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?