* Is there any word better than "revel"? His definition is just fantastic and has given me an idea for something I want to write. If I actually follow through, it would possibly be my first horror piece.
* Clute's thoughts on the origin of horror were fascinating, I suppose because I haven't thought about it before. Horror as a rejection of, I guess, superior Enlightenment-ideas is an interesting perspective to take. However, I'm having difficulty accepting that this is entirely the place from which horror was born. Perhaps I'm broadening the category and we mean--or Clute means--to be only discussing a smaller group of stories, but I would argue that stories about ghosts, demons, witches, unexplained things, and what-have-you have been around for a long time, with older civilizations, before "Enlightened Europeans" mattered. --Am I totally missing the point? I feel like it's unfair for me to want to contradict him, but I would want to suppose that other tales that even fit his model of horror have existed before this period to which he attributes horror as being a response to. The issue is that I really have no idea; further, I am probably wanting to count oral tradition and folktales, which were not often written down. --And now that I've gotten this far, I would suppose that Clute is saying horror isn't JUST ghosts, demons, etc. as I mentioned above but ALSO or maybe INSTEAD this model of a plot. (Anybody following me? Any thoughts?)
* ON THAT NOTE, I was surprised by this article when I read that Clute had mentioned It's A Wonderful Life. I've read here on the blog that some of my classmates have expressed similar surprise and/or doubts at the example. I will say that as I read through the four-step process I immediately thought of "Young Goodman Brown," which we are reading for this week (and which I had read in the past and, as a thirteen-year-old, remembered as "the dumbest story ever"). Oddly enough, I want to give Clute the benefit of the doubt. Classifying literature, stories, etc. is difficult if even possible, and Clute's model doesn't claim that things like Texas Chainsaw Massacre are not horror but, rather, that "horror" is a much broader term which we have come to narrow through repeated use. What comes to mind is the idea of gothic novels--the modern idea of what the word "gothic" means (from our pop culture, i.e.) is different from what it means in a more literary and historic context. Therefore, in a weird way, I'm willing to accept what Clute has to say about horror because I'm pretty impressed. --However, I do think that when one hypothesizes a certain "model" for a story or type of story, it's extremely easy to find ways for many diverse stories to fit into it. [I once did a project on Beauty and the Beast stories. Going off what I guess I would call a folklore model, i.e. a definitive list of the parts that make a story a Beauty and the Beast-type story, I included in my project Inuyasha--a modern Japanese manga. It may have been a stretch, in that the plot is much more than the Beauty and the Beast model, but I was able to argue it successfully.] --Regardless, I am willing to listen to Mr. Clute. For the purposes of this course, however, the "It's A Wonderful Life-as-horror" model may be irrelevant.
* ALSO, (sorry, y'all), while I can go on his shorter definition of horror in comparison to science fiction and fantasy, I would want to investigate science fiction and fantasy more thoroughly before, I guess, believing him. I guess it's the definition for science fiction that bugs me the most. --Those of y'all that know more about science fiction than me: what do you think?
Maybe it's the fact that I've had several Blogger blogs before--but there's just something about a post editor like this that makes me want to write forever. Begging your pardon,
Meg
3 comments:
Well, it may depend on the work of science fiction. But for me, one episode of Stargate SG1 comes to mind (probly because its the most recent sci-fi I've seen since I started watching it this month). It is an episode where an archaeology team finds a previously undiscovered sarcophagus in some mayan pyramids.
The sighting I would call is when these archaeologists see that the sarcophagus is covered in Egyptian symbols long before the Egyptian language ever made it to the Americas. The sarcophagus then opens and a live being is found to be inside despite the sarcophagus being over 2000 years old.
The Thickening I would describe as the time where this woman from the sarcophagus is given to the SG team and they take her as just being a crazy woman. She then begins to bewitch the men with her "magic" which is actually a hormonal chemical she blows out of her mouth. And you start to see all the men becoming enticed and bewitched.
The Revel is where she reveals she is a Ghould queen and that she is planning to turn the Mountain (the place where the stargate is) into a Hive and making all the men in Jaffa (humans that carry Ghould until they reach maturity). The few women on the base (since women are not affected by her enticement) are locked away but break out and seek to save the men, the base, and the world. I would say this is the evil unveiling herself as her true form and not just some crazy woman and that her goal is total destruction and infestation.
The Aftermath is after the women save the men, they have no memory of what happened and they have to it explained to them and thank their rescuers.
So, in this case, Aclute's model works quite well as I understand it anyway.
I think this would actually make a fantastic paper topic. Applying Aclute's model of horror to a horror story and then comparing/contrasting it in an application to a fantasy or sci-fi story.
*jots it down for later discussion*
Clute's argument about the horror tropes of folklore, I think, would be that those stories were told in atmospheres of belief. A 16th-century legend about witchcraft, for example, would be told by a believer in witchcraft to a believer in witchcraft.
In the modern publishing era that Clute is talking about, however -- basically the same period covered by the Straub anthologies, from the 19th century onward -- these tropes are presented as unreal. The readers of Bram Stoker's Dracula, for example, neither believed in vampires nor assumed that Stoker himself believed in them. The vampire trope had become just that, a trope, something around which you build an entertaining story and, in the process, just maybe convey some meaning. What that meaning might be, in the modern era, is I think what Clute is at pains to explain.
And Meg, I don't mind long posts at all, as you can see.
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