The American Weird: Concept and Medium - Paperback

by Julius Greve (Editor), Florian Zappe (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

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 an Assistant Professor of American Studies at the Georg-August-University Göttingen, Germany. He is the author of books on William S. Burroughs ('Control Machines' und 'Dispositive' - Eine foucaultsche Analyse der Machtstrukturen im Romanwerk von William S. Burroughs zwischen 1959 und 1968, 2008) and Kathy Acker (Das Zwischen schreiben - Transgression und avantgardistisches Erbe bei Kathy Acker, 2013), as well as the co-editor of the essay collection SurveillanceSocietyCulture (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 America.