The Weird Beyond Weird Fiction: Weirding as Critical Heuristic
Description
This seminar seeks to explore the expanding definition of the Weird and the critical act of "Weirding" texts beyond the traditional confines of cosmic horror. The Weird emerged in its currently recognizable form during the "Haute Weird" period (roughly 1880-1940), coalescing around seminal pulp publications like Weird Tales and defined by major writers such as H.P. Lovecraft, Arthur Machen, and Algernon Blackwood. Contemporary popular and academic discourse has, however, increasingly extended this category to include older canonical texts, re-examining them through a Weird lens.
This trend is evidenced by the inclusion of authors like Franz Kafka and Ryūnosuke Akutagawa in Ann and Jeff Vandermeer’s Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories, as well as China Mieville’s designation of books such as Moby Dick and Jane Eyre as Weird fiction favorites. Similarly, scholars like Kate Marshall (Novels by Aliens) and Roger Luckhurst (The Cambridge History of the English Short Story) have "Weirded" texts as disparate as Stephen Crane’s “The Open Boat” and the works of Rudyard Kipling and Rachel Kushner. This seminar will build on these contemporary critical movements by questioning what previously unnoticed qualities and traits are brought to light when texts are “Weirded” in this manner.
A common critical approach to Weird fiction, noted by Benjamin Noys and Timothy S. Murphy in their introduction to the "Old and New Weird" issue of Genre, is to view it as a literature of "ungainly linguistic excess." This perspective is often rooted in the idea that because Weird fiction is concerned with what lies beyond human reason, language is necessarily inadequate to describe it. This fixation on excess and inadequacy has led to an emphasis on horror and cosmic terror as the primary characteristics of the genre.
This seminar, however, invites a reconsideration of the Weird as a broader phenomenon. It will welcome work that addresses Weirdness everywhere—in and outside cosmic horror, in poetics, in high modernism, and beyond. I am interested in papers that explore how the Weird can function as an heuristic, a mode of reading that unearths the “abcanny” and cosmically unsettling in unexpected places and across different genres and forms.
The seminar welcomes proposals that investigate, but are not limited to, the following questions:
- How does the act of "Weirding" a text change our understanding of its form, content, and historical context?
- How can we define the Weird beyond its common association with horror and linguistic excess?
- What is the relationship between the Weird and other literary modes, such as the surreal, the eerie, the uncanny, and the grotesque?
- How does the Weird manifest in different national or historical contexts?
Schedule
Papers
Speaker Bio
Martijn J. Loos is a PhD candidate at New York University's Department of Comparative Literature. His scholarly interests involve the intersections of speculative fiction and philosophy; more specifically science fiction and the Weird, and continental and political philosophy. His somewhat less scholarly interests include Belgian beers and anything involving laser guns.
Speaker Bio
Grant Dempsey is an instructor at King's University College in London, Ontario, Canada and a doctoral candidate at the University of Western Ontario’s Centre for the Study of Theory and Criticism. His work has received multiple awards, including the International Association for the Fantastic in the Arts’ David G. Hartwell Emerging Scholar Award. His recent article "The Pluriverse, Beyond the Concept of Practice" can be found in the journal PUBLIC.
Speaker Bio
Johnny Murray is a PhD candidate in English literature at Boston College. He has published chapters in the edited collections The American Weird: Concept and Medium (2021) and Horror Literature from Gothic to Post-Modern: Critical Essays (2020), and has presented papers at international conferences in Göttingen, Germany, Manchester, England, Dublin, Ireland, and Halifax, Canada. In addition to his scholarly work, Johnny is the author of a seven-volume illustrated novel, Ripponlea (2021–24).
Papers
Speaker Bio
Robert Baskin is a PhD candidate at Boston College. His research focuses on late 19th-century and early 20th-century Weird fiction and transatlantic literary modernism. His forthcoming dissertation will discuss the decadent and symbolist origins of both modernism and the Weird, and think of both as literary responses to epistemological crisis. He received a B.A. in English from Oberlin College.
Speaker Bio
Santiago Peña Bossano is a PhD candidate at the Universidad Complutense de Madrid and recipient of Ecuador’s National Essay Prize (2015). Editor-in-chief at Cactus Pink, he also coordinates creative-writing workshops at Kafka Escritores. His research explores weirding, oneiric/uncanny narrative, short-form science fiction, and Latin American/Spanish audiovisual cultures. Author of Estética de la indolencia (2015) and Mindotown (2017). ORCID: 0009-0001-2456-6952
Speaker Bio
Ben Radcliffe is a senior lecturer in Classics and Archaeology at Loyola Marymount University. He writes about Greek epic and tragedy, critical theory, and classical receptions. He is currently working on a book project about labor, surplus value, and the political economy of genre in archaic Greek epic.
Papers
Speaker Bio
Abigail Mills is a PhD student at Loughborough University in the UK. Her thesis, provisionally titled, ‘The Dark Side of Water: The increasing weirdness of water in speculative fiction from 1880 to the contemporary’ explores how water, at once utterly familiar and yet profoundly unknowable, has developed from serving as a backdrop for weirdness, to becoming a weird element in its own right.
Speaker Bio
Sönke Parpart is a PhD candidate in German Studies at Brown University. His dissertation project puts German literary narratives from the Goethezeit to the early twentieth century into dialogue with psychoanalytic theory and the anglophone tradition of weird fiction to highlight the ‘weirdness’ of fiction itself and investigate its epistemological and libidinal stakes. His work was most recently published in the Journal of European Periodical Studies (JEPS).
Speaker Bio
Robert Landau Ames received his Ph.D. from Harvard’s Department of Near Eastern Languages and Civilizations in 2018. He is a tech worker and independent scholar and has taught at Harvard, NYU, and St. Francis College. His interests range from Islamic intellectual history to continental philosophy. He published his first book, The Many Faces of Iranian Modernity, in 2021 and has published in journals and edited volumes including Comparative Islamic Studies and Lovecraftian Proceedings.