Consuming Mutilation : Affectivity and Corporeal Transgression on Stage and Screen.

This thesis suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, I propose a new affective corporeal model that accounts for the impact of recent films such as Saw (James Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Eli Roth, 2005). I also explore how such a theoretical approach exceeds cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on phenomenology, Pain Studies and Deleuze and Guattari's notion of the 'body without organs'. This thesis finds the seed for spectatorial affect in the dramatic tradition and its corporeal instantaneity. It thus also offers a brief genealogy of affective mutilation as it is evolves in Greek tragedy, Shakespearean drama, the Gothic stage, the theatre of the grand guignol and Artaud's theatre of cruelty. Case studies of representative texts shed light on the affective innovations that cinema draws from in order to convey similar participatory experiences. I consider how contemporary horror appeals directly to the somatic body through a focus on moments of extreme mutilation. I therefore find it necessary to complicate traditional views of the genre as sadistic, and offer a more nuanced conceptualisation of visual mutilation that allows for fluid, organic and non-representational connections between on-screen bodies and spectators. Issues of cinematic identification and alignment are addressed in relation to key texts of the 'torture porn' and 'snuff films' subgenres. Ultimately, I show that the affective corporeal model may be used to analyse a number of texts which utilize and manipulate the organic aspects of human embodiment. Precisely because the chosen texts have not been traditionally studied under an affective lens before, the results render an innovative re-evaluation of their cultural and spectatorial dimensions

Interview with Xavier Aldana Reyes

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader in English Literature and Film in Manchester, a founding member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies, and the author of Spanish Gothic: National Identity, Collaboration and Cultural Adaptation (2017) and Gothic Cinema (2019). His publications in Gothic and horror studies include Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester; 2019), Horror: A Literary History (2016) and Digital Horror: Haunted Technologies, Network Panic and the Found Footage Phenomenon (with Linnie Blake; 2015). Aldana Reyes also edited fiction anthologies for the British Library series, Tales of the Weird, including the following titles: The Gothic Tales of H.P. Lovecraft (2018), The Weird Tales of William Hope Hodgson (2019), Promethean Horrors: Classic Tales of Mad Science (2019) and Roarings from Further Out: Four Weird Novellas, by Algernon Blackwood (2019)

Digital Gothic : an interview with Xavier Aldana Reyes

Xavier Aldana Reyes is Reader/Associate Professor in English Literature and Film at Manchester Metropolitan University and a founder member of the Manchester Centre for Gothic Studies. He is author of Gothic Cinema (2020), Spanish Gothic (2017), Horror Film and Affect (2016) and Body Gothic (2014), and editor of Twenty-First-Century Gothic: An Edinburgh Companion (with Maisha Wester, 2019), Horror: A Literary History (2016) and Digital Horror (with Linnie Blake, 2015). Xavier is chief editor of the Horror Studies book series at the University of Wales Press, and has edited anthologies of Gothic and horror fiction for the British Library. One of Xavier's research interests is the optical dynamics of found footage horror films. On this topic, he has published an article on narrative framing for Gothic Studies, and chapters on affective immersion in the film [REC] (2007) and viewer involvement and guilt in The Last Horror Movie (2003). More recently, he wrote a chapter on 'Online Gothic' that considers social media found footage horror for the collection The Edinburgh Companion to Globalgothic (2022)

Emerging Infectious Literatures and the Zombie Condition

The bookclub format has enabled expert and nonexpert exploration of infection and epidemiology as encountered in popular literature, revealing that fiction focusing on apocalyptic disease often uses the zombie as embodiment of infection, as well as an exemplar of current knowledge on emerging disease

Pleasure and historical memory in Spanish Gothic film

This essay argues that scholars of Spanish culture are too ready to assume a reading of Gothic texts in terms of historical memory, or the rectification of injustices that occurred during the Franco era. It suggests that there has been a neglect of the question of the pleasures of reading or viewing the Gothic, even though these pleasures may well undermine the desire to do retrospective justice to the victims of Franco. Using as a case study the film Insensibles (Juan Carlos Medina 2012) this essay proposes some examples of pleasures that serve to disrupt the recuperation of historical memory, and calls for better awareness of the pleasures of genre in analysing relevant texts

Beyond psychoanalysis:post-millennial horror film and affective theory

This article suggests the possibility that psychoanalytic frameworks may prove insufficient to apprehend the workings of post-millennial horror. Through a sustained exploration of how affect theory may be applied to horror, and, more specifically, how it may exceed cognitivism in favour of an understanding of the genre founded on Deleuze and Guattari’s notion of the ‘body without organs’, I consider the implications of a new theoretical approach that accounts for the popularity of films such as Saw (Wan, 2004) and Hostel (Roth, 2005). The article proceeds by considering how psychoanalysis offers limited help in the study of a form of horror that appeals directly to the somatic body. It then considers the potential benefits of a theory that acknowledges its viscerality and its recent three-dimensional investments

'Who ordered the hamburger with AIDS'?:haematophilic semiotics in Tru(e) Blood

This article analyses the role of blood in the American series True Blood. It opens with a reassessment of sexual readings of vampires that complements previous work on their metaphorical significance for Queer Studies and focuses on the complex AIDS burger sequence in Season One. The article then explores how artificial blood, ‘TruBlood’, may function as a radical attack on vampires which mirrors how commodity culture has adapted to suit the needs of marginal communities. Lastly, the article turns to non-genetic blood ties to show how ‘true’ blood (i.e. personal or individual) is the only substance that actually unites creatures in the series