Roger Luckhurst (he of the “savaged by Joshi” fame) pops up in the Times Higher education newspaper today, with an article “Tentacles: the new fangs”…

Sea monsters are inspiring new critical theory and can even be a useful tool in the seminar room

Who knew?

* Cole Nelson (2014), “Devils in the Wilderness”: The Character of Wilderness in American Horror Fiction, University of Wisconsin-La Crosse Journal of Undergraduate Research XVII, 2014. “The Dunwich Horror” is one of three texts analysed. Explores the idea that description of wilderness in horror might be influenced by the manner of social deviance at the time of writing)

* Eric LaFreniere (2010), “An Awe-ful Integrity: The Science-Fiction Horror of H.P. Lovecraft” (2nd Place Winner of the long research essay category in the Madison Writing Awards 2010, James Madison University)

* Olmo Pedro Castrillo Cano (2013), “Memoria Explicativa del Trabajo de Fin de Master, “The Shadow over Innsmouth”” (In Spanish. Title roughly translates as: “An Explanatory Memorandum on The Work of The Master in “The Shadow Over Innsmouth””. For the University of Seville, Dept. of Communication. Seems to be an analysis of “Innsmouth”, possibly as part of adapating it as a film? script?)

* S.T. Joshi (trans. Alexander Pechmann), Das Ubernaturlich Grauen in der Literatur (In German. Appears to be a substantial free PDF sample of Golkonda Verlag’s German language edition of S.T. Joshi’s Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature)

* Vicente Quirarte (2014), “Morir en Azcapotzalco”, Revista de la Universidad de Mexico, No. 122, 2014. (In Spanish. Note that the HTML version of this article appears prematurely truncated. Muses on what might have happened had Lovecraft followed Barlow into exile in Mexico City, in order to recuperate from his survived illness. The author supposes that there Barlow would have gladly acted as typist for Lovecraft, and the climate would also have encouraged new fiction writing. With a legacy from Barlow’s aunt, the two friends would set up house together and Lovecraft discover a new sunset paradise amid the summer estate villas and strict social hierarchy of Mexico. Lovecraft would learn to read and write Spanish, and thus directly influence the peak years of early magic realism. However, the illness would return and Lovecraft dies in 1945. Barlow — having the income from Lovecraft’s estate and so not needing to teach classes — escapes homosexual blackmail by a student and thus lives to 80, and so Derleth never gets a look-in. These musings are made on the occasion of the publication of a book of Spanish translations of the works of Barlow and Lovecaft. The PDF version of this article appears to be a longer version of the 2012 blog post “Lovecraft, Barlow y Azcapotzalco”).

* Stefano Lazzarin (2014), “Il volto velato: Iperbole e reticenza in Howard Phillips Lovecraft, e nel racconto fantastico e d’orrore otto-novecentesco”, Between journal, Vol 4, No.7, 2014. (In Italian. “Lovecraft … as part of a certain line of nineteenth- and twentieth-century fantastic genre and horror literature [which] plays with — and reflects on — the rhetorical devices of hyperbole and reticence. In the texts examined by the author, what cannot be represented is chased throughout the story and is finally revealed, but only to leave room for an irresolvable ambiguity … The last horror, unnameable and unthinkable, is nothing more than an empty signifier.” In Italian.)

72nd World SF Convention, London in August 2014. The keynote academic speaker is Isabella van Elferen (author of the book Gothic Music: The Sounds of the Uncanny), on “In Space, No One Can Hear David Bowie: A Brief History of Unheard Music”…

Few authors have described the terrifying silence of space more grippingly than H. P. Lovecraft, whose stories narrate the “black seas of infinity” surrounding human life. But the vacuum of space, Lovecraft asserts, listens. Through the “audient void” of his universe voiceless sounds resonate. Detestable, gigantic, absurd … What could this arch-alien possibly sound like?

MLA 2015 Vancouver, session roundtable on “Weird Fiction, Weird Methods”. Does weird fiction have a single coherent approach and origin? Does it need to be read and studied differently than other fiction? Can it find a place in academia, or is it just too… weird?

* Kate Marshall (elements of American naturalist literature may have been co-opted by the early weird)

* S. T. Joshi (recapping Lovecraft’s theories of the weird)

* Ali Sperling (the early literary weird should be understood as part of the history of modernist literature)

* Matthew Taylor (what the new Speculative Realist philosophy has taken from the old weird, especially re: autonomous self-generating systems that have unhuman frames of reference)

* Eileen Joy (can academics develop a weird methodology for weird literature, by borrowing ideas from the philosophers of OOO Speculative Realism?)

I’m told the Gothic Studies academics at universities mostly don’t much care for Lovecraft, feeling he doesn’t fit in with their canon or their leftist politics. But if you were considering starting an academic journal a touch more friendly to the old gent, then note there’s to be a Gothic Networking Day for postgraduates and academics. It’s in Manchester in the north-west of England, on the 12th July 2014. It will including an afternoon of sessions on publishing academic journals in Gothic Studies, so you’ll get to meet some of the people who are already editing such journals — of which the UK now has quite a few.