Love of Ruins, The: Letters on Lovecraft
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Love of Ruins, The: Letters on Lovecraft

Love of Ruins, The: Letters on Lovecraft

by Scott Cutler Shershow, Scott Michaelsen

Overview

Explores issues related to race and religion in Lovecraft criticism.

Today, H. P. Lovecraft is both more popular and controversial than ever: the influence of his “Cthulhu mythos” is everywhere in popular culture, his cosmic pessimism has reemerged as a major theme in contemporary philosophy, and his racism continues to spark controversy in the media. The Love of Ruins takes a fresh look at a figure widely acknowledged as the father of modern horror or “weird” fiction. In these pages, Lovecraft emerges not as the atheist and nihilist he is often claimed to be, but as a kind of “psychonaut” and mystic whose stories, through their own imaginative rigor, expose the intellectual bankruptcy of their author’s racism. The Love of Ruins is itself written in the form of letters, in order to do homage to Lovecraft’s love of the form of the personal letter (he wrote more than 100,000), and to emulate Lovecraft’s lifetime practice of thinking-as-corresponding.

Scott Cutler Shershow is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate Scott Michaelsen is Professor of English at Michigan State University and coauthor (with David E. Johnson) of Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781438465128
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Publication date: 02/21/2017
Series: SUNY series, Literature . . . in Theory
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: NOOK Book
Pages: 206
File size: 2 MB

About the Author

Scott Cutler Shershow is Professor of English at the University of California, Davis, and author of Deconstructing Dignity: A Critique of the Right-to-Die Debate

Scott Michaelsen is Professor of English at Michigan State University and coauthor (with David E. Johnson) of Anthropology’s Wake: Attending to the End of Culture.

Table of Contents

Preface

1. Prayers

2. Warnings

3. Psychonautics, Sublimity, Love

4. Love and Ruins

5. Ruins and Race

6. Ruins, Sublimity, Laughter

7. Race and Writing

8. Writing and the Love of Ruins

9. Race, the Fourth Dimension, Apophasis

10. Race, the Love of Wounds

11. Wounds, Race, Music, and Noise

12. Race, Orientalism, Writing

13. Time Travel, White Mythology, the Library

14. Cities in Ruins

15. The Late City, the Decline of the West

16. Basalt Towers, Trapdoors, Taboos, Nameless Beings

17. Apophasis, Science Fiction, Visibility and Racism, Im-Possible Politics

18. Archive, Irruption, Eruption, Basalt

19. The Great Race, the Archive

20. Comedy and Laughter

21. Class, Socialism, Politics

22. Doubling, Indirect Racism, the Gift of Vision, Nonknowledge

23. The Fourth Dimension, Community

24. The Fourth Dimension, Community, Unworking

25. Community, Sacrifice, Cults

26. Racial Degeneration, Police, Sacrifice

27. Sacrifice, Madness, One Blood, the Invention of the White Race, Frogs

28. Untimeliness, Sacrifice, Religion

29. Religion after Religion, Dread

30. Religion, the Wholesome, Faith and Knowledge

31. Kindness, Wonder, Horror

32. Hauntology, Religion, Science, Race, and Racism

33. Modern Apophasis

34. The Weird, the Future, the Open

Notes
Bibliography
Index

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