‘Each bears his own ghosts’: How the classics speak to these days of fear, anger and presidential candidates stalking the land
You thought Spooky Season ended at midnight on October 31? Here in the U.S., Rachel Hadas, professor of English at Rutgers University, writes, “A week before the election, everyone seems to be afraid.”
“Our fear can bring us together. It can also tear us apart,” she writes. “Halloween provides the language to talk about threats, real or imagined.”
Some people love to scare themselves in an already scary world − here’s the psychology of why
In an article related to the one above, Sarah Kollat, teaching professor os psychology at Penn State University and author of thriller novels, examines the question “Why seek manufactured fear for entertainment when the world offers real terror in such large quantities?”
Her answer? “By eliciting powerful, positive emotions, strengthening social networks and preparing you for your worst fears,” scary stories, movies, and experiences allow us to rehearse survival skills in a safe, controlled environment.
Seven True Stories That Read Like Thrillers
Jared Sullivan observes that people, especially the American public, are drawn to underdog stories, “in which an average person, through some combination of luck and gumption, trounces a far more formidable opponent in a lopsided conflict.” Here he recommends seven nonfiction books that tell true stories but read like fiction.
Best Books of the Year 2024
I’m a little late at reporting this, but Barnes & Noble got a head start on “the year’s best books” lists even before Halloween. They’ve got all the list possibilities covered: fiction, mystery & thriller, history, fantasy, picture books, memoir, horror, young adult, audiobooks, romance, cookbooks.
They’ve also announced their Discover Prize Winner for 2024: Swift River by Essie Chambers. This award honors the best debut novel among Barnes & Noble’s Discover Monthly Picks: “This long-standing program is outstandingly successful in identifying new talent in the literary landscape and has been instrumental in launching the careers of many acclaimed writers.”
Why Han Kang’s Nobel Matters
Yung In Chae, assistant editor at The Yale Review and a PhD candidate in history at Yale University, explains: “Han Kang’s writing, her triumph, shows that histories of trauma from Gwangju to Gaza do not belong in the shadows. They belong to the world of literature. They belong to world literature.”
The Paradox of the Nobel Prize in Literature
Alex Taek-Gwang Lee, a professor of cultural studies who teaches critical theory and philosophy at Kyung Hee University in Seoul, Korea, discusses the significance of Han Kang’s award of the Nobel Prize in Literature:
Even as authors reach for universal themes, their works remain inextricably woven into the tapestry of their cultural, historical, and linguistic origins. These national and ethnic nuances are not merely decorative elements but fundamental threads in the fabric of literary creation, influencing how works are received, interpreted, and positioned within the global literary landscape.
All Travelers are Infiltrators: An Introduction to the Study of Travel Writing
Tyler Thier writes that travel writing as a “literary subgenre has arguably been around since the dawn of written material but didn’t emerge as a distinct sector of scholarship and pedagogy until roughly the 1980s.” Travel writing “straddles the boundaries of personal essay, memoir, journalism, cultural criticism, food writing, nature writing, and more dominant umbrellas like fiction and poetry.”
Thier offers “a list of some exciting work that this corner of research has to offer, from analyzing primary sources, to theorizing the treatment of non-human entities in one’s worldview, to guided tourism and ‘ruin porn,’ to confrontational screeds and immersion manuals.”
Because this article is from JSTOR, it includes links to many of the resources listed.
Could Steampunk Save Us?
“A goofy-seeming sci-fi subgenre holds useful lessons about managing technology in an accelerating age.”
Joshua Rothman describes steampunk, a genre of science fiction “in which nineteenth- and twentieth-century technologies are merged.” In such stories, Rothman writes, “It’s fascinating to imagine, implausibly, how ravishing technology could be constructed out of yesterday’s parts.”
He then asks, “But what if the world really is constructed that way?” Read the examples he offers of how, in fact, today’s technology IS constructed that way.
The Barnes & Noble Book of the Year
Barnes & Noble announces its short list for their Book of the Year award. The winner will be announced on November 15th.
The Everlasting Joy of Terrifying Children
“Pop-horror writers like R. L. Stine see fear and storytelling the way the Victorians did.”
Adrienne LaFrance, executive editor of The Atlantic, writes that “the Victorians . . . reinvented children’s literature, sweeping away the previous century’s didactic spelling books and etiquette guides and replacing them with stories written for the sheer pleasure of reading.” But as culture shifted in the 20th century, children’s literature shifted away from “the darkest elements of classic fairy-tale stories” to “inherently fearless protagonists, such as superheroes.”
LaFrance looks at how the writings of R.L. Stine once again seek to pull young readers into “what children already feel so viscerally: that the otherworldly is, in fact, always at hand, if just out of sight. That the fullness of the universe is right there, if you are brave enough to search for it, at the end of the darkened hallway, under the bed, through the looking glass, or straight on till morning.”
© 2024 by Mary Daniels Brown
