messages listlengths 2 2 |
|---|
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Weird Tales and Scientific Borderlands at the Fin de Siècle Near the end of Terry Pratchett’s Sourcery (1988), Rincewind the wizard finds himself in the Dungeon Dimensions, a dark realm of “skewed images” and “weird curvature.” He observes a number of Things clustered aro... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Firstly, weird fiction has its own place in how we understand the relations between literature and science in this period. Fin-de-siècle weird fiction, I argue, was often doing remarkably bold work by plunging into some of the same ontological and epistemological quagmire... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Perhaps it didn’t help that Lovecraft (for good reasons) titled an influential survey essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature” rather than, say, “Weird Lit-erature.” It probably also didn’t help that Darko Suvin’s strategy in the 1970s for elevating science fiction as a ... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Machin makes the important point that few, if any, definitions of the weird are other than variations on this quotation, which articulates the weird vividly without tying it down. Neverthe-less, for my argument about weird fiction’s relationship with science, it is worth ... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Weird tales can also be motivated by an urge to convey “the vague, elusive, fragmentary impressions of wonder, beauty, and adventurous expectancy.” Implicit in the weird aesthetic is the potential for the phenomena breaching natural law to generate admiration and wonder, ... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: It has been suggested that weird fiction of the early twentieth century represents a parallel to high modernism: a “pulp modernism,” responding to the same cultural crises as high modernism, “shadows the modernist avant-garde and replicates its autocritique of mo dernity ... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: A hierarchy was established that has never really been overturned, in which rational scientific principles could be used to explain the world mechanically and bend “nature” to the service and dictates of humankind. For example, Enlightenment efforts to classify and unders... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Elana Gomel considers spiritualism as doomed to failure because of its attachment to conventional science, fatally underscored by “a schism within its own defining concepts in the oxymoronic view of materiality, expressed in the movement’s defining trope of ‘natural super... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: For “despite its reputa-tion, ‘materialistic’ is precisely what 19th-century physics was not. Instead of taking matter to be the fundamental stuff that the world is made of, physicists were driven by an attempt to find out what matter itself U eally was. ” Nevertheless, t... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: The novella demonstrates, not least, what was al U eady weird about late nineteenth-century science (in this case, psychology and psychical research) through its representation of Hyde as a character and in the construction of the narrative itself as unstable, eluding sec... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: In The Island of Docıo U Mo U eau , “The Derelict” (1907), and “The Voice in the Night” (1912), monstrous creatures are presented as real theoretical, if extreme, possibilities. Moreau’s Beast People and Hodgson’s mould and fungus creatures belong to terrestrial environme... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Weird Selves, Weird Worlds: Psychology, Ontology, and States of Mind in Robert Louis Stevenson and Arthur Machen Robert Louis Stevenson’s Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and Arthur Machen’s 1890s fiction did much to establish the terms of the weird tale in th... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: In place of that coherent self is a conception of human consciousness that sits much closer to that of the weird, open to the possibility of multiplicity and contradiction, resisting stable and absolutely determined answers. Jekyll and Hyde is widely recognised as a text ... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Gish relates Hyde to “a theory of a ‘normal’ multiplicity of the self that, in this case, takes the form of a good/evil split.” But this binary is normative rather than descriptive, part of Jekyll’s untrustworthy efforts to impose what Jerrold Hogle calls a “grid of intel... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Ontologically and narratologically, Jekyll and Hyde is an unstable, ungraspable, irreducible text, never fully knowable, resisting the fixing of meaning and existing on the brink of the weird. Through its multiplicity, the novella’s rich and varied contributions to litera... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Even more seriously, accepting a modern, materialist standpoint on knowledge is dangerous — it could make the difference between achieving an ecstatic spiritual experience or a dreadful one. Critics have noted ways in which practices of reading and writing were central to... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: They are unwelcome prehistoric irruptions, but their possession and creation of artefacts and their capacity to use symbolic language “signals their participation in the cultural stage of civilization, placing them in the domain of history proper.” The arts, not the capac... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: He proposes a physical, neurological basis for the activities of the mind and spirit, resembling the suggestions put forward by the SPR of receptive nerves accounting for telepathy. Raymond applies, in short, materialist, positivist approaches to an occult experiment in “... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Matheson appeals to the reliability of his senses and the supremacy of his mind; though briefly thrown in astonishment, he soon gets his body under control and calmly observes what is happening. His report is thus to be received as an empirical account conveyed by his “re... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Machen himself seems later to have considered the effects of The Great God Pan as something of a mistake, reflecting on “my real failure; I translated awe, at worst awfulness, into evil; again, I say, one dreams in fire and works in clay.” Hence, perhaps, the ambiguous af... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Weird Knowledge: Experiments, Senses, and Epistemology in Stevenson, Machen, and Edith Nesbit Weird tales are sites of experiment, narrative laboratories in which alternative systems of knowledge and knowing can be imaginatively tested. The analogy — of narrative as labor... |
[
{
"role": "user",
"content": "TEXT: Huxley’s agenda, ultimately, is to make clear that not only does knowledge not come from body or mind alone, it does not come from God either; he dwells on the physical structure of nose, eye, and ear to emphasise their biological explicability. The stories of the weird t... |
End of preview. Expand in Data Studio
No dataset card yet
- Downloads last month
- 15