“Horror isn’t just a genre of stories but an outlook on life,” Matthew Warner writes in his foreword to Horror Isn’t a 4-Letter Word: Essays on Writing & Appreciating the Genre. In this collection of articles published between 2002 and 2007, the author of The Organ Donor, Death Sentences: Tales of Punishment & Revenge, and Eyes Everywhere challenges us to look beyond the stereotypes associated with a much-maligned type of fiction. Horror empowers us to cope with our fears by teaching us about them, he says, either overtly or through symbolism. It’s not just about blood and guts. The book consists mostly of editorials written for the Horror World website, plus selected articles from venues such as Hellnotes Newsletter. Warner runs the gamut in subject matter—everything from ghost hunting, to gory holiday decorations, to effective writing techniques—in his meditations about horrific things, whether they be fictional or real. Contents include some of his most controversial columns: “My Summer with a Book Doctor: An internship at Edit Ink, a Notorious Scam Operation,” “Message Versus Medium: The Agenda of Left Behind,” “Addictive Plotting as Taught by Buffy the Vampire Slayer,” and “Obscenity v. The First Amendment: Why the Prosecution of X-rated Films Affects Books.” Read preliminary reviews of Horror Isn't a 4-Letter Word at Horror World, Bookgasm and Monster Librarian. Preorder the book here.
In Technologized Desire, D. Harlan Wilson measures the evolution of the human condition as it has been represented by postcapitalist science fiction, which has consistently represented the body and subjectivity as ultraviolent, pathological phenomena. Operating under the assumption that selfhood is a technology—i.e. a creative projection from the body encompassing everything from language to electronic machinery—Wilson studies the emergence of selfhood in philosophy (Deleuze & Guattari), fiction (William S. Burroughs' cut-up novels and Max Barry's Jennifer Government), and cinema (Army of Darkness, Vanilla Sky, and the Matrix trilogy) in an attempt to portray the schizophrenic rigor of twenty-first century mediatized life. We are obligated by our own pathological unconsciouses to always choose to be enslaved by capital and its hi-tech arsenal. The universe of consumer-capitalism, Wilson argues, is an illusory prison from which there is no escape—depsite the fact that it is illusory.
Over a century ago, Sigmund Freud wrote an essay called "The Uncanny" in an effort to understand art, fairy tales, ghost stories, and other phenomena that arouse dread and horror. In the process, he initiated a critical theory surrounding "the return of the repressed" that remains current to this day. In The Popular Uncanny, award-winning horror author Michael Arnzen critically examines how the aesthetic of the uncanny has circulated in mass culture since Freud's breakthrough essay. After an insightful introduction to the theory and its legacy in 20th century criticism, Arnzen takes us on a cultural exploration of the key icons of the uncanny in several media. A chapter on the doppelgänger (or "the Double") in advertising analyzes the interesting history of the Doublemint Twins, revealing how uncanny images are packaged for the mass market and what their "double pleasures" have to show us about our cultural anxieties. Arnzen's look at the "dismembered hand that acts on its own accord" provides a critical account of that horror icon as it has appeared in art and cinema history and uncovers its ideological functions along the way. Turning to bestselling genre fiction, Arnzen analyzes the metafictional uncanny in Stephen King's novel Misery, exposing how the revelation of "all that ought to have remained secret" (as Freud famously put it) points to uncertainties regarding genre, gender, and authorship. The Popular Uncanny concludes with an enlightening survey of the uncanny media of the World Wide Web; here we learn how the icon of the haunted house and other elements of the uncanny offer a fruitful way of reading what is unspoken about "home" pages and other online technologies. This fresh take on the uncanny in popular culture provides ways of understanding the arousal of dread in a manner that points us not only toward what we fear as a culture, but also toward a doorway that often leads to progressive cultural change. Arnzen keeps a blog for The Popular Uncanny subtitled "A Notebook on the Strange in Pop Culture and Everyday Life." Read it at www.gorelets.com/uncanny. The
Reflexive Gaze of Critifiction:
The Columbia Literary History of the United States defines critifiction as “a kind of narrative that contains its own theory and even its own criticism.” Critifiction blurs genres. When metafictionist Raymond Federman declared Postmodernism had died in the 1980s, he identified a new form of discourse “that is critical as well as fictional . . . We are surrounded by discourses: historical, social, political, economic, medical, judicial, and of course literary.” So why not combine them all instead of keeping them separate and existing in an either/or textual world? Michael Hemmingson examines seminal critifctional texts: Avital Ronnel’s Crack Wars, Vladimir Nabokov’s Pale Fire, and Samuel R. Delany's The American Shore, as well as recent works such as Paul Mann’s Masocritcism and Frank Lentricchia’s Lucheesi and the Whale. Like a private eye, Hemmingson investigates incidents of critifctional metatexts in underground literary movements (e.g. avantpop, avantporn, avantpunk, bizarro, post-cyberpunk, radical empiricism, auto/ethnography), closely reading the reflexive gaze in the blurring of fiction, memoir, and theory. Critifction is not limited to the so-called “underground” and the halls of academntia; it has had made its way to more popular, commercial literary publishing, evident in Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, Brett Easton Ellis’ Lunar Park, and William T. Vollmann’s Seven Dreams series. Critifiction goes beyond the printed and bound book—indeed, Hemmingson identifies and reads metatextuality in Craigslist sex ads, Myspace blogs, the academic peer review process, the life of Paris Hilton, Instant Messaging, e-mail, and the performative interactions of the “money slave” and the “money mistress.” The Reflexive Gaze of Critifiction is also a critifictional text, as Hemmingson blurs his own autobiography, the lies of his life that are mere fiction, and close readings of the reflexive metagaze in the books of Raymond Carver, Ernest Hemingway, and Charles Bukowski. |
