Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock | |
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Education | B.A., English; M.A., American Literature; M. Phil., Human Sciences; PhD, Human Sciences [1] |
Alma mater | University of Pennsylvania, The George Washington University |
Occupation | University Professor |
Years active | 1994–present |
Employer | Central Michigan University |
Known for | Analyses of monsters, the Gothic, and cult media in American and popular culture |
Title | Professor of English Language and Literature |
Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock (born January 24, 1970) is an American literature, film, and media scholar who has been teaching in the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University since 2001. He has authored or edited more than thirty books and a range of articles focusing on the American Gothic tradition, monsters, cult film and television, popular culture, weird fiction, pedagogy, and goth music.
Weinstock is the associate editor in charge of horror for the Los Angeles Review of Books, [2] the founder and president of the Society for the Study of the American Gothic, [3] the founder and general editor of the peer-reviewed journal American Gothic Studies, [4] and the co-founder and past chair of the Modern Language Association’s Gothic Studies Forum. He was the 2019 recipient of the Poe Studies Association's James W. Gargano Award for the best scholarly article on Poe [5] and the 2024 recipient of the Science Fiction Research Association’s Thomas D. Clareson Award for Distinguished Service to the field of speculative literature and media studies. [6] Also in 2024, his monograph, Gothic Things: Dark Enchantment and Anthropocene Anxiety, was short-listed for the International Gothic Association's Allan Lloyd Smith Prize for the scholarly monograph considered to have advanced the field of Gothic studies significantly. [7]
Weinstock graduated from the University of Pennsylvania with a B.A. in English. [8] He then earned an M.A. in American literature and both an MPhil and PhD from the Program in the Human Sciences at The George Washington University. [8] He joined the faculty of the Department of English Language and Literature at Central Michigan University in 2001.
Weinstock's academic work has covered a variety of research areas, but clusters around theorizing the ways in which Gothic texts and practices give shape to culturally specific anxieties and desires. [1]
Of particular interest to Weinstock have been the roles that monsters play in enforcing social norms while also highlighting desires to transgress those same norms. In an early article on freaks and freak shows, "Freaks in Space: ‘Extraterrestrialism’ and ‘Deep-Space Multiculturalism’," Weinstock adapts Edward Said's concept of Orientalism to address the ways in which contemporary racial stereotypes find expression in science fiction film and television through the role of the extraterrestrial. [9]
In the introduction to the Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, the 2014 encyclopedia he edited, he draws upon the work of anthropologist Mary Douglas to discuss monsters as violations of established cultural categories whose transgression of conceptual frameworks creates anxiety. [10] This work won the 2014 Rue Morgue Magazine "Best 2014 Non-Fiction Book" award, as well as the 2014 "Golden Ghoul" award for "Best 2014 Non-Fiction Horror Book" from the Serbian Cult of the Ghoul publication.[ citation needed ]
In "Invisible Monsters: Vision, Horror, and Contemporary Culture," his contribution to Asa Mittman and Peter Dendle's Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, Weinstock proposes that twenty-first century Western culture has decoupled monstrosity from appearance creating concerns that monsters cannot be identified in advance of their attacks. To develop this argument, he focuses on serial killers, terrorists, faceless corporations, viruses, and natural phenomena such as global warming. [11] In "American Monsters," a chapter included in Charles L. Crow's A Companion to the American Gothic, Weinstock addresses the cultural construction of American monsters paying attention to the roles of race and religion in creating monstrous others. [12]
In 2020, Weinstock published The Monster Theory Reader, an edited collection of writings about monsters. This was followed in 2023 by Monstrous Things: Essays on Ghosts, Vampires, and Things That Go Bump in the Night, a collection of previously published articles on monsters. Relatedly, he and Regina Hansen published the co-edited collection of scholarly essays, Giving the Devil His Due: Satan and Cinema, 2021.
Weinstock's interest in ghosts and hauntings began with his doctoral dissertation, Dead Letters: Ghostly Inscriptions and Theoretical Hauntings, an analysis of the "spectrality of language" indebted to the post-structural theorizing of Jacques Derrida and Jacques Lacan and focusing around the idea of the "dead letter" in the works of Edgar Allan Poe, Herman Melville, Henry James, Edith Wharton, and Toni Morrison. [13]
The dissertation became the springboard for two later book publications related to ghosts: 2004's Spectral America: Phantoms and the American Imagination and 2008's Scare Tactics: Supernatural Fiction by American Women. In the introduction to Spectral America, Weinstock refers to the "spectral turn" of twenty-first century culture, a formulation that has resonated in later publications on ghosts and culture. [14] In Scare Tactics, Weinstock argues for the existence of a little-acknowledged feminist tradition of nineteenth- and early twentieth-century American women writing ghost stories to contest various forms of legal and social oppression. Among the authors addressed in this study are Harriet Beecher Stowe, Edith Wharton, Alice Cary, Mary Austin, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and Harriet Prescott Spofford. [15] [16]
Weinstock is perhaps best known for his 2012 work, The Vampire Film: Undead Cinema, which surveys the history of the vampire in film and addresses their persistent popularity in relation to the themes of sex, technology, and race. [17] In the introduction to this book, indebted to the work of Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and Henry Jenkins III, he asserts seven principles governing the cinematic representation of vampires:
The Vampire: Undead Cinema was the winner of the 2013 International Association of the Fantastic in the Arts Lord Ruthven Assembly Award for Best Nonfiction Title.
Weinstock has focused on the popularity and importance of vampires in twentieth and twenty-first century culture in a number of articles and book chapters, including a chapter on American Vampires in the Edinburgh Companion to the American Gothic. [20]
Weinstock's interests in monsters, ghosts, and vampires are specific manifestations of his broader interest in the American Gothic tradition—an interest that runs throughout his body of work and is reflected by his research on Edgar Allan Poe, H. P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Toni Morrison, among others. Of note in this respect is his 2011 monograph on American Charles Brockden Brown arguing for the late eighteenth-century author's centrality in establishing American variants of four Gothic subgenres: the frontier Gothic, the urban Gothic, the psychological Gothic, and the female Gothic. [21] [22] In 2017, Weinstock published The Cambridge Companion to the American Gothic. [23]
Weinstock has also published research on cult film and television, including both a monograph and an edited collection on The Rocky Horror Picture Show , edited collections on directors Tim Burton and M. Night Shyamalan, edited collections on Twin Peaks and the film The Blair Witch Project , and articles and essays on films including The Evil Dead and Bubba Ho-tep . Weinstock's 2007 book, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, one of the first three titles published as part of the now well-established "Cultographies" series from Wallflower Press (now an imprint of Columbia University Press), offers a survey of the film's history, considers its sexual politics, examines its interweaving of references to other cinematic texts, and theorizes the audience's famous response as a vacillation between empathic and ironic behavior. [24]
Weinstock's research often seeks to theorize contemporary popular culture. Tangential to his emphasis on the Gothic, he edited a 2008 collection for SUNY Press on the animated program South Park .
In 2018, Weinstock published Critical Approaches to Welcome to Night Vale: Podcasting Between Weather and the Void, a collection of scholarly essays devoted to the popular podcast, Welcome to Night Vale . The book is the first scholarly book publication related to a particular podcast. [25]
In 2020, he and Kate Egan of Northumbria University published the co-edited volume And Now For Something Completely Different: Critical Approaches to Monty Python. Weinstock’s own contribution focuses on the cultic qualities of Monty Python and the Holy Grail .
Together with Carl Sederholm of Brigham Young University, Weinstock edited a 2016 scholarly collection on American author of weird fiction, H. P. Lovecraft. Weinstock's own chapter contribution to the volume, "Lovecraft's Things", utilizes the insights of contemporary object-oriented ontology to consider the roles of material objects in Lovecraft's fiction. [26] The collection received the 2016 Ray & Pat Browne Award for Best Edited Collection in Popular Culture and American Culture. Weinstock had previously edited three volumes of the fiction of H. P. Lovecraft for Barnes & Noble.
Weinstock has expressed an interest through his career in pedagogy in general, and ways to teach the Gothic in particular. His 2003 edited collection, The Pedagogical Wallpaper: Teaching Charlotte Perkin's Gilman's " The Yellow Wall-paper ," addressed approaches to using Gilman's short story as a tool for teaching in the classroom. This collection became the subject of a round-table discussion in the Spring 2004 issue of the journal Pedagogy. [27] In 2009, as part of the Modern Language Association's "Approaches to Teaching World Literature" series, Weinstock co-edited the volume Approaches to Teaching Poe's Prose and Poetry with Anthony Magistrale of the University of Vermont. His own contribution focuses on Poe's only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , and charges of plagiarism surrounding it. [28]
Weinstock’s interest in pedagogy has extended to publishing two textbooks: The Mad Scientist’s Guide to Composition (A Somewhat Cheeky but Exceedingly Useful Introduction to Academic Writing) (2020) and Pop Culture for Beginners (2021).
An extension of Weinstock's interest in the Gothic, as well as a channeling of his interest in goth, industrial, and experimental electronic music, and his more than 25 years as a DJ of these genres, [29] Goth Music: From Sound to Subculture is a study authored by Weinstock with musicologist Isabella van Elferen of Kingston University, London. Making use of the theories of Bruno Latour and M. M. Bakhtin, Van Elferen and Weinstock assert in this book that the diversity of styles encompassed by the generic rubric goth find their consistency through shared chronotopes—aural time-spaces that serve as the settings for shared fantasy narratives. [30]
Gothic fiction, sometimes called Gothic horror, is a loose literary aesthetic of fear and haunting. The name refers to Gothic architecture of the European Middle Ages, which was characteristic of the settings of early Gothic novels.
Goth is a music-based subculture that began in the United Kingdom during the early 1980s. It was developed by fans of gothic rock, an offshoot of the post-punk music genre. Post-punk artists who presaged the gothic rock genre and helped develop and shape the subculture include Siouxsie and the Banshees, Bauhaus, the Cure, and Joy Division.
Horror is a genre of fiction that is intended to disturb, frighten or scare. Horror is often divided into the sub-genres of psychological horror and supernatural horror, which are in the realm of speculative fiction. Literary historian J. A. Cuddon, in 1984, defined the horror story as "a piece of fiction in prose of variable length ... which shocks, or even frightens the reader, or perhaps induces a feeling of repulsion or loathing". Horror intends to create an eerie and frightening atmosphere for the reader. Often the central menace of a work of horror fiction can be interpreted as a metaphor for larger fears of a society.
The undead are beings in mythology, legend, or fiction that are deceased but behave as if alive. Most commonly the term refers to corporeal forms of formerly alive humans, such as mummies, vampires, and zombies, which have been reanimated by supernatural means, technology, or disease. In some cases, the term also includes incorporeal forms of the dead, such as ghosts.
A monster is a type of fictional creature found in horror, fantasy, science fiction, folklore, mythology and religion. Monsters are very often depicted as dangerous and aggressive, with a strange or grotesque appearance that causes terror and fear, often in humans. Monsters usually resemble bizarre, deformed, otherworldly and/or mutated animals or entirely unique creatures of varying sizes, but may also take a human form, such as mutants, ghosts, spirits, zombies, or cannibals, among other things. They may or may not have supernatural powers, but are usually capable of killing or causing some form of destruction, threatening the social or moral order of the human world in the process.
Weird fiction is a subgenre of speculative fiction originating in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Weird fiction either eschews or radically reinterprets traditional antagonists of supernatural horror fiction, such as ghosts, vampires, and werewolves. Writers on the subject of weird fiction, such as China Miéville, sometimes use "the tentacle" to represent this type of writing. The tentacle is a limb-type absent from most of the monsters of European folklore and gothic fiction, but often attached to the monstrous creatures created by weird fiction writers, such as William Hope Hodgson, M. R. James, Clark Ashton Smith, and H. P. Lovecraft.
Dark fantasy is a subgenre of fantasy literary, artistic, and cinematic works that incorporates disturbing and frightening themes. It often combines fantasy with elements of horror, possessing a dark and gloomy tone or a gothic atmosphere of dread.
Lovecraftian horror, also called cosmic horror or eldritch horror, is a subgenre of horror fiction and weird fiction that emphasizes the horror of the unknowable and incomprehensible more than gore or other elements of shock. It is named after American author H. P. Lovecraft (1890–1937). His work emphasizes themes of cosmic dread, forbidden and dangerous knowledge, madness, non-human influences on humanity, religion and superstition, fate and inevitability, and the risks associated with scientific discoveries, which are now associated with Lovecraftian horror as a subgenre. The cosmic themes of Lovecraftian horror can also be found in other media, notably horror films, horror games, and comics.
"The Outsider" is a short story by American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft. Written between March and August 1921, it was first published in Weird Tales, April 1926. In this work, a mysterious individual who has been living alone in a castle for as long as he can remember decides to break free in search of human contact and light. "The Outsider" is one of Lovecraft's most commonly reprinted works and is also one of the most popular stories ever to be published in Weird Tales.
Wilum Hopfrog Pugmire, was a writer of weird fiction and horror fiction based in Seattle, Washington. His works typically were published as W. H. Pugmire and his fiction often paid homage to the lore of Lovecraftian horror. Lovecraft scholar and biographer S. T. Joshi described Pugmire as "the prose-poet of the horror/fantasy field; he may be the best prose-poet we have" and as one of the genre's leading Lovecraftian authors.
A zombie is a mythological undead corporeal revenant created through the reanimation of a corpse. In modern popular culture, zombies are most commonly found in horror genre works. The term comes from Haitian folklore, in which a zombie is a dead body reanimated through various methods, most commonly magical practices in religions like Vodou. Modern media depictions of the reanimation of the dead often do not involve magic but rather science fictional methods such as fungi, radiation, gases, diseases, plants, bacteria, viruses, etc.
"Lot No. 249" is a Gothic horror short story by British writer Arthur Conan Doyle, first published in Harper's Magazine in 1892. The story tells of a University of Oxford athlete named Abercrombie Smith who notices a strange series of events surrounding Edward Bellingham, an Egyptology student who owns many ancient Egyptian artefacts, including a mummy. After seeing his mummy disappear and reappear, and two instances of Bellingham's enemies being attacked, Smith concludes that Bellingham is re-animating his mummy.
"The Damned Thing" is a horror short story written by American Civil War soldier, wit, and writer Ambrose Bierce. It first appeared in Town Topics on December 7, 1893.
American gothic fiction is a subgenre of gothic fiction. Elements specific to American Gothic include: rationality versus the irrational, puritanism, guilt, the uncanny, ab-humans, ghosts, and monsters.
Kyla (Lee) Ward is an Australian writer of speculative fiction, poet and actor. Her work has been nominated multiple times for the Ditmar Award, the Aurealis Award, the Australian Shadows Award, the Bram Stoker Award and the Rhysling Award. She won the Aurealis Award in 2006 for her collaborative novel Prismatic.
A list of reference works on the horror genre of film.
John Edgar Browning is an American author, editor, and scholar known for his nonfiction works about the horror genre, Dracula, and vampires in film, literature, and culture. Previously a visiting lecturer at the Georgia Institute of Technology, he is now a professor of liberal arts at the Savannah College of Art and Design in Atlanta, Georgia.
Mummies are commonly featured in horror genres as undead creatures wrapped in bandages. Similar undead include skeletons and zombies.
David is a fictional character from the 1987 film The Lost Boys portrayed by Kiefer Sutherland. In the film David is the head of a gang of vampires in the fictional town of Santa Carla.
Gothic Western is a subculture, artistically similar to gothic Americana, but blends goth and Western lifestyles that are notably visible in fashion, music, film and literature.