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. Thus trauma came to refer to
the violation of psychic boundaries (often conjoined with a physical violation
as in the case of railway and industrial accidents), the event that caused the
breach, and the long-term aftereffects of the breach. The event instantiating
psychic trauma is so shocking, 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 or working-through of trauma should be furthered by the
most painstakingly accurate representation of its inception and effects.
However, 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. Thus 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, and displacement at one or more removes.
One genre that can be said to generate such perversely accurate
representations of trauma is Horror. Horror specializes in hyperbolic scenarios
of human subjects in the throes of excruciating physical and psychic pain, and
develops these scenarios by means of phantasmatic images and hallucinatory
narrative sequences. As a further complication, Horror invites its reader or
spectator into a pleasurable relationship with trauma, offering up trauma as a
compelling spectacle to be consumed and even enjoyed. This special issue
invites essays that explore Horror’s strategies for representing personal and
historical trauma, Horror’s ability (or failure, or refusal) to abreact trauma,
and the paradoxical appeal of a popular genre devoted to the unpleasure of
shock, violence, and psychic disorientation.
Other topics might include:
- Horror consumption as a form of traumatophilia, whereby the subject wilfully seeks out traumatic encounters that threaten to swamp or pulverize the boundaries of the psyche.
- Ecohorror and the post-apocalypse, from Mary Shelley to the Strugatsky brothers to Jeff VanderMeer.
- Horror as a genre that elicits “empathic unsettlement” (LaCapra 2001), as opposed to aversion, disgust, or other forms of denial, in its consumer.
- Critiques of Horror as an exploitative or “pornographic” genre, particularly in its representations of war, genocide, and other large-scale atrocities.
This CFP understands Horror as a capacious genre that may overlap or
intersect with other fantastic genres such as Gothic, Science Fiction, Kaidan,
the Weird, and so forth. It welcomes discussions of literature, film,
television, graphic novels, visual arts, music, and other cultural forms, and
essays that discuss national and/or regional traditions of Horror as well as
individual texts. It also solicits essays that discuss the phenomenon of
violent de-subjectification during earlier periods, and propose discursive
antecedents (clinical, sociomedical, philosophical, religious) to the
later-modern trauma paradigm.
Essays are due by September 1, 2020. They can be of varying lengths,
including position papers and longer research articles. Please use
Chicago-style formatting, and submit double-spaced, 12-point font, .docx files
to the special issue editor, Kelly Hurley, kelly.hurley@colorado.edu. Please
omit identifying information from all pages except the cover page, as we use a
blind review format. Send all inquiries to Kelly Hurley.
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