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 the literary genre most associated with irrationality. It is often construed around the emotional and physical responses it seeks to produce in its audience, from anxious fright to hair-raising chills, especially in the cinema, where aesthetic success is measured by the volume of spectator screams. The appeal of horror fiction and film lies in the ambivalent thrills associated with fear, suspense, and terror, no matter how significant its subtextual messages might be. Even when its practitioners mine the fields of philosophy, psychology, theology, and metaphysics in the deepest of intellectual ways, horror resists mastery by the intellect, privileges the emotional/physical response, and remains the primary venue for the literary expression of dread, anxiety, caution, shock, uncertainty, and the uncanny.
One might wonder, then, what business horror fiction has in the college classroom. If the point of horror is to scare readers, what lessons can it possibly teach them? When does fear and shock serve a pedagogical function? Is it ethical to horrify students in the hopes of teaching them something?
I delve into transformative learning theory to posit some answers to those questions. Go read “The Unlearning: Horror and Transformative Theory” if interested… college teachers might also find my weblog on pedagogy of interest.
