Hostname: page-component-8448b6f56d-42gr6 Total loading time: 0 Render date: 2024-04-23T19:16:47.727Z Has data issue: false hasContentIssue false

JAMES, MARSH, WILDE: UNCANNY KINETICS IN THE 1890S

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  10 May 2016

Aaron Worth*
Affiliation:
Boston University

Extract

Old media can be scary – much scarier, ceteris paribus, than other objects of comparable antiquity. Film and television directors, as well as writers of fiction, who traffic in chills know that few things can insert a palpable sense of dread into a mise-en-scène more economically than a strategically placed daguerreotype (its dour or baleful inhabitants staring out from their world of sepia), a tinny voice issuing from an ancient radio, or the needle of a Victrola bobbing cracklingly in grooves of black vinyl. On the other hand, it is at least as much of a truism to say that new media, too, come freighted with anxieties as well as exhilarations: otherwise we would be less susceptible to narratives about being enslaved by a transpersonal Matrix, zombified by our cell phones, and so on. It should not surprise, then, that in our own media-saturated age a host of tropes and topoi derived from information technologies have tended to recur again and again in works of horror film and fiction. Many of these involve interactions between and among media: old technologies acting like new ones, and vice versa; categorial blurrings and hybridizations involving different media within a particular ecology, or the sense of an uncanny partnership or cooperation between them; and so on. Also common are tableaux of trans- or extra-medial transgression: e.g., the figure of dread escaping the representational field and entering the “real world” of the story. Then, too, there is the figure of prodigious or preternatural (and usually unasked-for) perceptual extension or augmentation, the trope of the technology that enables, or compels, one to see and/or hear more than is good for one.

Type
Research Article
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 2016 

Access options

Get access to the full version of this content by using one of the access options below. (Log in options will check for institutional or personal access. Content may require purchase if you do not have access.)

References

WORKS CITED

Arnold, H. F.The Night Wire.” The Weird: A Compendium of Strange and Dark Stories. Ed. Ann and VanderMeer, Jeff. New York: TOR, 2011. 154–58.Google Scholar
Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction.” Illuminations. Ed. Arendt, Hannah. New York: Schocken, 1969. 217–52.Google Scholar
Bloom, Clive. “M. R. James and His Fiction.” Creepers: British Horror and Fantasy in the Twentieth Century. Ed. Bloom, Clive. London: Pluto, 1993. 6471.Google Scholar
Bram Stoker's Dracula. Dir. Francis Ford Coppola. Perf. Gary Oldman, Winona Ryder. Columbia, 1992. DVD.Google Scholar
Briggs, Asa, and Burke, Peter. A Social History of the Media: From Gutenberg to the Internet. Cambridge: Polity, 2002.Google Scholar
Briggs, Julia. Night Visitors: The Rise and Fall of the English Ghost Story. London: Faber, 1977.Google Scholar
Ceram, C. W.Archaeology of the Cinema. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1965.Google Scholar
Cox, J. Randolph.Ghostly Antiquary: The Stories of Montague Rhodes James.” English Literature in Transition (1880–1920) 12.4 (1969): 197202.Google Scholar
Cox, Michael. James, M. R.: An Informal Portrait. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1983.Google Scholar
Fauconnier, Gilles, and Turner, Mark. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind's Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic, 2002.
Freud, Sigmund. The Uncanny. Trans. Alix Strachey. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Ed. Leitch, Vincent B.. New York: W. W. Norton, 2001. 929–52.Google Scholar
Geertz, Clifford. “Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight.” Daedalus 134.4 (Fall 2005): 5686.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. “Hand and Eye: Excavating a New Technology of the Image in the Victorian Era.” Victorian Studies 54.3 (Spring 2012): 495515.Google Scholar
Gunning, Tom. Introduction. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Trans. Crangle, Richard. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000. xix-xxx.Google Scholar
Hodgson, William Hope. Carnacki the Ghost-Finder. St. Albans: Panther, 1973.Google Scholar
Hoffmann, E. T. W. [sic]. The Sandman. Tales from the German, Comprising Specimens from the Most Celebrated Authors. Trans. Oxenford, John and Feiling, C. A.. London: Chapman and Hall, 1844.Google Scholar
James, M. R.Collected Ghost Stories. Ed. Jones, Darryl. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011.Google Scholar
James, M. R.. Count Magnus and Other Ghost Stories. Ed. Joshi, S. T.. London: Penguin, 2005.Google Scholar
Jones, Anna Maria. “Conservation of Energy, Individual Agency, and Gothic Terror in Richard Marsh's The Beetle, or, What's Scarier than an Ancient, Evil, Shape-Shifting Bug?Victorian Literature and Culture 39 (2011): 6585.Google Scholar
Jones, Darryl. Introduction. James, M. R. Collected Ghost Stories. Ed. Jones, Darry. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2011. ix-xxx.Google Scholar
Keep, Christopher. “Technology and Information: Accelerating Developments. ”A Companion to the Victorian Novel. Ed. Brantlinger, P. and Thesing, W. B.. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 137–54.Google Scholar
King, Stephen. “The Sun Dog.” Four Past Midnight. New York: Signet, 1991. 605763.Google Scholar
Kittler, Friedrich. Optical Media: Berlin Lectures 1999. Trans. Enns, Anthony. Cambridge: Polity, 2010.Google Scholar
Kreilkamp, Ivan. “A Voice without a Body: The Phonographic Logic of ‘Heart of Darkness.’Victorian Studies 40.2 (Winter 1997): 211–44.Google Scholar
Lacefield, Kristen, ed. The Scary Screen: Media Anxiety in The Ring. Burlington: Ashgate, 2010.Google Scholar
Lane, Anthony. “Fright Nights: The Horror of M. R. James.” New Yorker (13 Feb. 2012): 105–08.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, Howard Philips. The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories. Ed. Joshi, S. T.. New York: Penguin, 1999.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, Howard Philips. The Dreams in the Witch House and Other Weird Stories. Ed. Joshi, S. T.. New York: Penguin, 2004.Google Scholar
Lovecraft, Howard Philips. Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York: Ben Abramson, 1945.Google Scholar
Mannoni, Laurent. The Great Art of Light and Shadow: Archaeology of the Cinema. Trans. Crangle, Richard. Exeter: U of Exeter P, 2000.Google Scholar
Marsh, Richard. The Beetle: A Mystery. London: Penguin, 2008.Google Scholar
Marsh, Richard. Curios. Kansas City: Valancourt, 2007.Google Scholar
Marsh, Richard. The Seen and the Unseen. Chicago: Valancourt, 2007.Google Scholar
McLuhan, Marshall. Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1964.Google Scholar
Murphy, Ryan. “‘Cracked’ Google Glass Could Mean Hacked ‘Eyesight.’” 3 May 2013. Web.Google Scholar
Otis, Laura. Networking: Communicating With Bodies and Machines in the Nineteenth Century. Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 2001.Google Scholar
Parkinson, David. History of Film. London: Thames and Hudson, 1995.Google Scholar
Pater, Walter. The Renaissance: Studies in Art and Poetry. Ed. Phillips, Adam. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1986.Google Scholar
Pfaff, Richard William. Montague Rhodes James. London: Scolar, 1980.Google Scholar
Powell, Kerry. “Tom, Dick, and Dorian Gray: Magic-Picture Mania in Late Victorian Fiction.” Philological Quarterly 62.2 (Spring 1983): 147–70.Google Scholar
Richards, Thomas. The Imperial Archive: Knowledge and the Fantasy of Empire. London: Verso, 1993.Google Scholar
The Ring. Dir. Gore Verbinski. Perf. Naomi Watts, Martin Henderson. DreamWorks Pictures, 2002. DVD.Google Scholar
Ringu. Dir. Hideo Nakata. Perf. Nanako Matsushima, Miki Nakatani, Yûko Takeuchi. Toho, 1998. DVD.Google Scholar
Rossel, Deac. Living Pictures: The Origins of the Movies. Albany: State U of New York P, 1998.Google Scholar
Sconce, Jeffrey. Haunted Media: Electronic Presence from Telegraphy to Television. Durham: Duke UP, 2000.Google Scholar
Sinister. Dir. Scott Derrickson. Perf. Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance. Summit Entertainment, 2012. DVD.Google Scholar
Sullivan, Jack. Elegant Nightmares: The English Ghost Story from Le Fanu to Blackwood. Athens: Ohio UP, 1978.Google Scholar
Wicke, Jennifer. “Vampiric Typewriting: Dracula and Its Media.” ELH 59.2 (Summer 1992): 467–93.Google Scholar
Wilde, Oscar. The Picture of Dorian Gray. Oscar Wilde: The Major Works. Ed. Murray, Isobel. Oxford: Oxford UP, 1989. 47214.Google Scholar
Worth, Aaron. “Imperial Transmissions: H. G. Wells, 1897–1901.” Victorian Studies 53.1 (Autumn 2010): 6589.Google Scholar