English Language Notes Edited Collection: “Trauma and Horror”

Abstract

315 NOTES AND CORRESPONDENCE WORKS CITED Davis, Heather. “Toxic Progeny: The Plastisphere and Other Queer Futures,” philoSOPHIA 5.2 (2015): 231-50. del Ray, Lester. “Helen O’Loy.” 1938. Science Fiction Hall of Fame: Vol. 1 (192964 ). Ed. Robert Silverberg. New York: Orb: 42-52. Padgett, Lewis. “The Proud Robot.” 1943. Robots Have No Tails. New York: Gnome, 1952. 7-52. English Language Notes Edited Collection: “Trauma and Horror.” Later nineteenth-century psychology appropriated the medical term trauma, used to denote a wound derived from the violent piercing of the skin, to describe a violent breaching of subjectivity. The event instantiating psychic trauma is so devastating that the ego’s defenses are broken down, and the subject is powerless to resist the overwhelming impressions that flood its barriers, or to manage the swell of affective distress that results. The abreaction (working-through) of trauma should be furthered by the most painstakingly accurate representation of its inception and effects. Yet contemporary trauma theorists have described the difficulty, perhaps impossibility, of a “true” representation of traumatic events, given that the very experience of trauma involves the derangement or shattering of the subjective apparatus designed to process it. Traumatic events can only be understood belatedly and imperfectly; they give rise to repetitive dreams and uncontrollable flashbacks and generate narratives characterized by disjunction and distortion, including the interpolation of fantasy elements. The most faithful accounts of traumatic events, perversely, can only be rendered by means of narrative breaks and refusals, hyperbole, and other modes of distortion, as well as displacement at one or more removes. The horror genre can be said to generate just such perversely accurate representations of trauma. The genre specializes in hyperbolic scenarios of human subjects in the throes of excruciating physical and psychic pain, and develops these scenarios by means of hallucinatory narrative sequences. Moreover, the genre offers up trauma as a spectacle to be consumed and even enjoyed. This special issue of English Language Notes invites essays that explore the horror genre’s strategies for representing personal and historical trauma, its ability (or failure, or refusal) to abreact trauma, and its paradoxical appeal as a popular genre devoted to the unpleasure of shock, violence, and psychic disorientation. Other topics might include eco-horror and the postapocalypse from Mary Shelley to the Strugatsky brothers to Jeff VanderMeer; horror’s eliciting of “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2001), as opposed to aversion, disgust, or other forms of denial; or critique of horror as an exploitative or “pornographic” genre, particularly in its representations of war, genocide, and other large-scale atrocities. Horror may overlap or intersect with other fantastic genres such as Gothic, Science Fiction, Kaidan, the Weird, and so forth. We welcome discussions of literature, film, television, graphic novels, visual arts, music, and other cultural forms, as well as essays that discuss 316 SCIENCE FICTION STUDIES, VOLUME 47 (2020) national and/or regional horror traditions as well as individual texts. Essays are due by September 1, 2020. They can be of varying lengths, including position papers and longer research articles. Use Chicago-style formatting and submit double-spaced, 12-point font, .docx files to the special-issue editor, Kelly Hurley . Please omit identifying information from all pages except the cover page, as we use a blind-review format. Send all inquiries to Kelly Hurley.—Kelly Hurley, University of Colorado at Boulder Technoculture: Call for Contributions. An online journal of technology in society, Technoculture invites submissions for its tenth-year anniversary issue. We seek critical essays and creative works from a range of academic disciplines that focus on cultural studies of technology—particularly the future of the study of technology and culture. We are interested in ideas that push beyond contemporary American culture and its fascination with computers. For the critical articles in this upcoming issue, we are especially interested in such questions as these: What is the future of the study of technology and culture? How can scholars of technoculture approach the past and/or the future of technology and technological advances? What new methodologies might be useful and how might scholars’ findings best be disseminated? What should critical and creative scholars recover and/or leave behind? How can authors push the boundaries...