Reviews SEED, DAVID
Journal of American studies,
08/2013, Letnik:
47, Številka:
3
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Because it was explored relatively later than the Arctic, the southern continent has had a shifting, fluid existence for writers, figuring variously as utopia, laboratory, or site of lost races. ......inevitably, substantial parts of each chapter can only mention individual works in passing. The answer is Dickens and poetry anthologies, among other works. ...they even set up newsletters like the South Polar Times and engaged in theatricals, sometimes performing their own works. Both studies have their respective strengths, not least their joint demonstration of how extensive ways of imagining Antarctica have been. Because they are, of necessity, so selective, they also point up the need for a substantial historical survey of this material.
Harman presents this book as a continuation of the Continental tradition of seeking literary exemplars of philosophical world-views, yet he also frames the book as a necessary, even foundational, ...aesthetic analysis of this still under-studied writer, who has only recently crossed from pulp into the American literary canon. Of the book's three sections, the first and last frame Lovecraft's relationship to object-oriented ontology, while the longer middle section presents case studies of Lovecraft's fiction. The cultists, an 'evil-looking crew of Kanakas and half-castes', board the Europeans' ship, and the Europeans, led by their Norwegian second mate, Johansen, respond by killing the cultists to the last man.2 Harman analyses the passage in terms of its aesthetics, as a case of Lovecraft's vertical generation of gaps between subject and object. Harman reads the passage as a case of the subject's inability to fully express the reality of the object, yet we might instead read the 'abominable' quality of these cultists not as an objective property that they possess, but as the subjective, affective response to their Otherness on the part of the European sailors (and the Bostonian WASP narrator).
Introduction: Lovecraft Now Sederholm, Carl; Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew
Journal of the fantastic in the arts,
09/2015, Letnik:
26, Številka:
3 (94)
Journal Article
Recenzirano
What the WFA debate (which actually received coverage on America's National Public Radio and in many prominent publications, including The Guardian, The Atlantic, Salon.com, and The LA Review of ...Books) did perhaps more than anything was to make still more people aware of Lovecraft-a relatively obscure author at the time of his death in 1937 from cancer at the age of 46. The process of allocation was facilitated by the fact that the essay submissions broke upon an obvious fault line: we received a group of submissions that explored Lovecraft's work in light of contemporary theoretical paradigms such as object-oriented ontology and posthumanism-these became our book collection, The Age of Lovecraft, published by the University of Minnesota Press in 2016; and we received a group of submissions that considered contemporary "appropriations" of Lovecraft-his influences on contemporary makers of popular culture, allusions to him to modern works, and extensions of his writings into other genres. Consider, too, the multiple internet memes such as the one which with we started, along with YouTube videos, plush dolls, action figures, fan fiction, fan art, and tentacle-ridden ski masks that populate the online marketplace. Prometheus, according to McWilliam, offers a nihilistic form of posthuman creationism that undermines assumptions about the sanctity of human life by revealing a universe in which anthropocentrism gives way to the realization that humans are simply experimental subjects in an inscrutable alien plan.
In this paper, we explore the potential of a corpus approach to study translated cohesion. We use key words as starting points for identifying cohesive networks in Lovecraft's At the Mountains of ...Madness, and discuss how these networks contribute to the construction of literary meanings in the text. We focus on the role of repetition as a key element in establishing cohesive networks between lexical items. We specifically discuss the implications of our method for the analysis of cohesion in translated texts. A comparison of Lovecraft's original novel and a translation into Italian provides us with a nuanced understanding of the complex nature of cohesive networks. Finally, we discuss the broader issue of applying models and methods from corpus linguistics to corpus stylistic analysis.
Neste artigo, propomos a existência de um diálogo entre três documentários dirigidos pelo cineasta Werner Herzog (O Homem Urso, 2005; Encontros no Fim do Mundo, 2007; Visita ao Inferno, 2016) com a ...noção de horror cósmico, desenvolvida pelo escritor e teórico da literatura H.P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), cuja produção tem se mostrado fonte recorrente de análises culturais e filosóficas. Em uma breve análise de elementos temáticos e discursivos presentes nos três documentários, buscamos lançar as bases de uma pesquisa ainda em andamento. A análise procura observar semelhanças específicas entre as narrativas de Herzog e Lovecraft, uma vez que ambos concebem suas obras de modo a miniaturizar a vida humana, resumindo-a à sua insignificância dentro de um universo infinito e hostil, sobre o qual pouco se conhece. Essa perspectiva cria não apenas ambientes fantásticos, mas também leva seus personagens aos limites da sanidade e, eventualmente, à loucura diante do desconhecido.
Reviews RUNDQUIST, LEISA
Journal of American studies,
02/2013, Letnik:
47, Številka:
1
Journal Article
Recenzirano
(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.) Exclusive Online Reviews Since 2002, scholarship on the work of Henry Darger (1892-1973), a so-called "outsider artist," has operated within a ...psychoanalytic discourse, heralding the solipsistic nature of this enigmatic figure's art and writings. "Resource" in this study's title can be understood in the word's full sense; Moon looks to material culture and finds Darger's sources of information, his wellspring of creative energies, as well as evidence of the artist's practical ingenuity. Moon is a pioneer in this revisionist study, first by revealing how the dark recesses of proletarian print culture can shed light on Darger's gory and elegiac art (and vice versa), and second by his use of nuanced queer perspectives to further elucidate intersections between sexuality, class, and religion in Darger's writings.
Esoteric spiritual groups such as the Theosophical Society have had a profound effect on the general public’s understanding of the ancient world and archaeology. This article describes the author’s ...visit as an outside observer to a conference held by the Theosophical Society in America to examine the ways in which the ancient world was represented. While the beliefs of the Theosophical Society and related groups are not always well known to the general public, it is argued that their beliefs have nevertheless had a broad impact on public audiences through adoption in popular culture and films. This article will examine the appearance of esoteric claims about the ancient world in popular fiction, including the writings of H. P. Lovecraft and the Indiana Jones film franchise. If archaeologists are going to engage with public audiences, they need to understand what the public actually thinks of their work.
This article investigates the phonic materiality of sound, specifically of buzzing voices, in H. P. Lovecraft’s 1930 short story “The Whisperer in the Darkness.” The insectile is configured as a ...trope for the “outside” and as a formless entity, the latter rendered as an enfleshed voice. I am concerned with the interplay between form and formlessness, particularly as it pertains to sound, and the production of form, that is, how form and, conversely, formlessness are determined as political categories, not ontological givens. I use this approach, a focus on the valorization of form, to argue against recent scholarship, notably Graham Harman’s Weird Realism (2012), claiming Lovecraft as a writer offering a deconstruction of “man” through perspectives other than human, when the latter remains absolutely understood according to what Sylvia Wynter calls the “coloniality of Being.”
If parapolitics, a branch of radical criminology that studies the interactions between public entities and clandestine agencies, is to develop as an academic discipline, then it must develop a ...coherent theory of aesthetics in order to successfully perform its primary function: to render perceptible extra-judicial phenomena that have hitherto resisted formal classification. Wilson offers the work of H.P. Lovecraft (1890–1937) as an example of the relevance of subversive literature—in this case, cosmic horror and the weird tale—to the parapolitical criminologist. Cosmic horror is a form of writing that relies heavily upon the epistemological assumption of a radical and irreconcilable disjunction between appearance and reality, perception and truth. In many ways, the well-constructed weird tale strongly resembles the hard-boiled detective story or the noir thriller in that the resolution of the narrative hinges upon a dramatically shattering confrontation with an unspeakable reality. Apart from its obvious utilization of conspiracy theory, the primary attraction of the Lovecraftian text lies with its remarkably sophisticated utilization of two central tropes of classical aesthetic theory—the sublime and the grotesque. Not only does Lovecraft’s oeuvre represent a remarkable use of both of these motifs, but the raw literary power of the Lovecraftian weird tale serves as an outstanding exemplar for the parapolitical scholar to emulate in formulating an alternative mode of discourse, or poetics.
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