Joel Faflak

My fields of interest are Romantic & nineteenth-century literature & culture; psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theory, & histories of psychoanalysis & psychiatry; theory & criticism; 18th- & 19th-century philosophy; cultural studies & popular culture; American film musicals

Introduction : deviance and defiance

The thirteenth annual meeting of the North American Society for the Study of Romanticism took place August 13–16, 2005 in Montreal, Canada, sponsored by Université de Montréal. The conference was held in conjunction with the seventh biennial meeting of the International Gothic Association (August 11–14) and was the first major collaborative effort between NASSR and IGA. The theme for both conferences was “Deviance and Defiance,” to underscore the fact that in recent years the interrelation of Gothic and Romantic studies has emerged as a central topic of scholarly study

"Why Reasonable Children Don’t Think that Nutcracker is Alive or that the Mouse King is Real"

Zunshine’s essay draws on recent research in developmental psychology and cognitive evolutionary anthropology to examine emotional responses to supernatural events by the child and adult characters of E. T. A. Hoffmann’s "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King" (1816), as well as to revisit the traditional literary critical view of those responses, according to which the tale’s main protagonist, the seven-year-old Marie, possesses a “Romantic imagination” (in contrast to her philistine parents). Zunshine demonstrates, first, that Marie’s stubborn insistence on the reality of Nutcracker and the Mouse King is well in keeping with what developmental psychologists today would expect from children of her age group; and, second, that when Marie’s parents are called to comment on their daughter’s account of her magical adventures, their stodgy response is influenced by a very particular kind of social pressure under which they find themselves. While the essay’s primary goal is to emphasize the developmental and social aspects of the characters’ attitudes toward what is real, Zunshine also discusses the legitimacy of using recent research by cognitive scientists for examining the psychology and interpersonal dynamics of early nineteenth-century fictional characters

From Romantic Gothic to Victorian Medievalism: 1817 and 1877

"The Cambridge History of the Gothic was conceived in 2015, when Linda Bree, then Editorial Director at Cambridge University Press, first suggested the idea to us

Speaking of Godwin's Caleb Williams: The Talking Cure and the Psychopathology of Enlightenment

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Do impact spatters depend on impact velocity, impact energy or impactor shape?

This experimental study investigates the parameters controlling the spatial distribution and size distribution of blood spatter stains. An experimental setup consisting of two cylinders colliding along their main axes is used to produce spatter patterns, under conditions where the impact velocity and kinetic energy of the impact are independently controlled. The resulting spatter patterns are scanned and made available as digital images. Characteristic distributions of stain sizes and stain positions, as well as the number of stains, are measured. The influence of the velocity and kinetic energy of the impact, as well as the shape of the impactor, is quantified and interpreted. An energy analysis is performed and provides a criterion based on dimensionless parameters to determine which impact conditions influence the spatter pattern. High-resolution images of the 19 spatter patterns produced during the study are made available in an open-access repository.This version of the article has been accepted for publication, after peer review (when applicable) and is subject to Springer Nature’s AM terms of use, but is not the Version of Record and does not reflect post-acceptance improvements, or any corrections. The Version of Record is available online at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s00348-021-03341-1. Copyright 2021 The Author(s). Posted with permission