My essay on the teaching of horror fiction — “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” — just went live in the debut issue of the journal, Transformative Works and Cultures. Here’s the opening passage: I. Introduction: Fear is Never Itself The horror genre has many reasonable lessons to teach us, even though it is perhaps… Continue reading The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory
Author: Michael Arnzen
Michael Arnzen holds four Bram Stoker Awards and an International Horror Guild Award for his disturbing (and often funny) fiction, poetry and literary experiments. He has been teaching as a Professor of English in the MFA program in Writing Popular Fiction at Seton Hill University since 1999.
Irony and The Return of the Repressed
“The unconscious is very serious today — even a little bit sad — because we repress serious things into it: sex, death, libido, desire. But if it were irony and off-handedness which were repressed, what form would the new unconscious take then? It would become ironic; we would have ironic, breezy drives and fantasies, which… Continue reading Irony and The Return of the Repressed
The Uncanny Hands of Horror Fiction
I’ve just posted an annotated list of “Classic Dismembered Hand Stories” on my creative writing weblog, The Goreletter. (This “hands” list was originally scheduled to appear in The Book of Lists: Horror, but was cut for space — but I do have another article in that book on “Top Horror Colleges”!). Stories about dismembered… Continue reading The Uncanny Hands of Horror Fiction
Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
If you watch the latest Doublemint gum TV commercial — featuring Chris Brown dancing in the dark with the product’s new “slim” package — you might be wondering: gee, that song and dance is nice but what happened to the infamously kitschy jingle and the wholesome set of twins? The ad itself is a twin: … Continue reading Pop Song as Product Placement: Doublemint “Forever”
Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
The TV Tropes Wiki is a useful community-built resource of common plot elements on television shows, which illustrates the high degree of scholarship and close reading that fan culture is capable of producing. It reads like a folklorist’s taxonomy. The majority of the site’s “tropes” — which they define as “devices and conventions that a… Continue reading Weirdness Isolation and Sunnydale Syndrome
Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod
Although the iPod shuffle is now an mp3 player that is the size of a postage stamp, the advertising campaign for the device — back in 2006 when it was the size of a stick of gum — asked consumers to “Enjoy Uncertainty.” I can think of no better mascot for the popular uncanny. Typically, uncertainty… Continue reading Enjoy Uncertainty: Randomization and the Uncanny iPod