Abstract
Building on accounts offered by Judith Ryan and Nicholas Dames, Enright explores the ways in which Paul Tremblay’s novel, A Head Full of Ghosts, helps situate the horror genre within conversations about literature “after” literary theory. This chapter demonstrates that Tremblay comes alongside a number of other authors included in what Dames terms the “theory generation,” authors who make theory part of the content of their novels and thus comment on the still-evolving relationship between literature and literary studies. Enright shows that Tremblay uniquely implicates horror fiction as part of this conversation, drawing renewed attention to the historical relationship between the horror genre and postmodernism.
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Notes
- 1.
See, for instance, Horror Writers Association President Lisa Morton’s recent post, “HWA in the 21st Century” (2017). While Morton reflects on the impact of the internet on horror writers and publishing, others have credited the technology with almost single-handedly reviving the genre: see “Horror Authors Take a Stab at Self-Publishing” (Spector 2016).
- 2.
Examples include Jeffrey Nealon’s Post-Postmodernism: Or, the Cultural Logic of Just-in-Time Capitalism (2012), which tracks shifts in the “overcoding” of literary and cultural production(s) following the “long 1980s,” as well as Kimberly Jackson’s Technology, Monstrosity, and Reproduction in 21st Century Horror (2013) and Shira Chess and Eric Newsom’s Folklore, Horror Stories, and the Slender Man (2015), which examine the role of internet technology and reproducibility in creating new kinds of horror fiction.
- 3.
See, for instance, Josh Toth’s article in Critique entitled “Healing Postmodern America: Plasticity and Renewal in Danielewski’s House of Leaves” (2013), which reads the novel alongside Catherine Malabou’s resuscitation of Hegelian “plasticity” as a model for the world and experience, in response to Derridian deconstruction.
- 4.
Such references are especially prevalent in Chap. 23. In what could well be a nod toward Deleuzean accounts of socially induced “schizophrenia” in the late twentieth century, Karen frantically draws “lines of flight” between The Possession and Law & Order (p. 236), Jean-Paul Sartre’s No Exit (p. 237), Gothic ur-texts such as The Castle of Otranto and Wuthering Heights (p. 238), contemporary novels including The Shining and House of Leaves (p. 238), Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper” (p. 239), Scooby Doo (p. 242), The Exorcist (p. 245), Evil Dead 2 (p. 246), Akira Kurosawa’s film Rashomon (p. 250), and The Sopranos (p. 252).
- 5.
Merry’s insistence that there is no “ground zero” or historical “before” the events of the novel reflect ideas put forth in Baudrillard’s Simulacra and Simulation (1981), while her anxiety over the interpolation of her memory with audio-visual culture is reminiscent of Jameson’s essay, “The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism” (see Jameson 2000, pp. 201–208).
- 6.
Hutcheon clarifies: “Postmodernism’s distinctive character lies in this kind of wholesale ‘nudging’ commitment to doubleness, or duplicity … It must be admitted from the start that this is a strange kind of critique, one bound up, too, with its own complicity with power and domination, one that acknowledges that it cannot escape implication in that which it nevertheless still wants to analyze and maybe even undermine” (Hutcheon 1989, p. 1).
- 7.
While Karen offhandedly compares The Possession to the Akira Kurosawa film Rashomon (1950) in Chap. 23, the “Rashomon effect” in fact becomes paradigmatic for the whole novel, as “differences [in accounts] arise in combination with the absence of evidence to elevate or disqualify any version of the truth, plus the social pressure for closure on the question” (Anderson 2016, p. 258).
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Enright, L. (2018). Horror “After Theory”. In: Corstorphine, K., Kremmel, L. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook to Horror Literature. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-97406-4_38
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