Journal articles on the topic 'Fantastico e Horror'

Abstract This essay analyzes how George A. Romero, in his underrated psychological vampire film Martin, translates individual trauma (slow, process-based, unrecognized) into collective trauma (sudden, event-based, recognized) through a vocabulary of horror. The language of trauma spoken by Martin is not the one we expect from the horror film, with its traditional investments in fantastic spectacle. Instead, it is a language that combines horror’s fantastic vocabulary and documentary’s realist vocabulary in ways that undermine our attempts to distinguish between the two modes. Romero’s vision urges us to see catastrophe where we are accustomed to seeing only the mundane, and collective trauma where we routinely see only individual trauma. In Martin’s version of horror, the economic decline of Braddock, Pennsylvania, is paired with trauma connected to the Vietnam War and immigration. The film moves between these coordinates to revisualize the distinctions that divide the fantastic from the real as well as the individual from the collective.

This research paper explores how and why the existing tradition of supernatural stories about ghosts and other fantastical creatures, which located terror as an external factor in these unnatural and malignant beings, was transformed in the early to mid-Nineteenth Century into tales that are instead focused on fear in terms of the internal psychology of the narrator and the protagonist. It investigates two well-known examples of psychological horror, E.TA. Hoffmann’s “The Sandman” (1816) and Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843). The research paper deploys a contextual historical approach examining the impact of Romanticism as a philosophy focusing on the individual’s mental state and extreme psychological situations, as well as developing scientific ideas about psychology in the period. In my argument it is “madness” (which could affect anyone in society) that became the new fear that haunted and fascinated society, replacing the explicitly external supernatural. I also use Tzvetan Todorov’s structuralist theory and model of “the fantastic” and suggest it is possible for a psychological tale to be fantastic in a different way than he envisages, insofar as madness is itself an experience where the victim is never sure if what they experience is real or unreal.

With a view to discussing an important three-faceted example of marginality in literature whereby terror, the literary Fantastic and the fin de siècle period are understood as interconnected marginalia, this paper examines works such as Guy de Maupassant’s “Le Horla” and H. Rider Haggard’s She from an alternative critical perspective to that dominating current literary discourse. It demonstrates that in spite of the dominant associations of fantastic literature with horror, terror, as the marginal and marginalized fear of the unknown, with its uncanny, sublime and suspenseful qualities, holds a definitive presence in fin de siècle fantastic texts. Literary analysis of the chosen texts registers significant examples of the importance of terror to fantastic writing, and as such functions to extract an “aesthetics of sublime terror” from the margins of critical studies of this often macabre literary mode.

A new collection at East Carolina University’s Joyner Library: The James H. and Virginia Schlobin Literature of the Fantastic Collection includes fantasy, science fiction, horror, and the weird which builds, perhaps, on the uncertainty and anxiety created by the “marvelous” and the “uncanny” aspects of fantasy identified by Tzvetan Todorov (1975).

In Poland, research-related fanzines rarely include writings edited by Polish fans of science fiction, horror and fantasy. Active fans edited amateur magazines which were very important because they popularized fantastic literature and culture in Poland. The role of fantastic fanzines was not limited solely to the promotion of amateur creativity or publishing translations of foreign fiction not available on the market, but also consisted in the creation of creative bonds between writers and readers. The remnants of the activities of Polish fantastic fiction fans are about one hundred titles including “Quasar”, “Red Dwarf” and “Other Planets”. These three fanzines as effects of pure amateur work are also very similar to the professional magazines. Each of them has a different poetics and thematic dominant. They have also published stories written by famous Polish writers such as Ewa Białołęcka and Andrzej Sapkowski.

This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy.

In the spring of 1818, a novel was published in England, which became the starting point of a new literary genre. The name of the discovered type of literature is sci-fi horror. The creator of sci-fi horror – Mary Shelley – was at that time only 21 years old. Even the title of the novel became today the common noun is “Frankenstein, or Modern Prometheus”. “Archetype of horror”– this is how literary critics say about this work. The article attempts to prove and show that the entire plot of the novel is based on discoveries made at that time in the science of electrical phenomena. The article also tells about experiments with electricity, conducted by scientists in the 18th – early 19th centuries, and their perception by contemporaries. Thewhole structure, narrative of the novel, its rhetoric and even expressive artistic means are all works on the idea of bringing the natural-scientific basis under the absolutely seemingly fantastic plan. But, moreover, the novel can be viewed as a work of genius, foreseeing the emergence of what will be called molecular biology and genetic engineering.

El teatro, muy a menudo excluido en los estudios sobre géneros comúnmente llamados no miméticos (el terror, lo fantástico, la ciencia ficción), puede, sin embargo, aportar mecanismos que caen más allá del alcance de otros medios como el cine o la narrativa. En concreto, el terror puede beneficiarse de la ruptura de la cuarta pared y la integración del público en el ámbito escénico. El artículo rastrea, en la teoría y en la práctica, los grados de tal asimilación y las posibilidades que se siguen para la recreación del terror en las tablas. Theatre, very often excluded in studies on genres usually called non-mimetic (horror, the fantastic, science fiction), can, however, afford mechanisms that fall beyond the reach of other media such as film or narrative fiction. Specifically, horror can benefit from the breaking of the fourth wall and the integration of the audience into the scenic area. This article traces, both in theory and in practice, the degrees of this assimilation to the show and the possibilities that follow for the recreation of horror on the stage.

The trend of horror genre has spread towards Indonesian literature, marked by the emergence of light noves for teenagers aged 13-18 under the label of Fantasteen, an imprint of DAR! Mizan starting in 2011, a division of PT Mizan Pustaka, one of the biggest publishing companies in Indonesia. Among various printed Fantasteen light novels, the Ghost Dormitory series became the most prominent work as each story is set in one foreign city such as Tanzania, Den Haag, etc. The study reveals the interconnecting phenomenon between literary works and commercial ways through the perspective of Pierre Bourdieu’s the field of cultural production and Tzvetan Todorov’s Fantastic theory. Using a qualitative method, this article proves that DAR! Mizan has successfully achieved popular legitimation owing to the rising horror-themed light novels which are presented through Fantasteen brand, written by teenagers and also targeted for young readers. With the rise of the special series Ghost Dormitory among other Fantasteen works, the result of the study shows that as one of the major publishers, DAR! Mizan has successfully conducted a strategy to influnce the face of the Indonesian teenage literary world which is presenting a horror genre as its main theme.

Razmatra se motiv poklapanja prostorne i/ili vremenske izmeštenosti sa takvom izmeštenošću u mentalnom i/ili stvarnosnom smislu u tzv. žanr književnosti koja je označena odrednicom "naučna fantastika, fantastika i horor". Cilj je da se ukaže na mogući pravac antropološkog proučavanja date komunikacijske forme, na osnovu toga koje uslove i predmet proučavanja, ali i samo proučavanje, treba da zavrede da bismo mogli da ih označimo kao antropološke.

Abstract The roundtable gathers specialists dedicated to thinking through the Afro-Gothic as a conceptual approach to black aesthetics and as a theoretical framework. In the spirit of camaraderie and intellectual curiosity, contributors consider meanings of the Afro-Gothic from various disciplines and diasporic perspectives. The participants discuss the ways in which horror, haunting, the uncanny, the monstrous, and the fantastic are manifest in black aesthetics and, in doing so, they conceptualize Afro-Gothic, indicate how its tenets manifest in each of their work, and indicate directions for future study.

Mind is influenced by socio-cultural religious belief systems, experiences and attributions in the development of psychophenomenology. Film viewing is a common entertainment among young adults.ObjectivesInfluence of repetitive watching of films of fiction and horror genres on onset phenomenology in young adults.MethodTwo case reports on onset of psychotic features and mixed anxiety depressive phenomenology were seen in two patients aged 16 and 20 years respectively and based on the fantastic imagination created by films. The 28-year-old female patient diagnosed with schizoaffective disorder had onset at 16 years of age and the course of phenomenology was influenced by the fiction movie ‘Jumanji’ with partial response to medications over 10 years. The depressive and anxiety symptoms of less than 6 months duration of a 20-year-old male patient was influenced by film ‘Hannibal’ and responded to antidepressant and cognitive behavior therapy.ConclusionsHorror and fiction films can influence the thinking patterns and attribution styles of a young adult by stimulating fantasy thinking which if unrestrained can lead to phenomenology. Viewing films compulsively, obsessive ruminations on horror and fictional themes can lead to onset of psychopathology of both psychosis and neurotic spectrum. Further research on neurobiological, psychological correlates is needed. Parental guidance and restricted viewing of horror genre films with avoidance of repeated stimulatory viewing of same genre movies in children, adolescents, young adults and vulnerable individuals is required.Disclosure of interestThe authors have not supplied their declaration of competing interest.

The article is dedicated to the analysis of the genres' eclecticism in the novel by Viktoria Hranetska "The body©". The purpose of an article is to find out the specifics of the genre on the base of the novel, the studying of the plot and compositional elements according to the postmodern discourse, the finding out the correlation between the different directions of the fantastic genre in the structure of the novel. Research methods In the context of studying the literary work, we used the basic principles of mythological, comparative-historical, psychological and typological methods. Results. The article deals with the genre and plot-compositional features of the novel "The body©", found out its leading motives, ways of representing them in the text and also postmodern features. We were able to identify the genres in which the text was created, and how they manifest themselves on the plot-compositional level. Scientific novelty. The author explores the genesis of science fiction and its kinds on the material of the novel and also gives the characterization of the genres of science fiction, fantasy and horror. The author studies deeply the leading motifs of the horror literature – the motives the mettempsychosis with all its modifications on the example of the works of fiction of Ukrainian and world literatures for the first time. The article thoroughly analyzes the novel "The body©" as a postmodernist work of fiction wich have all features of postmodernism, in particular eclectic genres. Practical significance. The main principles of research can be used for a deeper understanding of the characteristic features of the fantastic sub-genres, the ability to distinguish them from the general canvas of science fiction.

In Lee Frost's 1972 film The Thing with Two Heads, a white bigot unknowingly has his head surgically grafted onto the body of a black man. From that moment on, these two personalities compete for control of their shared body with ridiculous results. Somewhere between horror and comedy, this Blaxploitation film occupies a strange place in interracial discourse. Throughout American literature, the subgenre of tragic mulatto fiction has critiqued segregation by focusing on the melodramatic lives of those divided by the color line. Most tragic mulatto scholarship has analyzed overtly political novels written by African American writers from the Reconstruction Era or Harlem Renaissance, and examining these overtly political texts has produced valuable ways to understand American racism's harsh reality. Beyond this focus on reality, however, The Thing with Two Heads is a valuable contribution to the field of tragic mulatto studies because its focus on the fantastic plot of a black/white conjoined twin provides opportunities to theorize race in ways that more reality-bound works cannot. This article explores how this horror-comedy articulates different discourses regarding interracialism, conjoined twins, and monstrosity in ways that reveal much about American ideas about race, selfhood, and identity.

The article discusses the problem of the romance as a genre in Adam Mickiewicz’s poetic cycle Ballady i romanse (Ballads and Romances). So far scholars have paid attention mainly to Mickiewicz’s ballads and his innovative use of this genre, treating the romance as a ballad-like genre, without its own specifi city and rather marginal in the context of the developing romantic aesthetics. However, a closer analysis of the poems Kurhanek Maryli and Dudarz shows their distinctiveness within Mickiewicz’s poetic volume. The poet’s romance turns out to be a weak ballad of sorts, only stressing the potentiality of fantastic events. This genre can also be described as a contamination of the idyllic convention with elements of a horror ballad.

Evert Jan van Leeuwen is a lecturer in English-language literature at Leiden University, in the Netherlands. He researches fantastic fictions and counter cultures from the eighteenth century to the present. He is also interested in the international, intertextual dimensions of genres like Gothic, Horror and Science Fiction, and explores how they manifest in the British Isles, the Low Countries, and North America. He has recently co-edited the volume Haunted Europe: Continental Connections in English Language Gothic Writing, Film and New Media (2019) with Michael Newton and has written articles and chapters about American gothic authors Nathaniel Hawthorne and Edgar Allan Poe, amongst others. In relation to this, Evert has also published House of Usher (2019) a book analyzing Poe’s famous story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), Richard Matheson’s related film script and the cinematic adaptation by Roger Corman in the context of the 1960s counter-culture.

Since the beginnings of western media culture, sound synthesis has played a major role in articulating cultural notions of the fantastic and the uncanny. As a counterpart to sound reproduction, sound synthesis operated in the interstices of the original/copy correspondence and prefigured the construction of a virtual reality through the generation of novel sounds apparently lacking any equivalent with the acoustic world. Experiments on synthetic sound crucially intersected cinema’s transition to synchronous sound in the late 1920s, thus configuring a particularly fertile scenario for the redefinition of narrative paradigms and the establishment of conventions for sound film production. Sound synthesis can thus be viewed as a structuring device of such film genres as horror and science fiction, whose codification depended on the constitution of synchronized sound film. More broadly, sound synthesis challenged the basic implications of realism based on the rendering of speech and the construction of cinematic soundscapes.

The paper intends to explore Elizabeth Bowen’s stylistic choices in her wartime short story, The Demon Lover (1945), wherein the experience of war is rendered in gothic form as a supernatural occurrence. Bowen’s predilection for framing aspects of war in an inverted manner is well-documented in such novels as The Heat of the Day (1949), and her appeal to the fantastic is part of an Irish tradition, ranging from Bram Stoker to John Banville. The paper attempts to analyze the way in which the gothic mode, particularly at the level of language, contributes to a deconstruction of the war experience and a re-examination of the psychological horror of the Other. To this end, the paper employs theoretical concepts pertaining to the sphere of the “war gothic”, while also placing emphasis on modernist theories of style, specifically as they relate to Bowen’s “willfully tortuous syntax” (Teekell 61) which has an almost physical, claustrophobic effect on the reader.

In its recent history, the philosophy of mind has come to resemble an entry into the genre of Hammer horror or pulpy science fiction. These days it is unusual to encounter a major philosophical work on the mind that is not populated with bats, homunculi, swamp-creatures, cruelly imprisoned genius scientists, aliens, cyborgs, other-worldly twins, self-aware Computer programs, Frankenstein-monster-like ‘Blockheads,’ or zombies. The purpose of this paper is to review the role in the philosophy of mind of one of these fantastic thought-experiments — the zombie — and to reassess the implications of zombie arguments, which I will suggest have been widely misinterpreted. I shall argue that zombies, far from being the enemy of materialism, are its friend; and furthermore that zombies militate against the computational model of consciousness and in favour of more biologically-rooted conceptions, and hence that zombie- considerations support a more reductive kind of physicalism about consciousness than has been in vogue in recent years.

La India María: Mexploitation and the Films of María Elena Velasco, Seraina Rohrer (2018) Austin: University of Texas Press, 220 pp., ISBN 978-1-47731-345-9, p/bk, $29.95 USDMexican Transnational Cinema and Literature, Maricruz Castro Ricalde, Mauricio Díaz Calderón and James Ramey (eds) (2017) Oxford and Bern: Peter Lang, 312 pp., ISBN 978-1-78707-066-0, p/bk, $69.95The Latin American (Counter-)Road Movie and Ambivalent Modernity, Nadia Lie (2017) Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 260 pp., ISBN: 9783319435534, h/bk, £57.65, p/bk, £71.96Evolvi ng Images: Jewish Latin American Cinema, Norah Glickman and Ariana Huberman (eds) (2018) Austin: University of Texas Press, 264 pp., ISBN 978-1-47731-471-5, p/bk $29.95 USDThe Spanish Fantastic: Contemporary Filmmaking in Horror, Fantasy and Sci-Fi, Shelagh Rowan-Legg (2016) London and New York: I. B. Tauris, 214 pp., ISBN 978 1 78453 677 0, h/bk, $103.50; e-book, $82.80

Known for her fantastical and allegorical style and for her affiliation with "magic realism," Paola Masino's reputation rests chiefly on her novels, particularly Nascita e morte della massaia, and on works that are seemingly confined to female subjectivity and the private sphere. This article examines Masino's short fiction to reveal a more public, engagé, side of the author. After a close reading of "Fame," "Famiglia," "Lino," "Terzo anniversario" and "Paura," it focuses on the two racconti brevi "Una parola che vola" and "Il nobile gallo" in order to highlight the neo-realist aspect of the pieces and to argue that Masino drew on allegories, fables, and parables to engage with history. It also maintains that Masino used her pen as a political tool to denounce the horror and suffering of war, to foster a commitment to the Resistance, and to call for the cultural and political reconstruction of Italy.

The author puts forward the thesis that the challenges of the current times resulting from environmental change, the destruction of habitats and ecological disasters direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic or ecofiction: (eco)horror, (eco)science fiction, or (eco)fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene, culminating in inevitable disaster, science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. The author follows K.S. Robinson’s line of thinking that “science fiction is a new realism”, A. Ghosh’s analysis of the relationship between literature and ecology, and D. Haraway’s research on new ways of understanding the relationships between people and non-humans using the speculative potential of sci-fi. It is therefore suggested that there is a great need for a science fiction vision, aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene/Capitalocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

As a major voice in children's literature in China, Feng Zikai uses his own life experience and the historical context of contemporary wars to negotiate the Chinese cultural myth of ‘The Peach Blossom Spring’ [Tao Hua Yuan]. ‘The Country of the Red Heart’ [Chi Xin Guo] is a fantastic utopia that exists parallel to our world, revealing his efforts to depict a pastoral dreamland and his subsequent disillusion in the face of the horrors of war and political strife. It is a story of fantasy as well as a political move on the part of Feng Zikai to address the historical milieu of China during the time of World War II, the Civil War, and the Korean War. Feng Zikai goes beyond the combination of Chinese-style cartoon [manhua] drawings and grotesquely fanciful plot as a war story for children. It is a modern political parable that demonstrates the vulnerability of his utopia in the first part of twentieth-century China.

In recent decades, the researchers of artistic stories have paid their attention to the narrative analysis of a set of weird texts of mystical and absurd content, works of “black humour”, fantastic (khymerna) prose created by a non-anthropic narrator or by an author in a changed state of consciousness. These texts serve the field of actualizing atypical and non-usual narrative structures, the sphere of meaningful changes within the bounds of narrative categories and, which is important, of forming special communicative senses of aesthetic nature. The basic problems of the linguistic analysis of “unnatural” stories are identifying the types of changes in the narration constituents, reasons of these changes and narrative categories (first of all, events, participants, objects, chronotope characteristics, points of view, moduses, modalities, etc.). The article analyses one of the texts of mystical content aiming at the revealing of some specificities of the structure and functioning of the so-called “unnatural artistic narrations”. The object of the research is V. Shevchuk’s novel “The Beginning of Horror”. The subject of the analysis is lingual means of the narrative structure formation, the author’s objectification of the mystical artistic sense and lingual “signals” of a reader’s perception of these senses. The most important semantic means of creating mystical atmosphere of the story are predicates that ascribe the names of their referents atypical dynamic and static features connected with the Christian view of the infernal world. It helps to form narrative events that root in weird situations, which cannot take place in reality. Non-dispositional nature of these situations correlates with the reference to the mystery that goes far beyond the bounds of a usual perceptive and psycho-mental background. Among the pragmatic means of creating mystical atmosphere of the main hero’s story as well as of the novel in general, we specify the individual inimitative perception of the flow of time and modality of “real unreality” formed by the role of an unreliable narrator and a vague point of view of the described event with its perceptive, ideological and time planes of objectification. Due to the increasing interest to various expressions of the esoteric, the increase of the number of artistic works of such content and growth of their popularity, we consider it topical to proceed in further investigations of lingual-narrative aspects of “unnatural” stories, in particular, the ones with the modus of mystical in them.

Gustav Meyrink’s novel Der Golem [The Golem], published in 1915, and Leo Perutz’s 1953 novel Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke [By Night under the Stone Bridge] communicate the authors’ image of the Jewish experience and treatment during the period of the twentieth century. Uncanny and fantastical elements are used throughout both texts to help portray the Jewish condition. Meyrink conveys the animosity between nationalistic Jews and middle-class assimilated Jews and highlights the rising anti-Semitism among Gentiles by associating Jews with the decay and corruption of modernity. At the same time, however, Jews are also depicted as a model of higher spirituality. Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke places the Holocaust within the greater context of Jewish history and conveys Perutz’s assessment that the tragedy of the Holocaust is one in a series of devastating events which have plagued the Jewish people. Moreover, the text casts doubt on the benevolence of Jewish and non-Jewish authority figures and even the mercifulness of God. The doubt raised in the novel regarding central Jewish beliefs mirrors the Jewish experience of disorientation and confusion following the horrors of the Holocaust. Perutz also conveys the need for Jewish history to be passed down to future generations as it is their past which helps form their Jewish identity. Keywords: Der Golem [The Golem] (Meyrink, Gustav); Nachts unter der steinernen Brücke [By Night under the Stone Bridge] (Perutz, Leo); Jewish experience (portrayal of); twentieth century; uncanny and fantastical literature; literary interpretation

Research indicates that humor is an effective method to reinforce learning, yet humor is rarely used in horticultural textbooks. Use of humor in horticulture is easier than in many disciplines because humor dealing with plants is less likely to offend specific population segments since plants, not people, are usually the butt of the jokes. A large collection of plant humor has been assembled, including the following: Edward Lear's 32 line drawings of “Nonsense Botany”, e.g. Manypeeplia upsidonia; Gary Larson's macabre Far Side cartoons dealing with plants, e.g. the “Venus kidtrap”; periodic tables of vegetables and of fruits & nuts; Arcimboldo's Renaissance paintings of faces composed of flowers, vegetables, and plant parts and their modern imitations; Robert Wood's book, How to Tell the Birds From The Flowers, containing drawings and poems; Axel Erlandson's fantasticly grafted trees; plant movies like the two versions of Little Shop of Horrors, which is set in a flower shop; Joke Fountains of the Renaissance; and numerous cartoons from science periodicals.

In Edward Gorey’s numerous scenes of breakfasts, lunches, dinners, and afternoon teas, food and drink often feature with more or less prominence and are sometimes even found in the titles of his books, such as in The Fatal Lozenge (1960) or The Unknown Vegetable (1995). Their seemingly innocent appearance is often tied to violence or death: a head is discovered in a breadbox, a woman murders her husband by lacing his tea with atropine, a boy dies of exposure after being punished for “splashing his soup”, and several characters are consumed by more or less fantastic creatures. And yet, throughout all such gruesome events, Gorey’s characteristically playful and absurd humour adds levity to scenes of food-related death, misery, downfall, and even murder. Whether much attention is drawn to such events (such as in The Unknown Vegetable, where the entire story revolves around the discovery of a giant turnip-like vegetable that leads to a woman being buried alive) or whether they are merely mentioned in offhanded comments, Gorey couches them in a frame of the ridiculous and the nonsensical. It is therefore the aim of this paper to explore how Gorey achieves this curious combination of the grotesque and the humorous in scenes revolving around food, and how this approach extends to a general confusion of tone in his darkly funny, seriocomic creations in which any manner of horror may be lurking in peaches, cakes, crackers, boiled turnips, a recipe for fudge, a family picnic, or under a haunted tea cosy.

When formulating proecological strategies, social imagination is devoted relatively little attention. Contribution of the humanities to the management in the age of the Anthropocene is most often perceived as explaining threats that we and the future human and non-human beings will have to face as a result of irresponsible environmental policies. Hence, the presumed task of the humanities (and social science) consists primarily in analyzing and presenting the causes and the processes which culminated in the climate crisis and the decline of biodiversity. However, such an approach does not allow this knowledge to be actively engaged in constructing alternative, proecological attitudes. Consequently, I argue in this paper that in order for the state of affairs to change one requires not only new scientific tools (methodology, language), but also new sensitivity and aesthetics. The author argues that the challenges of the current times, resulting from environmental change, destruction of habitats and ecological disasters, direct our sensibilities and aesthetics ever more tangibly towards the fantastic: horror, science fiction, or fantasy. However, while ecohorror mainly exposes the negative aftermath of the Anthropocene – culminating in the inevitable disaster – science fiction offers leeway for a more speculative approach, enabling one to construct such visions of reality in which multispecies justice will be observed and cultivated. It is therefore suggested that there is much need for a science fiction aesthetic and narration that would be capable of guiding us out of the anthropocentric entanglement and the Anthropocene into the Chthulucene (as conceived by Haraway).

Budući da je u svjetskoj književnosti od romantizma nadalje najveći dio fantastične dionice pripovjedne književnosti formiran oko ideje straha od nepoznatoga i neobjašnjivoga, ovaj je prilog usmjeren na manifestacije te emocije u odabranim primjerima hrvatske fantastične novele 19. stoljeća. U raspravi se problematizira i tematsko-žanrovska pripadnost kanonskih novela, i to upravo s obzirom na prisutnost motiva straha. U književnostima zapadnog kruga u 19. se stoljeću pojačano javljaju fantastični pripovjedni žanrovi kojima je motiv straha glavni narativni pokretač, a pojedini elementi fantastički intonirane književnosti s obilježjima književnoga horora prisutni su i u odabranome istraživačkom korpusu: od romantičarskih obilježja Jorgovanićeve fantastike preko premošćivanja realističke poetike i okretanja misticizmu u Gjalskijevoj novelistici do modernističke psihologizacije Matoša i Leskovara. Iako se u tradicionalnoj hrvatskoj književnoj historiografiji zadani korpus nije tumačio kroz prizmu motiva straha, njegova prisutnost otvara niz istraživačkih pitanja poput, primjerice, kako se strah manifestira u pripovjednom tekstu, kojoj pripovjednoj razini emocija straha zapravo pripada, kako motiv straha sudjeluje u proizvodnji fantastičnog i irealnog itd.

Aim. The paper examines lexico-grammatical and syntactic specificity of the third novelistic collection by Albert Ayguesparse (1900–1996) – one of the more prominent Belgian Francophone writers of the 20th c. It aims at outlining the more important characteristics of individual novellas in the selection, where the reader comes to know the polyphony of the writer’s short prose, moving from Lyrical Realism through tragic episodes of life to the enigmatic and the fantastic. Research methodology. The article employs a systematic approach with the use of literary-historical and comparative methods. On the basis of these two methods, the specificity of the author’s writing, syntactic structure of the text, individualized language of the characters, places of the light-and-shadow, voice-and-silence, life-and-death playing have been determined. Results. The study provides a wider analysis of the selection’s first novella, viz. «Monica sans tête» [«Monica Without the Head»], as well as the novellas «Les Bottes» [«The High Boots»], full of horror stories; «Le Point rouge» [«The Red Spot»], presenting an interest by the functioning of the internal dialogue; the psychological triptych «Les chasses d’Eros» [«The Hunts of Eros»], «Je me nomme Jérôme» [«My Name Is Jérôme»], «Monsieur Oscar» [«Mr. Oscar»], the mystic in its conception novella «Les Survivants» [«Those Who Survived»]. Research novelty. The article is the first in Ukrainian Literary Studies research into the famous Belgian writer’s novellas, with whose novels the Ukrainian reader got acquainted owing to the translation of his work «Notre ombre nous précède» [«Our Shadow’s Ahead»], published in 1984/1985 on the pages of the «Vitchyzna» [«Motherland»] magazine. Practical value. The article may become the basis for a deeper reading of the work of one of the leading representatives of contemporary Belgian Francophone literature, lexical-stylistic features of the writer’s novellas.

The article describes the influence of foreign, mainly German, literature on the ballads of the Philomaths – Tomasz Zan, Jan Czeczot and Adam Mickiewicz. The inspirations, references, and transformations of literary themes taken from German poets are presented in chronological order. The article begins with the answer to questions: why and how Zan used Lenora by Gottfried August Bürger in Neryna and Twardowski (common character and versification, intensifying the mood of horror). The full image of foreign references in this poet's work is completed by his version of Arion, based on the literary work by August Wilhelm Schlegel. Philomath used the character of a hero from Hellas, but he presented his fate in a dramatically condensed way. All these references lead to the conclusion that Zan transformed foreign threads in his own way, treating this activity as an exercise in his literary technique. A similar approach was shown by Jan Czeczot, who focused on native themes – but he added a large dose of humor, which was characteristic also of the most outstanding philosopher-writer, Adam Mickiewicz. The author of Ballady i romanse included in his collection a free translation of Friedrich Schiller’s Rękawiczka. He gave up the local color in it, creating a more “homely” version. In Świtezianka and Pierwiosnek, Mickiewicz referred to Johann Wolfgang Goethe. Świtezianka refers to Rybak with the motif of a fantastic figure emerging from the water. Pierwiosnek, like Fiołek, contains the lament of a metaphorical flower addressed to an insensitive lover. An analysis of Mickiewicz's references to his masters shows that this poet, like his friends, treated ballads as poetic exercises. He wanted to challenge his favorite writers. At the same time, these references confirm his manifestation of creative freedom. It turns out that the philomath ballads share the same approach to creation in this genre, which has been found in the example of transformations of material taken from foreign literature.

"With a few symbols a dream can define the whole of one's life, and warn us of the future, too" (Schlueter 71).In this extract from an interview by Jonah Raskin in 1969, Doris Lessing explained the importance of dreams in her major work, The Golden Notebook; but it could just as easily be applied to a large part of her extensive novelistic corpus. Throughout her diverse literary output, Lessing uses traditional narrative methods such as tales and fables "as a creative vehicle to examine the states of consciousness of the human soul" (Galin 23). Through use of all these fantastic elements, she endows several of her novels, such as The Fifth Child (1988), with a dreamlike atmosphere in which reality and imagination merge. If dreams can define one's entire life, they will also provide the clues to one's own identity, illuminating areas that we do not have access to in conscious life. Identity is a major issue in the novels of Doris Lessing, especially those dealing with female protagonists trying to define their own selves amongst the different roles they perform in life. The subconscious, through dreams and imagination, plays an important part in this quest, since a person's identity is built up by both conscious factors and subconscious forces.The aim of this paper is to show how Doris Lessing's The Fifth Child can be read as a valid representation of a failure in the construction of identity; the novel dramatises the way in which the dreams and fantasies of the subconscious can destroy or fatally interrupt the identity-building process. The Fifth Child, which is described by Jones in the New York Review of Books as "a horror story of maternity and the nightmare of social collapse" (30-31), combines dreaming, imagination and a sense of female identity which is endangered and comes close to disappearing. A closer look into The Fifth Child and its multi-layered treatment of identity as a form of troubled self-creation will help us to appreciate its integral role in the Lessing canon.

Modern drama tends to catch up with the representation of the dystopian alternative worlds much like the contemporary mass culture. Sci-fi and dystopian productions become popular onstage because the medical and technological breakthroughs occur so rapidly in our present-day life that the humanity fails to reflect them properly. There are the following main features pertaining to science fiction in drama, namely dystopian play: fantastical concepts in tune with the modern scientific theory; the illusion of authenticity via scientific methodology; creation of a fictional world on the basis of the factors and tendencies of wide public importance. The aim of this article is to study the generic features of sci-fi subgenre of dystopia on the material of Henley’s drama “Signature” (1990). The play written by the US woman dramatist introduces the world deprived of meaningful lives for its characters whose fake values drive them to grave consequences (death, loss of the beloved). This text for staging warns the audience about the devaluation of human life in favor of elusive success. Henley’s 2052 Hollywood is a dystopic space for rather emotionless characters (the T-Thorp brothers, L-Tip, the Reader), who understand their failures and losses when it is too late. The only exception is William, selfless and unafraid of predicaments. The fundamental for the Western civilization phenomenon of love is distorted and disregarded in favor of immediate satisfaction and addiction to fame. Like her predecessors in sci-fi Henley predicts a mass human alienation in not so distant future. Yet the open end of Boswell’s story somewhat decreases the horror of dystopia – there is a remote chance that after anagnorisis the protagonist will find his beloved and make peace with her even though for a very short time. Henley’s dystopia constructs the ambivalent vision of the future, charged with questions of cryonics, cloning, global digitalization, omnipresent euthanasia, environmentalism and feminism.

Life after death: About the psychology of dreamsin the works of Vladimir OdoyevskyThe way to abetter understanding of what happens to ahuman soul after death, Carl Gustav Jung saw in dreams, in which the death played aspecial role. The characteristic Jungian combi­nation of dreams and death inspired the author of the article to look at the romantic synthesis of the same interpretations in nineteenth-century Russian literature from the perspective of depth psychology. The selection of short, fantastic prose by Odoyevsky for this type of research, more precisely: The tale of a dead body belonging to no one knows whom — story from the writer’s col­lection Gaudy tales, Taunting dead man — one of the parts of the notorious cycle of the writer — The Russian nights and The living corpse, proved to be the right move on the path to creative exegesis, primarily due to the genre classification and world system presented in the mentioned writer’s stories. Such reinterpretation allowed the perception of yet another, psychological, side of the conventional motifs in Russian literature. The thanatological motifs are primarily attributed to the function of triggering the horror in areader — the fear of characters from the afterlife. On the example of Odoyevsky’s protagonists dreams, several designates were revealed, indicating not only acertain imagination of life after death but also the need for mental development of the nineteenth-century Russian literature character. Жизнь после смерти. О психологии сновидений в произведениях Владимира ОдоевскогоПуть к лучшему осмыслению идей о том, что происходит с человеческой душой после смерти, основоположник аналитической психологии Карл Густав Юнг видел всновидени­ях, особенно в тех, в которых смерть играла главную роль. Содержащеесяв размышлениях психолога характерное соединение сновидений и смерти вдохновило автора этой статьи исследовать, с точки зрения глубинной психологии, романтический синтез тех же самых качеств в русской литературе XIX века. Малая фантастическая проза Владимира Федо­ровича Одоевского, в частности произведения: Сказка о мертвом теле, неизвестно кому принадлежащем — рассказ, помещенный в сборнике писателя Пестрые сказки; Насмешка мертвеца — одна из частей известной серии Русские ночи, а также Живой мертвец, для такого рода исследований оказались хорошим материалом особенно ввиду их жанровой классификации и особенностей фиктивного мира в упомянутых выше произведениях. Та­кой обзор позволил увидеть другую, психологическую сторону конвенционных мотивов в русской литературе, поскольку танатологическим мотивом приписываются прежде все­го функции, связанные с вызовом страха у читателя. На примере снов героев Одоевского обнаружено несколько референтов, указывающих не только определенное воображение жизни после смерти, но также нa потребность „психического развития” героев в русской литературе XIX века.

Daphne du Maurier’s 1938 novel Rebecca provides rich opportunities for the study of imaginary narrative spaces and the language associated with such spaces. The present study explores the linguistics of the imaginary narrative spaces in Rebecca, drawing upon three lines of linguistic research consistent with a Cognitive Linguistic approach: (i) an interest in understanding and appreciating ordinary readers’ actual responses (rather than merely relying upon “expert” readers’ responses), (ii) the construction of worlds or “spaces”, and (iii) the application of ideas from Cognitive Grammar. The study reveals a surprisingly intricate interplay of linguistic devices used in the construction of imaginary narrative spaces and the maintenance of such spaces in extended discourse. References Armitt, L. (2000). Contemporary women’s fiction and the fantastic. New York: St. Martin’s Press. Beauman, S. (2003). Afterword. In Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca (pp. 429-441). London: Virago Press. Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S., & Finnegan, E. (Eds.) (1999). Longman grammar of spoken and written English. Harlow, UK: Pearson Education Limited. Birch, D. (2007). Addict of fantasy. The Times Literary Supplement, 5447-5448, 17-18. Dancygier, B. (2012). The language of stories: A cognitive approach. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dancygier, B. (2017a). Introduction. In B. Dancygier (Ed.), The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 1-10). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Dancygier, B. (2017b). Cognitive Linguistics and the study of textual meaning. In B. Dancygier (Ed.) The Cambridge handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 607-622). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Du Maurier, D. (2012). Rebecca. London: Virago Press. Emmott, C. (1997). Narrative comprehension: A discourse perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Evans, V., & Green, M. (2006). Cognitive linguistics: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Fauconnier, G. (1985). Mental spaces: Aspects of meaning construction in natural language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forster, M. (1993). Daphne Du Maurier. London: Chatto & Windus. Gavins, J. (2007). Text world theory: An introduction. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Hadiyanto, H. (2010). The Freudian psychological phenomena and complexity in Daphne Du Maurier’s “Rebecca” (A psychological study of literature). LITE: Jurnal Bahasa, Sastra, Dan Budaya 6(1), 14-25. Available at: https://publikasi.dinus.ac.id/index.php/lite/article/ view/1348/1014. Harrison, C., Nuttall, L., Stockwell, P., & Yuan, W. (Eds.) (2014). Cognitive grammar in literature. Amsterdam & New York: John Benjamins. Harrison, C., & Stockwell, P. (2014). Cognitive poetics. In J. Littlemore and J. R. Taylor (Eds.), The Bloomsbury companion to cognitive linguistics (pp. 218-233). London: Bloomsbury. Horner, A., & Zlosnik, S. (1998). Writing, identity, and the Gothic imagination. London: Macmillian. Huddleston, R. (2002). The verb. In R. Huddleston & G. K. Pullum (Eds.), The Cambridge grammar of the English language (pp. 71-212). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kelly, R. (1987). Daphne du Maurier. Boston: Twayne Publishers. Lakoff, G., & Turner, M. (1989). More than cool reason: A field guide to poetic metaphor. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press. Langacker, R. W. (1991). Foundations of cognitive grammar. Vol. II: Descriptive application. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Leech, G. N. (1969). A linguistic guide to English poetry. London: Longman Group Limited. Margawati, P. (2010). A Freudian psychological issue of women characters in Daphne Du Maurier’s novel Rebecca. LANGUAGE CIRCLE: Journal of Language and Literature IV(2), 121-126. Available at: https://journal.unnes.ac.id/nju/index.php/LC/article/viewFile/900/839 Naszkowska, K. (2012). Living mirror: The representation of doubling identities in the British and Polish women’s literature (1846–1938). Doctoral dissertation, The University of Edinburgh. Palmer, F. R. (1974). The English verb. London: Longman Group Limited. Stockwell, P. (2002). Cognitive poetics: An introduction. London & New York: Routledge. Turner, M. (1996). The literary mind. New York & Oxford: Oxford University Press. Turner, M. (2015). Blending in language and communication. In E. Dąbrowska & D. Divjak (Eds.), Handbook of cognitive linguistics (pp. 211-232). Berlin & Boston: de Gruyter Mouton. Werth, P. (1999). Text worlds: Representing conceptual space in discourse (M. Short, Ed.). Harlow, UK: Longman. Wilde, O. (1996). The picture of Dorian Gray. In The complete Oscar Wilde: The complete stories, plays and poems of Oscar Wilde (pp. 11-161). New York: Quality Paperback Book Club. Winifrith, T. J. (1979). Daphne du Maurier. In J. Vinson (Ed.), Novelists and prose writers (Great writers of the English language) (pp. 354-357). New York: St. Martin’s Press.

This essay focuses on the peculiar intersection which seems to explain unstable living forms – precarious ‘bodies in progress’ – that inhabit Lina Meruane’s ‘degenerated’ poetics, one where queer discourse mixes with fantastic and gothic features. Indeed, if, on the one hand, the Chilean author’s political agenda clings to the refusal of a disciplinating mould and objections to any request of identity accountability, on the other, she constantly counterbalances her revolutionary theoretical drive always flirting with narrative codes of the ominous, as illustrated by estranging, almost a ‘horror’ staging she intends for every one of her ambiguous, amorphous creatures.

The usual postmodern suspicions about diligently deciphering authorial intent or stridently seeking fixed meaning/s and/or binary distinctions in an artistic work aside, this self-indulgent essay pushes the boundaries regarding normative academic research, for it focusses on my own (minimally celebrated) published creative writing’s status as a literary innovation. Dedicated to illuminating some of the less common denominators at play in Australian horror, my paper recalls the creative writing process involved when I set upon the (arrogant?) goal of creating a new genre of creative writing: that of the ‘Aboriginal Fantastic’. I compare my work to the literary output of a small but significant group (2.5% of the population), of which I am a member: Aboriginal Australians. I narrow my focus even further by examining that creative writing known as Aboriginal horror. And I reduce the sample size of my study to an exceptionally small number by restricting my view to one type of Aboriginal horror literature only: the Aboriginal vampire novel, a genre to which I have contributed professionally with the 2011 paperback and 2012 e-book publication of That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! However, as this paper hopefully demonstrates, and despite what may be interpreted by some cynical commentators as the faux sincerity of my taxonomic fervour, Aboriginal horror is a genre noteworthy for its instability and worthy of further academic interrogation.Surprising to many, Aboriginal Australian mythology includes at least one truly vampire-like entity, despite Althans’ confident assertion that the Bunyip is “Australia’s only monster” (16) which followed McKee’s equally fearless claim that “there is no blackfella tradition of zombies or vampires” (201). Gelder’s Ghost Stories anthology also only mentions the Bunyip, in a tale narrated by Indigenous man Percy Mumbulla (250). Certainly, neither of these academics claim Indigeneity in their ethnicity and most Aboriginal Australian scholars will happily agree that our heterogeneous Indigenous cultures and traditions are devoid of opera-cape wearing Counts who sleep in coffins or are repelled by crucifix-wielding Catholics. Nevertheless, there are fascinating stories--handed down orally from one generation to the next (Australian Aborigines, of course, have no ancestral writing system)--informing wide-eyed youngsters of bloodsucking, supernatural entities that return from the grave to feed upon still living blackfellas: hence Unaipon describes the red-skinned, fig tree-dwelling monster, the “Yara Ma Yha Who […] which sucks the blood from the victim and leaves him helpless upon the ground” (218). Like most vampires, this monster imparts a similarly monstrous existence upon his prey, which it drains of blood through the suckers on its fingers, not its teeth. Additionally, Reed warns: “Little children, beware of the Yara-ma-yha-who! If you do not behave yourselves and do as you are told, they will come and eat you!” (410), but no-one suggests this horrible creature is actually an undead human.For the purposes of this paper at least, the defining characteristics of a vampire are firstly that it must have once been an ordinary, living human. Secondly, it must have an appetite for human blood. Thirdly, it must have a ghoulish inability to undergo a permanent death (note, zombies, unlike vampires it seems, are fonder of brains than fresh hemoglobin and are particularly easy to dispatch). Thus, according to my criteria, an arguably genuine Aboriginal Australian vampire is referred to when Bunson writes of the Mrart being an improperly buried member of the tribe who has returned after death to feed upon the living (13) and when Cheung notes “a number of vampire-like creatures were feared, most especially the mrart, the ghost of a dead person who attacked victims at night and dragged them away from campsites” (40). Unfortunately, details regarding this “number of vampire-like creatures” have not been collated, nor I fear, in this era of rapidly extinguishing Aboriginal Australian language use, are they ever likely to be.Perhaps the best hope for preservation of these little known treasures of our mythology lies not with anthropologists but with the nation’s Indigenous creative writers. Yet no blackfella novelist, apparently, has been interested in the monstrous, bloodsucking, Aboriginal Undead. Despite being described as dominating the “Black Australian novel” (Shoemaker 1), writer Mudrooroo--who has authored three vampire novels--reveals nothing of Aboriginal Australian vampirology in his texts. Significantly, however, Mudrooroo states that Aboriginal Australian novelists such as he “are devoting their words to the Indigenous existential being” (Indigenous 3). Existentiality, of course, has to do with questions of life, death and dying and, for we Aboriginal Australians, such questions inevitably lead to us addressing the terrible consequences of British invasion and genocide upon our cultural identity, and this is reflected in Mudrooroo’s effective use of the vampire trope in his three ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels, as they are also known. Mudrooroo’s bloodsuckers, however, are the invading British and Europeans in his extended ‘white man as ghost’ metaphor: they are not sourced from Aboriginal Australian mythology.Mudrooroo does, notably, intertwine his story of colonising vampires in Australia with characters created by Bram Stoker in his classic novel Dracula (1897). He calls his first Aborigine to become a familiar “Renfield” (Undying 93), and even includes a soft-porn re-imagining of an encounter between characters he has inter-textually named “Lucy” and “Mina” (Promised 3). This potential for a contemporary transplantation of Stoker’s European characters to Australia was another aspect I sought to explore in my novel, especially regarding semi-autobiographical writing by mixed-race Aboriginal Australians such as Mudrooroo and myself. I wanted to meta-fictionally insert my self-styled anti-hero into a Stoker-inspired milieu. Thus my work features a protagonist who is confused and occasionally ambivalent about his Aboriginal identity. Brought up as Catholic, as I was, he succumbs to an Australian re-incarnation of Stoker’s Dracula as Anti-Christ and finds himself battling the true-believers of the Catholic Church, including a Moroccan version of Professor Van Helsing and a Buffy-like, quasi-Islamic vampire slayer.Despite his once revered status, Mudrooroo is now exiled from the Australian literary scene as a result of his claim to Indigeneity being (apparently) disproven (see Clark). Illness and old age prevent him from defending the charges, hence it is unlikely that Mudrooroo (or Colin Johnson as he was formerly known) will further develop the Aboriginal Australian vampire trope in his writing. Which situation leaves me to cautiously identify myself as the sole Aboriginal Australian novelist exploring Indigenous vampires in his/her creative writing, as evidenced by my 312 page novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance!, which was a prescribed text in a 2014 Indiana University course on World Literature (Halloran).Set in a contemporary Australia where disparate existential explanations including the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Catholicism, vampirism and atheism all co-exist, the writing of my novel was motivated by the question: ‘How can such incongruent ideologies be reconciled or bridged?’ My personal worldview is influenced by all four of these explanations for the mysteries of life and death: I was brought up in Catholicism but schooled in scientific methodology, which evolved into an insipid atheism. Culturally I was drawn to the gothic novel and developed an intellectual interest in Stoker’sDracula and its significance as a pro-Catholic, covert mission of proselytization (see Starrs 2004), whilst simultaneously learning more of my totem, Garrawi (the Sulphur-crested White Cockatoo), and the Aboriginal Dreamtime legends of my ancestral forebears. Much of my novel concerns questions of identity for a relatively light-complexioned, mixed ancestry Aboriginal Australian such as myself, and the place such individuals occupy in the post-colonial world. Mudrooroo, perhaps, was right in surmising that we Aboriginal Australian authors are devoted to writing about “the Indigenous existential being” for my Aboriginal vampire novel is at least semi-autobiographical and fixated on the protagonist’s attempts to reconcile his atheism with his Dreamtime teachings and Catholicism. But Mudrooroo’s writing differs markedly from my own when it comes to the expectations he has regarding the audience’s acceptance of supernatural themes. He apparently fully believed in the possibility of such unearthly spirits existing, and wrote of the “Maban Reality” whereby supernatural events are entirely tenable in the Aboriginal Australian world-view, and the way these matters are presented suggests he expects the reader to be similarly convinced. With this Zeitgeist, Mudrooroo’s ‘Ghost Dreaming’ novels can be accurately described as Aboriginal Gothic. In this genre, Chanady explains, “the supernatural, as well as highly improbable events, are presented without any comment by the magical realist narrator” ("Magic Realism" 431).What, then, is the meaning of Aboriginal Gothic, given we Aboriginal peoples have no haunted castles or mist-shrouded graveyards? Again according to Chanady, as she set out in her groundbreaking monograph of 1985, in a work of Magical Realism the author unquestioningly accepts the supernatural as credible (10-12), even as, according to Althans, it combines “the magical and realist, into a new perspective of the world, thus offering alternative ways and new approaches to reality” (26). From this general categorisation, Althans proposes, comes the specific genre of Aboriginal Gothic, which is Magical Realism in an Indigenous context that creates a “cultural matrix foreign to a European audience [...] through blending the Gothic mode in its European tradition with the myths and customs of Aboriginal culture” (28-29). She relates the Aboriginal Gothic to Mudrooroo’s Maban Reality due to its acting “as counter-reality, grounded in the earth or country, to a rational worldview and the demands of a European realism” (28). Within this category sit not only the works of Aboriginal Australian novelists such as Mudrooroo, but also more recent novels by Aboriginal Australian writers Kim Scott and Alexis Wright, who occasionally indulge in improbable narratives informed by supernatural beings (while steering disappointingly clear of vampires).But there is more to the Aboriginal Gothic than a naïve acceptance of Maban Reality, or, for that matter, any other Magical Realist treatments of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Typically, the work of Aboriginal Gothic writers speaks to the historical horrors of colonisation. In contrast to the usually white-authored Australian Gothic, in which the land down under was seen as terrifying by the awestruck colonisers, and the Aborigine was portrayed as “more frightening than any European demon” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10), the Aboriginal Gothic sometimes reverses roles and makes the invading white man the monster. The Australian Gothic was for Aborigines, “a disabling, rather than enabling, discourse” (Turcotte, "Australian Gothic" 10) whilst colonial Gothic texts egregiously portrayed the colonised subject as a fearsome and savage Other. Ostensibly sub-human, from a psychoanalytic point of view, the Aborigine may even have symbolised the dark side of the British settler, but who, in the very act of his being subjugated, assures the white invader of his racial superiority, moral integrity and righteous identity. However, when Aboriginal Australian authors reiterate, when we subjugated savages wrestle the keyboard away, readers witness the Other writing back, critically. Receivers of our words see the distorted and silencing master discourse subverted and, indeed, inverted. Our audiences are subjectively repositioned to see the British Crown as the monster. The previously presumed civil coloniser is instead depicted as the author and perpetrator of a violently racist, criminal discourse, until, eventually, s/he is ultimately ‘Gothicised’: eroded and made into the Other, the villainous, predatory savage. In this style of vicious literary retaliation Mudrooroo excelled. Furthermore, as a mixed ancestry Aborigine, like myself, Mudrooroo represented in his very existence, the personification of Aboriginal Gothic, for as Idilko Riendes writes, “The half caste is reminiscent of the Gothic monstrous, as the half caste is something that seems unnatural at first, evoking fears” (107). Perhaps therein lies a source of the vehemency with which some commentators have pilloried Mudrooroo after the somewhat unconvincing evidence of his non-Indigeneity? But I digress from my goal of explicating the meaning of the term Aboriginal Gothic.The boundaries of any genre are slippery and one of the features of postmodern literature is its deliberate blurring of boundaries, hence defining genres is not easy. Perhaps the Gothic can be better understood when the meaning of its polar opposite, the Fantastic, is better understood. Ethnic authorial controversies aside and returning to the equally shady subject of authorial intent, in contrast to the Aboriginal Gothic of novelists Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright, and their accepting of the supernatural as plausible, the Fantastic in literature is characterised by an enlightened rationality in which the supernatural is introduced but ultimately rejected by the author, a literary approach that certainly sits better with my existential atheism. Chanady defined and illustrated the genre as follows: “the fantastic […] reaffirmed hegemonic Western rational paradigms by portraying the supernatural in a contradictory manner as both terrifying and logically impossible […] My examples of the fantastic were drawn from the work of major French writers such as Merimee and Maupassant” ("Magic Realism" 430). Unfortunately, Chanady was unable to illustrate her concept of the Fantastic with examples of Aboriginal horror writing. Why? Because none existed until my novel was published. Whereas Mudrooroo, Scott and Wright incorporated the Magical Realism of Aboriginal Australian mythology into their novels, and asked their readers to accept it as not only plausible but realistic and even factual, I wanted to create a style that blends Aboriginal mythology with the European tradition of vampires, but ultimately rejects this “cultural matrix” due to enlightened rationality, as I deliberately and cynically denounce it all as fanciful superstition.Certainly, the adjective “fantastic” is liberally applied to much of what we call Gothic horror literature, and the sub-genre of Indigenous vampire literature is not immune to this confusion, with non-Australian Indigenous author Aaron Carr’s 1995 Native American vampire novel, The Eye Killers, unhelpfully described in terms of the “fantastic nature of the genre” (Tillett 149). In this novel,Carr exposes contemporary Native American political concerns by skillfully weaving multiple interactive dialogues with horror literature and film, contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations, postmodern philosophies, traditional vampire lore, contemporary Native literature, and Native oral traditions. (Tillett 150)It must be noted, however, that Carr does not denounce the supernatural vampire and its associated folklore, be it European or Laguna/Kerasan/Navajo, as illogical or fanciful. This despite his “dialogues with […] contemporary U.S. cultural preoccupations [and] postmodern philosophies”. Indeed, the character “Diana” at one stage pretends to pragmatically denounce the supernatural whilst her interior monologue strenuously defends her irrational beliefs: the novel reads: “‘Of course there aren’t any ghosts,’ Diana said sharply, thinking: Of course there were ghosts. In this room. Everywhere” (197). In taking this stock-standard approach of expecting the reader to believe wholeheartedly in the existence of the Undead, Carr locates his work firmly in the Aboriginal Gothic camp and renders commentators such as Tillett liable to be called ignorant and uninformed when they label his work fantastic.The Aboriginal Gothic would leave the reader convinced a belief in the supernatural is non-problematic, whereas the Aboriginal Fantastic novel, where it exists, would, while enjoying the temporary departure from the restraints of reality, eventually conclude there are no such things as ghosts or vampires. Thus, my Aboriginal Fantastic novel That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! was intended from the very beginning of the creative writing process to be an existentially diametric alternative to Magical Realism and the Aboriginal Gothic (at least in its climactic denouement). The narrative features a protagonist who, in his defeat, realises the danger in superstitious devotion and in doing so his interior monologue introduces to the literary world the new Aboriginal Fantastic genre. Despite a Foucauldian emphasis in most of my critical analysis in which an awareness of the constructed status and nature of the subject/focus of knowledge undermines the foundations of any reductive typology, I am unhesitant in my claim to having invented a new genre of literature here. Unless there is, undiscovered by my research, a yet-to-be heralded work of Aboriginal horror that recognises the impossibility of its subject, my novel is unique even while my attitude might be decried as hubristic. I am also cognizant of the potential for angry feedback from my Aboriginal Australian kin, for my innovative genre is ultimately denigrating of all supernatural devotion, be it vampiric or Dreamtime. Aboriginal Fantastic writing rejects such mythologies as dangerous, fanciful superstition, but I make the (probably) too-little-too-late defence that it rejects the Indigenous existential rationale somewhat less vigorously than it rejects the existential superstitions of Catholicism and/or vampirism.This potential criticism I will forbear, perhaps sullenly and hopefully silently, but I am likely to be goaded to defensiveness by those who argue that like any Indigenous literature, Aboriginal Australian writing is inherently Magical Realist, and that I forsake my culture when I appeal to the rational. Chanady sees “magic realism as a mode that expresses important points of view, often related to marginality and subalternity” ("Magic Realism" 442). She is not alone in seeing it as the generic cultural expression of Indigenous peoples everywhere, for Bhabha writes of it as being the literature of the postcolonial world (6) whilst Rushdie sees it as the expression of a third world consciousness (301). But am I truly betraying my ancestral culture when I dismiss the Mrart as mere superstition? Just because it has colour should we revere ‘black magic’ over other (white or colourless) superstitions? Should we not suspect, as we do when seated before stage show illusionists, some sleight of (writing) hand? Some hidden/sub-textual agenda meant to entertain not educate? Our world has many previously declared mysteries now easily explained by science, and the notion of Earth being created by a Rainbow Serpent is as farcical to me as the notion it was created a few thousand years ago in seven days by an omniscient human-like being called God. If, in expressing this dubiousness, I am betraying my ancestors, I can only offer detractors the feeble defence that I sincerely respect their beliefs whilst not personally sharing them. I attempt no delegitimising of Aboriginal Australian mythology. Indeed, I celebrate different cultural imaginaries for they make our quotidian existence more colourful and enjoyable. There is much pleasure to be had in such excursions from the pedantry of the rational.Another criticism I might hear out--intellectually--would be: “Most successful literature is Magical Realist, and supernatural stories are irresistible”, a truism most commercially successful authors recognise. But my work was never about sales, indeed, the improbability of my (irresistible?) fiction is didactically yoked to a somewhat sanctimonious moral. My protagonist realises the folly and danger in superstitious devotion, although his atheistic epiphany occurs only during his last seconds of life. Thus, whilst pushing this barrow of enlightened rationality, my novel makes a somewhat original contribution to contemporary Australian culture, presenting in a creative writing form rather than anthropological report, an understanding of the potential for melding Aboriginal mythology with Catholicism, the “competing Dreamtimes, white and black” as Turcotte writes ("Re-mastering" 132), if only at the level of ultimately accepting, atheistically, that all are fanciful examples of self-created beyond-death identity, as real--or unreal--as any other religious meme. Whatever vampire literature people read, most such consumers do not believe in the otherworldly antagonists, although there is profound enjoyment to be had in temporarily suspending disbelief and even perpetuating the meme into the mindsets of others. Perhaps, somewhere in the sub-conscious, pre-rational recesses of our caveman-like brains, we still wonder if such supernatural entities reflect a symbolic truth we can’t quite apprehend. Instead, we use a totemic figure like the sultry but terrifying Count Dracula as a proxy for other kinds of primordial anxieties we cannot easily articulate, whether that fear is the child rapist on the loose or impending financial ruin or just the overwhelming sense that our contemporary lifestyles contain the very seeds of our own destruction, and we are actively watering them with our insouciance.In other words, there is little that is new in horror. Yes, That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! is an example of what I call the new genre of Aboriginal Fantastic but that claim is not much of an original contribution to knowledge, other than being the invention of an extra label in an unnecessarily formalist/idealist lexicon of literary taxonomy. Certainly, it will not create a legion of fans. But these days it is difficult for a novelist to find anything really new to write about, genre-wise, and if there is a reader prepared to pay hard-earned money for a copy, then I sincerely hope they do not feel they have purchased yet another example of what the HBO television show Californication’s creative writing tutor Hank Moody (David Duchovny) derides as “lame vampire fiction” (episode 2, 2007). I like to think my Aboriginal Fantastic novel has legs as well as fangs. References Althans, Katrin. Darkness Subverted: Aboriginal Gothic in Black Australian Literature and Film. Bonn: Bonn UP, 2010. Bhabha, Homi. Nation and Narration. London and New York: Routledge, 1990. Bunson, Matthew. The Vampire Encyclopedia. New York: Gramercy Books, 1993. Carr, Aaron A. Eye Killers. Norman: U of Oklahoma P, 1995. Chanady, Amaryll. Magical Realism and the Fantastic: Resolved versus Unresolved Antinomy. New York: Garland Publishing, 1985. Chanady, Amaryll. “Magic Realism Revisited: The Deconstruction of Antinomies.” Canadian Review of Comparative Literature (June 2003): 428-444. Cheung, Theresa. The Element Encyclopaedia of Vampires. London: Harper Collins, 2009. Clark, Maureen. Mudrooroo: A Likely Story: Identity and Belonging in Postcolonial Australia. Frankfurt: Peter Lang, 2007. Gelder, Ken. The Oxford Book of Australian Ghost Stories. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1994. Halloran, Vivien. “L224: Introduction to World Literatures in English.” Department of English, Indiana University, 2014. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://www.indiana.edu/~engweb/undergradCourses_spring.shtml›. McKee, Alan. “White Stories, Black Magic: Australian Horror Films of the Aboriginal.”Aratjara: Aboriginal Culture and Literature in Australia. Eds. Dieter Riemenschneider and Geoffrey V. Davis. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (1997): 193-210. Mudrooroo. The Indigenous Literature of Australia. Melbourne: Hyland House, 1997. Mudrooroo. The Undying. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1998. Mudrooroo. The Promised Land. Sydney: Harper Collins, 2000. Reed, Alexander W. Aboriginal Myths, Legends and Fables. Sydney: Reed New Holland, 1999. Riendes, Ildiko. “The Use of Gothic Elements as Manifestations of Regaining Aboriginal Identity in Kim Scott’s Benang: From the Heart.” Topos 1.1 (2012): 100-114. Rushdie, Salman. “Gabriel Garcia Marquez.” Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991. London: Granta and Penguin Books, 1991. Shoemaker, Adam. Mudrooroo. Sydney: Harper Collins, 1993. Starrs, D. Bruno. “Keeping the Faith: Catholicism in Dracula and its Adaptations.” Journal of Dracula Studies 6 (2004): 13-18. Starrs, D. Bruno. That Blackfella Bloodsucka Dance! Saarbrücken, Germany: Just Fiction Edition (paperback), 2011; Starrs via Smashwords (e-book), 2012. Tillett, Rebecca. “‘Your Story Reminds Me of Something’: Spectacle and Speculation in Aaron Carr’s Eye Killers.” Ariel: A Review of International English Literature 33.1 (2002): 149-73. Turcotte, Gerry. “Australian Gothic.” Faculty of Arts — Papers, University of Wollongong, 1998. 2 Aug. 2014 ‹http://ro.uow.edu.au/artspapers/60/›. Turcotte, Gerry. “Re-mastering the Ghosts: Mudrooroo and Gothic Refigurations.” Mongrel Signatures: Reflections on the Work of Mudrooroo. Ed. Annalisa Oboe. Amsterdam: Rodopi Press (2003): 129-151. Unaipon, David. Legendary Tales of the Australian Aborigines. Eds. Stephen Muecke and Adam Shoemaker. Carlton: The Miegunyah Press, 2006.

ABSTRAKArtikel ini bertujuan untuk mengungkapkan aspek fantastik yang terdapat dalam film Grave Torture (2012) karya Sutradara Joko Anwar. Teori yang digunakan dalam tulisan ini adalah teori fantastik Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Rasa takut yang dieksplorasi melalui struktur naratif film dan sinematografi menjadi titik berangkat kajian. Dengan menggunakan metode deskriptif, film Grave Torture akan dideksripsikan berdasarkan aspek struktur naratif dan sinematografisnya sehingga tersaji data yang menunjukkan adanya eksplorasi rasa takut. Dari hasil analisis tersebut, satuan cerita, tokoh, ruang, waktu, kostum dan tata rias, teknik pencahayaan, serta efek suara menunjukkan adanya perlintasan dunia manusia sampai dengan alam supranatural sehingga terjadi ketaksaan ruang yang menimbulkan efek yang menyeramkan. Di samping itu, formula horor kultural-religius ditampilkan untuk lebih mengeksplorasi rasa takut dari penonton dengan budaya sama

The developers of Red Hook Studios’ 2016 gothic horror “Darkest Dungeon” said that they wanted to “capture the human response to stress.” This paper analyzes how the game does this with its “stress,” “affliction,” and “virtue” mechanics. With reference to research literature on stress, I show how these mechanics, which could easily have been cheap gimmicks, approach the topic of stress with admirable detail, offering a complex reflection on the various aspects, positive and negative, of several possible human responses to stress. They show how different responses include similar symptoms, how stress impacts the people around the stressed person, and make the case that stress can break people, but also fuel heroism. It is a fantastic example of how video game mechanics can be used to educate people about complex subjects without explicitly saying this is what they are doing.