Session 5: It’s So Frightening – I Love It

3rd Global Conference

Saturday 19th September – Monday 21st September 2009
Mansfield College, Oxford

Fate and Terror in Don DeLillo’s Falling Man
Christine Muller
American Studies, University of Maryland, College Park, MD, U.S.A

The notion of forced and inevitable conclusion pervades Don DeLillo’s Falling Man, the sense of crossing into territory from which there is no coming back. Discrete, parallel lines evoking the Twin Towers appear on the cover of the text and signal the irreversible, insurmountable boundaries that demarcate time, place and person throughout the novel. Indeed, Lianne’s confrontation with Alzheimer’s disease, Hammad’s settling into the groove of predestined jihad, and Keith’s immersion in endless, timeless, anonymous poker rounds all operate within the bounds of structured but uncontrollable peril, where the end is fated because the door closes behind you long before the final instant actually arrives. On September 11, victims confronted and witnesses shuddered to see the reality that fortune is sometimes unfavorable, and we might find ourselves at times in places others have willed us and circumstances have taken us, and nowhere we would want to be.

Cultural studies often chastens any assertions of a common human condition –a hesitation Judith Butler reiterates in Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (20) – but the traumatic threat witnesses of those who jumped from the World Trade Center have perceived points to the possibility and the parameters of at least one: mortality. The aura of doom surrounding the specter of these fated individuals challenges us to question our own agency, our own ability to act purposefully and meaningfully in a world not of our own choosing. On these terms, of powerlessness in the realm of contingent fortune, the condition of mortality provokes fear as well as opportunity – fear of sharing the fate of the Other, and opportunity for compassionately engaging the vulnerable Other, who is also yourself.

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“Tuneful Tragedy:” Aesthetization of Horror in A Song of Ice and Fire by George R. R. Martin
Dagmara Zajac
The Jagiellonian University: Kraków, Poland

In the world of George R. R. Martin, horror seems ubiquitous. Hatred, aggression, violence and death are ever-present themes in his bestselling epic saga. The paper aims at presenting horror as a source of aesthetic stimulation in Martin’s novels. First of all, it may be argued that the language and imagery of “Ice and Fire’s” horrifying descriptions can be traced back to the nightmarish violence of medieval drama. The conventions first used in Corpus Christi plays were developed to create a special moment of simultaneous attraction and revulsion, of acknowledgement and denial; this particular moment provides an important key to understanding the representation of horror in Martin’s fiction. Another aspect of the spectacular nature of horror in “Ice and Fire” is the theory of the sublime as developed by Burke and Kant. The sublime may be delightful even in its terrible aspects, connected with transgressing the moral order of the universe. As a result, literary expression of terror becomes, as if by definition, an aesthetic expression: a representation already theatricalized and framed. George R. R. Martins spectacle of violence depicted in “A Song of Ice and Fire” thus becomes appalling and appealing at the same time.

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The Definition of Art-Horror
Andrea Sauchelli
Scuola Normale Superiore Pisa (ITA), University of Leeds (UK)

Noel Carroll’s influential and groundbreaking definition of the nature of artistic horror, or art-horror, has been taken as a starting point for many philosophers in contemporary analytic aesthetics. Carroll’s theory should be seen as an attempt to give a theoretical formulation to a concept already operative in our ordinary language at an intuitive level. He does not refer to psychoanalytic theories to define this genre, in fact he simply thinks that we can delimit the borders of this concept by looking at which emotions the works in question are supposed to elicit in the public. However, the project seems to face insurmountable objections: the central notion of monster, as the sole factor supposed to generate disgust in the public, and thus the only responsible factor for the recognition of art-horror, does not seem to generate a definition broad enough to capture all the various available examples, i.e. Psycho or other slasher movies. My project aims to maintain the basic idea of Carroll’s proposal, that is defining art-horror in terms of a supposed modification in the mental states of the audience, but without relying on the notion of monster. The main idea is to explore to which extent the notion of the ‘mood’ of a work can be helpful in facing the objections raised against the original account. I argue, in particular, that examples of art-horror have a specific mood responsible for the emotions that are expected to be elicited in the public. This prospective choice would extend the definition to the point of being able to include paintings and also other examples of art-horror coming from non-narrative art forms.