Literatura científica selecionada sobre o tema "Horror tales – appreciation – fiction"

This chapter explores a number of tales from the post-war period which suggest that the war produced vengeful and malevolent ghosts impossible to accommodate within the home. This chapter explores a specifically Gothic representation of the ghost which seeks to both contain, but also demonise, the war dead. Tales by E.F. Benson and M.R. James, among others, suggest that survivors of the war have irrevocably lost their sense of identity, that what is required is a new strategy by which one might lay the ghosts of the conflict finally to rest - also a feature of the poetry of Richard Aldington and Robert Graves during this period. The horror of the war and how to overcome it is also explored in Dennis Wheatley’s The Devil Rides Out (1934), which, if not a ghost story, does, through its use of the myth of Osiris, explore how anxieties about the fragmented bodies of the war dead haunt the culture of the 1930s. Dorothy L. Sayers in The Nine Tailors (1934) also highlights strategies for laying to rest the ghosts of the war and the memories that they provoke.

Abstract The Alien films form an interesting corpus for transdisciplinary scholarship. Their incorporation of science fiction motifs places them within the author’s favorite genre. However, they also depict gratuitous viscerality and viscosity, more readily associated with horror. Aesthetically, therefore, the author has always found these films instinctively repugnant and have a strong aversion to them. However, the films have enjoyed enduring popularity, and intense fandom of the evolving franchise is evident. This seems, therefore, to be a rich territory for considering the continuum of human reactions to viscera. The author has thus undertaken an introspective consideration of my responses to a variety of stimuli, within my quotidian milieu and in film, to try to make sense of my fear and disgust within the context of wider audience appreciation. Kristeva’s “abjection” provides a useful lens for viewing these subjectivities. My analysis brings new insights into the evolving role of popular culture within the modern psyche.

Born in Bulgaria in 1941 and an emigré to Paris in 1965, Julia Kristeva is a world-renowned philosopher, novelist and practising psychoanalyst. Author of more than 30 books and a professor emeritus at University of Paris VII–Denis Diderot, she has been awarded Commander of the Legion of Honour, Commander of the Order of Merit, the Holberg Prize, the Hannah Arendt Prize and the Vaclav Havel Prize. Her early work, Revolution in Poetic Language (1974), distinguished her as a major poststructuralist thinker, especially for its new ways of conceiving of the speaking being as one who is always subject to the revolutionary power of the affective dimensions of language, that is, the semiotic dimension, which, with the symbolic dimension, produces signification. In her major works of the 1980s – Powers of Horror (1980), Tales of Love (1984) and Black Sun: Depression and Melancholia (1987) – she developed new psychoanalytic theories of early development which gave ‘the maternal function’ a central role that had been neglected by previous psychoanalytic theories. Kristeva is also the author of numerous works of fiction, mostly detective novels with female protagonists, in which she tries to exemplify some of her theoretical ideas. These include The Old Man and the Wolves (1994), Possessions: A Novel (1996) and Murder in Byzantium (2006). Over the past 20 years she has turned to intellectual biography with the trilogy Female Genius: Hannah Arendt (1999), Melanie Klein (2000) and Colette (2002); and more general social theory with Hate and Forgiveness (2005) and The Incredible Need to Believe (2009). She has also continued her inquiry into revolt with books on the importance of self-reflection, critical questioning and inquiry in works such as Proust and the Sense of Time (1994), Intimate Revolt (1997) and the essay, ‘New Forms of Revolt’ (2014).