Weird Reading: Horror as Radical Politics at the End of the World

Open Access
- Author:
- Doane, Bethany
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 21, 2019
- Committee Members:
- Claire Colebrook, Dissertation Advisor/Co-Advisor
Claire Colebrook, Committee Chair/Co-Chair
Susan Squier, Committee Member
Matt Tierney, Committee Member
Rosemary Jolly, Outside Member - Keywords:
- horror
weird fiction
reading methods
critical theory
nonhuman turn
feminism
gender studies
black studies
queer studies - Abstract:
- Scalar and emphatic shifts away from the human in contemporary critical theory coincide with a renewed interest in horror and other speculative genres. Theorists of speculative realism in particular have turned to Lovecraftian “weird fiction” and its influences on horror, which manifest ideas about the limits of human understanding, or the gap between thing and representation. At its heart, weird fiction takes up themes of unknowability and unrepresentability, which it expresses via descriptive contradictions and aesthetic disharmonies. In focusing primarily on horror’s abstract speculation, however, the nonhuman turn has sometimes failed to address the political—particularly the racial and gendered—implications of either the genre or the theory. Weird Reading thus brings the critical scholarship of feminist and queer theory, philosophies of race, and historical questions of power and biopolitics together with the sometimes “apolitical” theories of the nonhuman turn. In doing so, it also intervenes in the history of reading in order to consider how multiple (often contradictory) ways of reading can operate simultaneously and productively. By “reading weirdly” I mean approaching the supernatural and strange elements of a text as illegible, rather than as allegory, in order to discover how the narrative is designed to resist fixed meaning or interpretation. By juxtaposing or layering the effects that these elements produce with traditional feminist and antiracist critique, I suggest that readers might affectively invest in the disturbances and pleasures of the text, while also reading those affects as politically engaged across disparate ethical and social scale frames. While this interdisciplinary project engages with a range of fields of inquiry, its core problem confronts questions about the politics of reading in an era marked by methodological debate. Rather than take a polemical stance in relation to critique and postcritique, Weird Reading emphasizes the affordances of differing levels affective proximity. This project argues that horror’s affects need not be uncritical, apolitical, or reactionary, but may actually offer a way to rethink the politics of reading—a way to be critical without being distant.