problem-to-be-overcome: the disabled body as liminal figure lacks futurity and lands the resultant ghost in the seat of the empty wheelchair as an endlessly liminal replay of trauma. Serving as a bridge between life and death, the wheelchair seems to be as reasonable a place as any for a ghost to sit while the spirit world bleeds through into materiality. The empty wheelchair becomes a locus of embodiment for the disembodied, suggesting a movement into a permanent state of liminality, rather than a movement out of it. As the marker of (non)disability is central to the capitalist enterprise of distribution of power and constraining unruly bodies into discrete and marginalized categories, the wheelchair becomes a marker of an inability to fully participate in the ways of capitalism, a social defect leading ultimately to ostracization and premature death. This essay analyzes The Changeling (1980) and Jessabelle (2014) to argue that in the absence of monstrous bodies, an empty wheelchair provides a seat for the ghost of eugenic horrors while attempting to avoid overt depiction of monstrous and eugenically unfit bodies.

 

Sarah Tanner

“Spheres and Dimensions Apart From Ours”: Anthropocene Horror and Ignorance in “The Call of Cthulhu”

 

This article applies an environmentally-oriented reading of Anthropocene horror to H. P. Lovecraft's “The Call of Cthulhu.” It examines the interaction between known and foreign landscapes and critiques the implicit biases towards human superiority present in the Anthropocene. Within the context of Lovecraft's particular take on Anthropocene horror, the universe looms large and dispassionate, significantly troubling claims of humanity's eminence, the stability of its institutions, and faith in materiality as the fabric of reality. Once humanity confronts its insignificance within the larger schema of the cosmos, it pursues a willful ignorance to avoid lethal mental decomposition. The paper concludes with a tentative path forward, despite the ostensible nihilism of this short story: Anthropocene horror allows Lovecraft to extend willful ignorance as an alternative to madness, despite the terrifying confluence of manmade and monstrous territories present in “The Call of Cthulhu.”

 

Connor Salter

Get Used to Disappointment: Jewish Comic Fantasy in William Goldman’s The Princess Bride

This essay analyzes how William Goldman, a secular Jewish writer, combines Jewish humor and Jewish speculative fiction in his novel and screenplay The Princess Bride to explore Jewish questions. Exploring how Goldman integrates Jewish humor into the narrative illustrates Jeremy Dauber’s argument that disappointment and suffering are key to Jewish humor and that Jewish humor often juxtaposes hope with the harsh reality of anti-Semitism. Seeing how Goldman explores Jewish questions about hope and endurance, the same questions that Jewish film director Rob Reiner explores in the 1989 film adaptation, also demonstrates what makes Jewish speculative fiction unusual: its willingness to explore dark questions, to use historic Jewish suffering as a lens to consider despair and hope. Exploring the novel and film as secular Jewish speculative fiction is a versatile tool for exploring Jewish concerns even when the storytellers reject Judaism’s conventional answers.  The Princess Bride not only deconstructs fantasy but does so to ask secular Jewish questions about hope, true love, and adventure. The story’s comedy of suffering and hints of tragicomic Jewish vengeance become key to understanding its theme: what people believe in after being disappointed.