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"The hero of submission" :Masochism and the aesthetic problem in horror (Bob Flanagan, Tobias George Smollett, Horace Walpole)

Record Type:	Electronic resources : Monograph/item
Title/Author:	"The hero of submission" :
Reminder of title:	Masochism and the aesthetic problem in horror (Bob Flanagan, Tobias George Smollett, Horace Walpole)
Author:	Neumann, Frederick Gustave.
Description:	335 p.
Notes:	Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-04, Section: A, page: 1381.
Notes:	Supervisor: Jane M. Gaines.
Contained By:	Dissertation Abstracts International65-04A.
Subject:	Literature, English.
Online resource:	http://pqdd.sinica.edu.tw/twdaoapp/servlet/advanced?query=3129072
ISBN:	0496763326

"The hero of submission" :Masochism and the aesthetic problem in horror (Bob Flanagan, Tobias George Smollett, Horace Walpole)
Neumann, Frederick Gustave.

"The hero of submission" :Masochism and the aesthetic problem in horror (Bob Flanagan, Tobias George Smollett, Horace Walpole) [electronic resource] - 335 p.

Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-04, Section: A, page: 1381.

Thesis (Ph.D.)--Duke University, 2003.

Finally, I conclude that horror is the art of suicide, feeding our fantasy of the presubjective state of erotic and thanatotic fusion, by allowing us to die our death and live it too. The pleasure of horror is the (un)pleasure of masochism; the genre restores to us our rightful anxiety. And critics, as subjects in and agents of culture, can hardly but respond to it with radical ambivalence.

ISBN: 0496763326Subjects--Topical Terms:

212435
Literature, English.

"The hero of submission" :Masochism and the aesthetic problem in horror (Bob Flanagan, Tobias George Smollett, Horace Walpole)
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500 $a Source: Dissertation Abstracts International, Volume: 65-04, Section: A, page: 1381.
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520 # $a Finally, I conclude that horror is the art of suicide, feeding our fantasy of the presubjective state of erotic and thanatotic fusion, by allowing us to die our death and live it too. The pleasure of horror is the (un)pleasure of masochism; the genre restores to us our rightful anxiety. And critics, as subjects in and agents of culture, can hardly but respond to it with radical ambivalence.
520 # $a In Chapter 1, I explore the links between horror and the performance art of Bob Flanagan, "Supermasochist," and conclude that horror shares with Flanagan's art a visceral critique of constitutive cultural oppositions which ultimately casts a willing audience as masochists in a larger dynamic, while affirming the subject's ongoing anxieties concerning psychic selfhood and bodily integrity. Chapter 2 argues for a masochistic construction of aesthetic experience, derived in part from Freud's theories on identification and group psychology. Taking Smollett's proto-gothic Adventures of Ferdinand Count Fathom as my text, I examine how, intentionally or not, the author's self-lacerating Dedication to himself and his modal cross-breeding undermine both the psycho-dynamics of aesthetic identification and the illusion of subjective identity, and so create the conditions for the panic which the Gothic proper and its descendants will exploit. In Chapter 3, I examine how Walpole's The Castle of Otranto establishes an interstitial form for subsequent horror texts which is not only monstrous, but also mimics the psyche's monstrously self-conflicted structure. Otranto's frequent recurrence to its own textual surface confronts the subject with his/her own textuality, while its flattening of figure and ground challenges the illusion of depth which distances the subject from the originary and ongoing psychic simultaneity of Eros and Thanatos.
520 # $a Whether dismissive or recuperative, critics of the horror genre, literary and cinematic, almost invariably evade the question of why horror might be desirable as an aesthetic effect. In this study, I propose an answer to that question which may also explain its having been so seldom addressed. Building upon the later Freud's theorization of Thanatos and "primary masochism," I contend that, as pornography is to the libido, horror is to the death drive.
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