Notes for 4 February 2016

LITCS 114
Teaching Associate: Patrick Mooney
Bldg. 494, room 160B
Winter 2016

• Winding up Foucault ...
  • Presentation by Christine on part V of The History of Sexuality, vol. 1.
  • Other topics on Foucault, if they aren't brought up:
    • The modernist power-inversion: Since the classical age the West has undergone a profound transformation of these mechanisms of power. (136ff)
      • genocide, the death penalty: 138–139
    • endpoints of the development of the power over life: the body as a machine and the species body (139)
    • biopower: 140
      • and capitalism: 140–41
      • and the development of institutions and techniques: 141
    • history, knowledge, power: 142
    • bio-history and bio-power: what might be called a society's threshold of modernity has been reached when the life of the species is wagered on its own political strategies (143)
    • development of techniques and strategies of power: 143–45
    • sex and sexuality as formed in this matrix of the development of bio-power: 145ff.
      • sexuality and race replacing blood as analytical and symbolic modes: 148–50
    • Objection: Foucault ignores sex: 151
      • response: sex,, like sexuality, has a unity only because of a historical development. (151–54)
    • Historical development of sexuality as central to identity: 156–57.
• Some notes on Lovecraft
  • Howard Phillips Lovecraft (1890–1937)
    • Best known for his stories of cosmic horror, particularly those associated with the fictional deity Cthulhu.
    • Work – primarily short stories – was primarily published in pulp magazines, especially Weird Tales.
    • Has been greatly influential on later 20th-century horror, science-fiction, and fantasy writers.
  • Cosmic horror or cosmicism
    • Lovecraft’s work takes the position that humanity is insignificant to the universe as a whole (and the universe may in fact contain powerful entities that are hostile to humans).
    • Common themes in his work that are implications of this position:
      • Knowledge and understanding lead to madness.
      • Truth (the universe, its structure, its scale) is, in the final analysis, incomprehensible.
      • Humanity is influenced by non-human forces.
      • Guilt and other effects of one’s decisions are heritable.
  • Arthur Jermyn and the hybrid apes
    • Especially it was unwise [of Sir Wade] to rave of the living things that might haunt such a place; of creatures half of the jungle and half of the impiously aged city. (74)
    • Sir Wade’s wild tales of a lost city peopled by strange hybrid creatures. […] certain legends of white apes ruled by a white god (75) a nameless, unsuspected race of jungle hybrids (76)
  • Arthur’s heritage
    • Some of the neighboring families who had heard tales of old Sir Wade Jermyn’s unseen Portuguese wife declared that her Latin blood must be showing itself. (76)
    • The ape-princess, it was said, became the consort of a great white god who had come out of the West. For a long time they had reigned over the city together, but when they had a son, all three went away. (76)
    • of poetic rather than scientific temperament (76)
  • The hybrid Jermyns
    • his second son, Nevil, a singularly repellent person who seemed to combine the surliness of Philip Jermyn with the hauteur of the Brightholmes, ran away with a vulgar dancer. (75)
    • With this gorilla Alfred Jermyn was singularly fascinated, and on many occasions the two would eye each other for long periods through the intervening bars. (75)
    • They did not expect to hear Sir Alfred Jermyn emit a shrill, inhuman scream. (75)
  • Offhand (and direct) racism
    • The stuffed goddess was a nauseous sight, withered and eaten away, but it was clearly a mummified white ape of some unknown species, less hairy than any recorded variety, and infinitely nearer mankind—quite shockingly so. (78)
    • In addition to the concerns about hybridism, you might consider other statements explicitly about race:
      • he [Sir Wade] would permit no one to care for his young son save a loathsome black woman from Guinea. (74)
      • it remained for a European to improve on the data offered by old Mwanu. (77)
  • Horror, in this way, shows us our inherent skepticism about absolute progress. […] Dracula, The Call of Cthulu [sic], or The Island of Dr. Moreau present a dark-regressive shadow image of the bright and progressive veneer of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century optimism. The origins of modern horror provide a vivid presentation of the inherent moral weaknesses and often-present darkness in the human imagination. (Philip Tallon, Through a Mirror, Darkly [2010])
• Today's whiteboard snapshots