Event Type
This roundtable will interrogate the possibilities and limitations for poetry as a vehicle for horror (and vice versa) by attending to their shared interests in forms, affects, cultural narratives and taboos, and social functions. Candice Wuehle’s presentation will consider the unheimlich in the work of Sylvia Plath as presented through the poet’s depiction of domestic space as well as her constructions of femininity. Hannah V Warren’s presentation will include an exploration of the uncanny in Sylvia Plath’s poetry through the lens of automata theory. Warren will share excerpts from her own creative work, an in-progress poetry collection named Sylvia, which compiles and manipulates this research to form a narrative point of view from a female-coded automaton figure. Maxime Berclaz’s presentation will consider the utopian possibilities of horror as they manifest in poetry and how the poetic context allows for a medium-specific articulation of utopian horror. Berclaz will argue that this horror is neither imposed onto poetry nor dependent on allusions to other media, but rather is made uniquely possible by poetry and horror’s rich symbiosis. Zachary Anderson will focus on two constituent categories of horror: the weird and the eerie. Drawing on Mark Fisher’s definitions, Anderson will examine how these categories map onto Sawako Nakayasu’s Mouth: Eats Color, a text that uses strategies of déjà vu, contagion, and automatism to confront and subvert the horror of “untranslatability.”