The Discipline of the Eye: Lovecraft’s Visual Epistemology, Atmospheric Proof, and the Horror of Display
| Autoři | |
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| Rok publikování | 2026 |
| Druh | Další prezentace na konferencích |
| Fakulta / Pracoviště MU | |
| Citace | |
| Popis | This paper argues that H. P. Lovecraft fashions cosmic horror through a paired technique of refusal and display: he bars the archive and withholds quotation, yet disciplines the eye to treat atmosphere as evidence. Reading his tales, his letters, and his essay “Supernatural Horror in Literature,” it traces a visual epistemology in which outline, surface, hue, and scene operate as atmospheric proof—signals of an alien order that resists an inventory of monsters. Readings of At the Mountains of Madness, “Pickman’s Model,” and “The Dreams in the Witch House” show how images (by Albrecht Dürer, Nicholas Roerich, and others) and “semantic wards” (placenames, repositories) coerce perception while keeping full disclosure out of reach. Indeterminacy, shared by narrator and reader, forces imaginative substitution, making the reader complicit in producing what cannot be stably seen. The result is an initiation in which seeing does not deliver mastery: the visible world becomes a destabilizing threshold that fractures selfhood and exposes the ethical risk of trained dread. |
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