The Popular Uncanny

Conference reports and reflections from the Uncanny Media conference in Utrecht, Netherlands (2008) are starting to pop up online. Since it relates to my work on The Popular Uncanny, I was very interested in attending this event, but was unable to, so I’m seeking as many discussions and reports from the conference as possible online — and I’m especially keen on finding posted conference papers and related scholarship by the scholars in attendance.

I’ll keep updating this post as I collect what I discover here:

• Isabella van Elferen (Utrecht University)– who coordinated the Uncanny Media conference — posts her report on the conference’s website (and hints that a sequel to the event may be fomenting).
• Ilse Marie Bussing (University of Edinburgh) posts her con report at The Gothic Imagination and links to entertaining (but bandwidth-soaking) event photos by LeAnne Kline.
• Steen Christiansen (Aalborg University, Denmark) kindly shares his conference paper, “David Bowie’s Hauntology” on his great weblog, New Mappings.
• BLIK magazine gives an overview of their coverage of the event (the mag itself is not online)

[Leave a comment if you know of others...]

My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures.

Here’s the opening passage:

I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself

The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps the literary genre most associated with irrationality. It is often construed around the emotional and physical responses it seeks to produce in its audience, from anxious fright to hair-raising chills, especially in the cinema, where aesthetic success is measured by the volume of spectator screams. The appeal of horror fiction and film lies in the ambivalent thrills associated with fear, suspense, and terror, no matter how significant its subtextual messages might be. Even when its practitioners mine the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, and metaphysics in the deepest of intellectual ways, horror resists mastery by the intellect, privileges the emotional/physical response, and remains the primary venue for the literary expression of dread, anxiety, caution, shock, uncertainty, and the uncanny.

One might wonder, then, what business horror fiction has in the college classroom. If the point of horror is to scare readers, what lessons can it possibly teach them? When does fear and shock serve a pedagogical function? Is it ethical to horrify students in the hopes of teaching them something?

I delve into transformative learning theory to posit some answers to those questions. Go read “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” if interested… college teachers might also find my weblog on pedagogy of interest.

“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which would surface in our dreams and our slips, in our neuroses and madness. But isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — Jean Baudrillard, Cool Memories

Feelings we attach to the uncanny are often the cause of laughter as much as screams or chills. I’m wondering to what extend Baudrillard’s musing relates to the humorous side of the uncanny affect; that is, the “ironic breezy drives and fantasies” we might see expressed on popular television or in bestselling fantasy fiction. Taking his thoughts to the psychosocial level seems warranted, I think; it may be productive to substitute “political unconscious” for “the unconscious” in his quotation.

I’m musing over whether Baudrillard’s quotation, too, is the product of a philosopher searching for happiness (or whatever the antithesis of “seriousness” and “sadness” is) in the workings of the psyche. He seems to be searching for the unexpressed wish as a carefree desire (as oxymoronic as that sounds); the wandering non-aggressive stuff of the animal daydream. His final musing — “Isn’t it already that way, in a sense?” — begs the question, but he’s got me wondering to what degree the promises of advertising and the fantasies of fiction manifest this “new unconsciousness” in the way that he is framing it, and whether this might move us closer to understanding the domesticity of horror and the uncanny, the rending “familiar” of the unfamiliar, through a highly self-conscious and ironic detachment. In other words, that element of the uncanny that is not necessarily sad, serious, or scary.