In many ways, horror films appeal to our desire for life rather than to our death drive. We subject ourselves to the terrors of the genre in order to affirm the stability of our own existence in contrast to the expendable lives on screen. As Morris Dickstein argues, horror films offer us the opportunity of "neutralizing anxiety by putting an aesthetic bracket around it" (54). The grueling experiences we encounter in the dark world of the theater may deeply influence our relationship to our own world: "What we take with us from these films is a deeper perceptual awareness of life and of our involvement in its complexities" (Telotte 31). The tagline of the 1979 film Phantasm-"If this one doesn't scare you, you're already dead!"-plays on the restorative potential of horror by implying that the more terror we experience in the theater, the more we confirm our position as one of the living. The horror film franchise Saw (2004) recently thematized this function of the genre by featuring a villain who targets his victims according to their inability to value their existence. Affected by terminal cancer, he envisions elaborate tortures requiring "people who don't appreciate their blessings" to commit gruesome acts (such as amputating their own legs) in order to save their lives. The moralistic undertone of this popular series foregrounds the horror film's valorization of life through its rupture. In this essay, I will address a subgenre of the horror film, which I term "spectral incognizance," that seems dedicated to reassuring viewers of their safety. The subgenre includes films such as Charles Vidor's The Spy (1929), Robert Enrico's La Riviere du Hibou (1962), Herk Harvey's Carnival of Souls (1962), Adrian Lyne's Jacob's Ladder (1990), M. Night Shyamalan's The Sixth Sense (1999), Alejandro Amendibar's The Others (2001), and Mark Forster's Stay (2005). In contrast to the

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

What Some Ghosts Don't Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film

Tom’s Cabin and the material that surrounded it when it Wrst appeared as a series of installments in the free-soil weekly the National Era.2 Publishing in that context, Stowe faced a formidable challenge: how to shape an account of slave culture that would have a greater impact than the antislavery discourse already typical of the abolitionist press. In representing slavery during the 1840s, writers of slave narratives, sermons, poems, and other texts often sought to elicit empathy from their readers. But it was Uncle Tom’s Cabin that established sympathetic identiWcation as a widespread reading practice for consuming the story of slavery. How did Stowe’s tale accomplish that end? Stowe was well aware that neither her facts nor her arguments would be new to readers of the Era. Indeed, in a sense they were all too familiar. By 1851 every edition of the National Era included images of fugitives as well as political discussions, religious appeals, and other well-rehearsed attacks on slave culture. William Lloyd Garrison and other abolitionists Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the National Era

Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era : An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading

http://link.springer.com/content/pdf/10.1007/978-94-011-0675-7_8.pdf

Medical Stories: Narrative and Phenomenological Approaches

Toward a Typology of Indeterminacy in Postmodern Narrative

����� ��� In what sense could “Tuan” Jim be said to have been “one of us”? (Lord passim). Marlow’s sudden appearance in the fifth chapter of Lord Jim derails the form of what had previously seemed a conventional novel of disillusionment, and yet is motivated by nothing more than the urgency of his claim. It seems plausible to read into this urgency the repressed anxiety of an author whose relationship to his self-chosen national community remained open to question throughout his life, who after fifteen years in the most British of all professions still felt that his ability to pass for an Englishman was not taken for granted by everyone. In a classic study, Avrom Fleishman documented Conrad’s affinity for postBurkean conceptions of “organic” and self-contained national communities in meticulous detail (51ff.). More recent essays have applied his findings to Heart of Darkness and uncovered in that novel a profound meditation on the question of “Englishness.” 1 Remarkably little attention, however, has been paid to Lord Jim and the way in which its central narrative rupture implicates questions of form and genre in Conrad’s struggle for communal recognition and legitimation. 2 The dominant model for such legitimation in the stories and novels that Conrad produced during the early part of his career is that of the Bildungsroman, a form that is still reflected in the opening chapters of Lord Jim. But already in these early efforts we can detect the attempt to express a model of human experience that cannot easily be incorporated into the classical framework by which the Bildungsroman medi

/pdf/beyond-the-bildungsroman-character-development-and-communal-2cdccxpval.pdf

Desire without History@@@Reading for the Plot: Design and Intention in Narrative

Citations

What Some Ghosts Don't Know: Spectral Incognizance and the Horror Film

Uncle Tom's Cabin in the National Era : An Essay in Generic Norms and the Contexts of Reading

Medical Stories: Narrative and Phenomenological Approaches

Toward a Typology of Indeterminacy in Postmodern Narrative

Beyond the Bildungsroman: Character Development and Communal Legitimation in the Early Fiction of Joseph Conrad