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Zusatztext It's about time that someone took on the task of defining the 'weird'; that deceptively throwaway term that defines so much of what is interesting about popular culture in the US. This excellent collection represents the best of current thinking on the topic. Informationen zum Autor Julius Greve is a lecturer and research associate at the Institute for English and American Studies, University of Oldenburg, Germany. He is the author of Shreds of Matter: Cormac McCarthy and the Concept of Nature (2018), and of numerous articles on McCarthy, Mark Z. Danielewski, François Laruelle, and speculative realism. Greve has co-edited America and the Musical Unconscious (2015), Superpositions: Laruelle and the Humanities (2017), “Cormac McCarthy Between Worlds” (2017), and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies, Geographies, Oddities (2019). He is currently working on a manuscript on the relation between modern poetics and ventriloquism. Florian Zappe is a Postdoctoral Researcher in the ERC project The Arts of Autonomy at Ludwig-Maximilians University of Munich, Germany. His work explores the intersection of cultural studies, aesthetics, and philosophy, with a particular interest in the cultural history of atheism and post-metaphysical thought in the United States. Klappentext Culture (2020)! and Spaces and Fictions of the Weird and the Fantastic: Ecologies! Geographies! Oddities (2019). In addition to that! he has published widely on literary and visual culture. Currently! he is working on a book project on the cultural history of atheism in Americ The first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study on the genre of the American Weird, exploring its concept and various representations across literature, film, television and music. Zusammenfassung Hitherto classified as a form of genre fiction, or as a particular aesthetic quality of literature by H. P. Lovecraft, the weird has now come to refer to a broad spectrum of artistic practices and expressions including fiction, film, television, photography, music, and visual and performance art. Largely under-theorized so far, The American Weird brings together perspectives from literary, cultural, media and film studies, and from philosophy, to provide a thorough exploration of the weird mode. Separated into two sections – the first exploring the concept of the weird and the second how it is applied through various media – this book generates new approaches to fundamental questions: Can the weird be conceptualized as a generic category, as an aesthetic mode or as an epistemological position? May the weird be thought through in similar ways to what Sianne Ngai calls the zany, the cute, and the interesting? What are the transformations it has undergone aesthetically and politically since its inception in the early twentieth century? Which strands of contemporary critical theory and philosophy have engaged in a dialogue with the discourses of and on the weird? And what is specifically “American” about this aesthetic mode?As the first comprehensive, interdisciplinary study of the weird, this book not only explores the writings of Lovecraft, Caitlín Kiernan, China Miéville, and Jeff VanderMeer, but also the graphic novels of Alan Moore, the music of Captain Beefheart, the television show Twin Peaks and the films of Lily Amirpour, Matthew Barney, David Lynch, and Jordan Peele. Inhaltsverzeichnis Acknowledgements Contributors 1.Introduction: Conceptualizations, Mediations, and Remediations of the American Weird Julius Greve (University of Oldenburg) and Florian Zappe (University of Göttingen) Part One: Concept 2. A Doxa of the American Weird Dan O'Hara (Independent Scholar, UK) 3. The Oozy Set: Toward a Weird(ed) Taxonomy Johnny Murray (Independent Scholar, UK) 4. Validating Weird Fiction as an (Im)Possible Genre An...
