This course examines weirdness in 19th century literature, culture, and scholarship. It will explore early precursors like ghost stories and Gothic tales. The goals are to analyze how styles and forms from this era probed human limits and to use contemporary weird methods in re-reading texts. Weird content in popular culture destabilized definitions. Weird forms disrupted conventions. Recent turns toward the nonhuman in philosophy and literary studies have unsettled the humanist perspective. The course will consider the roles of the weird historically and how writers created weird styles. It will also explore applying weird methods to 19th century works and activating their inherent weirdness.

1. Descent into the Weird
The Weird Nineteenth Century

2. • Weird content
• weird in popular culture, literature,
and arts
• weird scholarship moving beyond the
legacy of anthropocentrism
• Weird forms
• waywardness of the weird is often
about the slipperiness of forms
• unsettling of conventions
• Weird methods
• the recent nonhuman turn in
philosophy
• the recent method wars in literary
study
Weirdness in literature,
literary history, &
literary studies

3. • To track explore early precursors to
weird fiction in ghost stories, Gothic
tales, supernatural fiction, satires,
metaphysical sketches
• To attune ourselves to affects and
atmospheres of anxiety, dread, terror,
and the uncanny
• To push through the mundane into
“the colossal orbs” of the alien,
strange, sublime, and metaphysical
• To examine how different styles and
forms probe the limits of human
knowledge and understanding
• To explore contemporary methods and
theories that veer toward the weird
from course description
Goals of the Course

4. Where/What is the Weird?
• The Weird is incredibly difficult to define because it unsettles
definitions and boundaries
• As affect and mode of thought, the weird operates through
disrupting our ordinary perception and experience, creating
confusion and a sense of disorientation.
• Weird as an affect; a sensation; an inflection or tone; a mode of
writing, thinking, and being rather than a genre
• Weird as a method/mode that unsettles the human and
humanist thought (anthropocentric frames of analysis)
• The general effect of all of these turns, veerings, and
transformations in popular culture and scholarship is a strange
degree of estrangement

5. The Weird Nineteenth Century
Questions of the course
• CONTENT/HISTORY
• Where, how, and why do some 19th-century literary texts veer toward the weird?
• What are the different roles or functions of the weird in 19th century American
literature? What are its affordances? How can we read the “weird” historically?
• FORM/STYLE
• What makes a literary form, style, or structure “weird” in the nineteenth century?
How and why do writers create “weird” styles, forms, hybrid genres, etc.?
• How do “weird” forms invite us to read, think, feel in alternative ways?
• METHOD
• How can we read (or re-read) 19th century literary texts using weird methods?
• How can new or alternative methods of reading render literary texts weird or
activate the weirdness already inherent in a text?

6. “The allure that the weird” has “to do with a fascination for the outside, for
that which lies beyond standard perception cognition and experience”
“the weird is that which does not belong. The weird brings to the familiar
something which ordinarily lies beyond it, and which cannot be reconciled
with the ‘homely’ (even as its negation).” (10-11)
Mark Fisher
TheWeirdandtheEerie
Fascination for the Outside
H.P. Lovecraft, “The Colour out of Space”
“at the end of the tests the college scientists were forced to own that they could
not place it. It was nothing of this earth, but a piece of the great outside; and
as such dowered with outside properties and obedient to outside laws.”

7. What is
Weird
Fiction?
The Old Weird
&
The New Weird

8. • The Old Weird can be dated
between 1880 and 1940
• Pulp magazines (e.g. Weird Tales)
• H.P. Lovecraft defined the weird
tale as an instance of “non-
supernatural cosmic art”
• Lovecraft’s 1927 essay
“Supernatural Horror in
Literature”
Old Weird

9. • “New Weird” coined by M. John Harrison
in 2003
• Associated primarily with the fiction and
criticism of China Miéville. But also Jeff
VanderMeer.
• Speculative fiction with strange
relationship to genre (at the edges of
genres such as supernatural, gothic,
surrealism, magical realism, fantasy,
science-fiction, horror)
• Welcomes the alien/monstrous as sites of
affirmation & becoming (not limited to
cosmic horror)
• Closely tied to ontological turn in the
humanities
• Object oriented ontology (OOO),
speculative realism (SR), new
materialism, and dark ecology
New Weird

10. • Fiction can operate as a medium
for thought with the capacity to
engage critical questions about
• nonhuman agencies
• questions of sentience
• problems of scale & point of
view
• how human frameworks
obscure the material world
• strange influences between
things and objects
New Weird

11. • A desire for something more,
something hidden beyond the
mundane
• characters often pulled into the
“unfamiliar,” “unknown,” “abyss”
• glimpses of worlds beyond our own
that can’t be found in science or
religion
• focus on the indifferent and the
cosmic
• atmospheres of dread, anxiety, terror
• suspension or abolition of the
rational
• grapple with the fearful and
fascinating mystery of life
• nature evacuated of spiritual or
transcendental meaning (replaced
with terror or alien presence)
• strange beauty intertwined with
terror
• defamiliarization & estrangement
• dark epiphanies (dark sublime)
• linguistic excesses
• Intertextual and hybrid genre
Qualities of Contemporary
Weird Fiction

12. • The weird and weird fiction
involves the estrangement of our
sense of reality (creates affects of
awe, terror, estrangement,
confusion, alienation)
• China Miéville stresses the origin
of the weird in the experience of
“awe,” and “its undermining of
the quotidian.”
Estrangement

13. Russian formalism - estrangement (a technique of
art, but also a technique of the weird)
“…art exists the one may recover the sensation of life;
it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone
stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation
of things as they are perceived and not as they are
known. The technique of art is to make objects
‘unfamiliar’, to make forms difficult, to increase the
difficulty and length of perception because the
process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and
must be prolonged. Art is a way of experiencing the
artfulness of an object: the object is not important”
Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique” (1917)

14. Name for a variety of recent and current critical,
theoretical, and philosophical approaches to the
humanities and social sciences.
Approaches that decenter the human in favor of a turn
toward and concern for the nonhuman (animals,
affectivity, bodies, organic and geophysical systems,
materiality, or technologies)
TheNonhumanTurn

15. • Nonhuman doesn’t make claim about teleology or progress into
something posthuman or beyond human
• Nonhuman turn insists that the human has always coevolved and/or
coexisted with the nonhuman
• Arguments against human exceptionalism, which is often expressed
in conceptual dualisms that separate human from nonhuman
• Opposed to linguistic or representational turn in 1970s/1980s (e.g.
textual, cultural, ideological, aesthetic turns). They prefer “non-
representational theory”
• Most also involved a critique of social constructivism for stripping
the nonhuman world of agency and inherent meanings
From Richard Grusin, The Nonhuman Turn (21st Century Studies)
TheNonhumanTurn

16. TheDescentintotheM
aelstrom