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The New Weird
Abstract
Inasmuch as so-called New Weird fiction defines itself in relation to what now presumably must be considered ‘Old Weird’ fiction, any discussion of the former must necessarily start with the latter—and, in keeping with the complicated and fascinating etymology of the term ‘weird’ itself, it is a discussion that spreads out in several directions. Contemporary English speakers are likely to use the term ‘weird’ as an adjective to characterise something odd, strange, abnormal or unexpected. The Old English wyrd, however, from which the contemporary usage is derived, was a noun signifying ‘[t]he principle, power, or agency by which events are predetermined; fate, destiny’ (‘weird, n.’ Oxford English Dictionary). The werdys were the Fates, the goddesses in charge of determining the course of human life—one hears this resonance in Shakespeare’s three ‘weïrd sisters’ in Macbeth—and someone’s ‘weird’ was their appointed destiny, that which was fated to happen to them. The use of ‘weird’ as an adjective originally derived from the noun and connoted the supernatural power to manipulate the destiny of human beings. From there, it generalised to convey a sense of the strange, unusual and fantastic.
W artykule zaproponowano ekonarratologiczną analizę i interpretację funkcji opisów i metaleps w Drugiej jesieni – niedocenionej, eksperymentalnej powieści Wiktora Żwikiewicza, która zostaje przybliżona oraz retroaktywnie zakwalifikowana do kanonu polskiego weird fiction. W kontekście badań przeprowadzanych w ramach zwrotu deskryptywnego ustalono, że jeśli według Grahama Harmana inherentnie dziwna rzeczywistość potrzebuje dziwnego realizmu, to musi potrzebować także odpowiednich literackich środków wyrazu, na przykład: nieprototypowych lub dziwnych opisów między innymi iluzyjnych, aluzyjnych, podważających możliwości poznawcze deskryptora, zacierających granicę między podmiotem a środowiskiem. Ponadto określono funkcje metaleps w kontekście ekonarratologii; zwrócono uwagę, że mogą aktywizować czytelnika oraz stanowić ujawniający się w strukturze narracyjnej odpowiednik „lepkości” hiperobiektów.
This chapter seeks to illuminate the topicality of Freud’s concept of the uncanny and its conceptual modifications in contemporary critical discourse as well as in recent literary works. For this reason, essential points of ‘The Uncanny’ (1919) are juxtaposed with related discussions about Freud’s theory from the twenty-first century regarding ‘strangerness’ (Levine 2020), the uncanny and contemporary culture (Masschelein 2011) and sociological hauntology (Gordon, 2008). Based on this, two novels that belong to the rising genre of ‘Brexlit’ (Shaw 2021) will be analysed: M. John Harrison’s The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again (2020) and Niall Griffiths’ Broken Ghost (2019). Both novels depict fragmented experiences of reality, unstable identities or a haunting (national) past, which attest to the social and individual uncertainties in a post-Brexit country and ultimately represent aspects of the contemporary uncanny.
The history of Italian street art appears to be ingrained in interstitial architectures such as empty lots or abandoned and unfinished buildings, ruins in which since the late 1990s a new generation of outsider artists coming from graffiti writing have been developing new unsanctioned forms of muralism, based on science-fictional, fantasy, and horrific representations and imageries. This article aims therefore to revisit the history and aesthetics of Italian graffiti writing and street art through the prism of British philosopher Mark Fisher’s concept of the weird, by questioning the aesthetic, socio-anthropological, and critical interaction between street artworks and ruins: what role have ruins played in the development of graffiti writing and street art in Italy? And how, in return, have graffiti writing and street art transformed the aesthetic experience of ruins?
With its awkward generic shifts, odd repetitions, confusing spatial dislocations, unstable characters and inconclusive supernatural horrors, I here argue, bilingual Danish author Isak Dinesen’s The Angelic Avengers weirds our experience of living in a familiar, predictable and rule-governed universe. In my analysis, I especially foreground Dinesen’s use of West Indian voodoo, which is a prominent weirding device largely overlooked by the novel’s relatively few critics. Dinesen, I argue, wrote her novel amidst a widespread international voodoo and zombie vogue, tapping into popular representations of Caribbean witchcraft in nonfiction, pulp fiction and film. In The Angelic Avengers , I argue, Dinesen appropriates voodoo themes and characters, to conjure the presence of ominous agencies that trouble enlightened reason’s ability to explain and master the world.
Gängige Formen von Diskriminierung sowie die Reproduktion normativer Stereotype sind auch bei künstlicher Intelligenz an der Tagesordnung. Die Beitragenden erläutern Möglichkeiten der Reduktion dieser fehlerhaften Verfahrensweisen und verhandeln die ambivalente Beziehung zwischen Queerness und KI aus einer interdisziplinären Perspektive. Parallel dazu geben sie einem queer-feministischen Wissensverständnis Raum, das sich stets als partikular, vieldeutig und unvollständig versteht. Damit eröffnen sie Möglichkeiten des Umgangs mit KI, die reduktive Kategorisierungen überschreiten können.
Julius Greve traces the conceptual affinities of “the weird” and “the wild” in American literature and culture from transcendentalism to the present. Focusing on the ethics and aesthetics of both concepts Greve discusses multiple theorists, authors, and artists including H. P. Lovecraft, Henry David Thoreau, Jack London, Gary Snyder, Tzvetan Todorov, Thomas Ligotti, Werner Herzog, John Carpenter, Wu Tsang, and Jack Halberstam. Drawing on Lovecraft’s, Snyder’s and Halberstam’s theoretical vocabularies, Greve offers a theory of the “outré-normative” as a highly productive conception according to which one might synthesize the discourses of weirdness and wildness.
From the execution sermons of the Colonial era to television programs like The Wire and The Sopranos, crime writing has played an important role in American culture. Its ability to register fear, desire and anxiety has made it a popular genre with a wide audience. These new essays, written for students as well as readers of crime fiction, demonstrate the very best in contemporary scholarship and challenge long-established notions of the development of the detective novel. Each chapter covers a sub-genre, from ‘true crime’ to hard-boiled novels, illustrating the ways in which ‘popular’ and ‘high’ literary genres influence and shape each other. With a chronology and guide to further reading, the Companion is a helpful guide for students of American literature and readers of crime fiction.
Radical Fantasy in its content depicts subaltern constituencies organizing on the basis of class (rather than what Ernst Laclau and Chantal Mouffe term subject positions) in their militant struggle to overcome epistemological barriers and achieve social change. In its form, Radical Fantasy offers innovative strategies for representing the ever-changing capitalist totality and the emerging presence of posthuman identity. I clarify these elements by theorizing a continuum of historical developments in fantasy over the past century or so, before discussing in detail what is in Radical Fantasy. My argument is premised on the necessity of a historical-materialist methodology in recognizing and interpreting developments in all fantasy: Radical Fantasy signals the definitive emergence of a new historical phase of cultural production which I term late postmodernism.
The so-called New Weird subgenre of speculative fiction is known for its uninhibited commingling of fictional genres, most prominently science fiction, fantasy, horror, and steampunk. Recent novels by two New Weird innovators, K. J. Bishop’s The Etched City (2003) and China Miéville’s Iron Council (2004), also feature clearly recognizable motifs from the genre of the Western: gunfights, outlaws, deserts, railroads, ghost towns, and so on. Transplanted from their actual historical contexts into marvelous settings, these motifs become starker, almost parodic. In that the Western represents a distinctly American milieu, Bishop’s and Miéville’s refiguring of its characteristic elements in politically aware postmodern fiction simultaneously glorifies and censures fundamental aspects of American culture. The displaced generic elements of the Western often extol American ingenuity, individualism, bravery, and optimism even as they tend to disparage capitalism, gratuitous violence, the despoliation of nature, and the devastation of indigenous peoples.
The Etched City and Iron Council utilize the violent scenes, harsh settings, and American roots of the Western genre as provocative inroads into broader issues of identity and social change. My perception of Bishop’s and Miéville’s awareness of genre and global politics informs the readings of their novels that I will offer here. After outlining the implications of depicting Western tropes, especially the genre’s archetypal desert setting, in the twenty-first century, I will assess how the Western fits into the multifaceted genre known as the New Weird. My reading of The Etched City explores the roles that place and gender play in transforming the personal identity of its protagonist, as she strives to resist the violence characteristic of both the Western and New Weird genres. My discussion of Iron Council evaluates the tribulations of collective revolution within a hostile setting via the manipulation of technology (represented by the train), which can serve beneficial or malicious ends. The weirdness of the New Weird, with its invented worlds and supernatural effects, estranges readers from the violence, settings, and personae characteristic of the Western and compels them to interrogate these elements of a genre crucial to the American mythos.
Despite its recognizable imagery and often formulaic conventions, the Western is a deceptively complex genre, partly because its narrative spaces (to use Michel de Certeau’s terminology) are inflected by a nebulous interplay between the places and histories of the real American West and the many myths that have been created about it. Moreover, the long-running popularity of Western fiction has ensured that the fictional narratives themselves also engage in this ongoing reciprocity between reality and myth. Matthew R. Turner describes how the “codes and images” that act as generic markers of the Western—“the lonesome hero, moral justice enforced by violence, the coming of the railroad, the shoot-out, the open prairie, hats, horses, cowboys, and guns” (218)—bear traces of their American roots even when removed from the geographical context of the American West.1 K. J. Bishop and China Miéville are non-American authors—Australian and British, respectively—who in deploying the tropes of this distinctly American genre raise questions about the Western’s relevance in twenty-first-century global discourse.
Perhaps the popular perception of the George W. Bush administration triggered renewed fascination with Western themes. During his presidency, from 2000 to 2008, articles from around the world referred to Bush’s “cowboy diplomacy” and to his characterization as a “cowboy.” Paul Harris, for example, writing for London’s Daily Mail, poked fun at “Dubya’s” cowboy boots and matching diplomacy: “there would probably be a lot of pacing around with Tony Blair before [Bush] could ride triumphantly into the sunset[—]the kind of talks for which a man definitely needs his favourite boots” (13). Bush’s language at times suggested that the title “Cowboy President” suited him well. His often-quoted declarations that Americans would “smoke [Al Qaeda] outta their holes” and that Osama bin Laden was “wanted dead or alive” (qtd. in Keller 256) recalled scenes of sheriffs hunting bandits in a Western. In an address to the Australian parliament, in which he attempted—between interruptions by disgruntled senators—to garner support for his War on Terror, Bush began...
Supernatural Horror in Literature / H. P. Lovecraft Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
The Colour out of Space / H.P. Lovecraft Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
At the Mountains of Madness / H.P. Lovecraft Note: The University of Adelaide Library eBooks @ Adelaide.
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