Contenu du sommaire : La Peur / Fear

This essay explores how Elihu Palmer, a prominent advocate for deism in the early American Republic, sought to debunk Christianity by depicting it as a terrifying, even terrorizing faith. An analysis of Palmer's critique reveals a fundamental incomprehension of the positive role of fear in evangelical piety. In the context of a Calvinist faith, fear was appropriate because it offered a useful counterweight to sinful pride and might encourage the humility required to experience a saving grace. For Palmer's opponents, the deist disavowal of fear smacked of dangerous hubris. This essay demonstrates that vastly different assessments of the value and function of religiously-inspired fear shaped the disagreements over religion in the early United States.

This essay revisits two of Edgar Allan Poe's most famous tales, « Ligeia » and « The Tell-Tale Heart », and explores their experimenting with a rhetoric of fear (fear being both an effect potentially induced in the reader and the object of representation in the textual dynamics). It shows how these tales rely on repetition to create a complex sense of return and reduplication (in « Ligeia ») and of preparation or rehearsal (in « The Tell-Tale Heart »), resulting in an ambiguous game with substitution and displacement between the same and the other.

This article attempts to understand fear in James with respect to the anterior scene of consciousness. As the compulsively repeated representation of this scene in James's work shows, the artistic impulse of the subject derives from a “traumatic” loss of self-presence, itself the consequence of the linguistic inscription of the subject and its encounter with the other. In a tragic parody of the artistic impulse as it determines James's work as a whole, the speculative consciousness of John Marcher, in “The Beast in the Jungle,” obliterates the anterior scene of the encounter with the other on which the identity of the singular subject depends. Prior to the reading of the novella, a rereading of the famous Apollonian nightmare that James recounts in his autobiography is proposed, in order to delimit the operation of the artistic impulse. The reading of “The Beast in the Jungle” is then followed by a brief analysis of the spectral encounter in “The Way it Came,” in order to provide a counter-example to the kind of speculative panic that gives rise to the “negative adventure” of John Marcher.

Native American attitudes regarding the environment should not be represented simplistically by the figure of the Ecological Indian. At a time when environmental fears are more and more widespread and when societies are at a loss when confronting the dangers of human impact on nature, the issue can be addressed by paying attention to the way Native American authors make sense of environmental destruction. Some authors argue that it is human fears of the environment which cause humanity to forget its very connection to and reliance upon it. In order to end the destruction of nature—and ultimately to save mankind—human beings need to recover their symbiotic relationship to the earth. This implies regarding the wilderness—which some call a European invention—as something other than a sanctuary in which humanity would have no place.

This essay examines the transcription of trauma in Rick Moody's « The Mansion on the Hill », a short story based on the accidental death of the narrator's sister. Read within the theorical framework of Freud, Ferenczi, Lacan, Winnicott, and Caruth, impacts of traumatic experience including personality split, false self, repetitive reenactments and frightful awakening are addressed.

Marilyn Manson is well-known for his provocative “shock rock,” but his multifaceted work merits attention, too, for the elaborate vision of contemporary evangelical America it proposes. Manson's creations are highly controversial, as was shown by the accusations leveled against him after the Columbine massacre in 1999; yet they are richly aesthetic. The article argues that Manson's work should be seen as contravening the “symbolic misery” which, according to the French philosopher Bernard Stiegler, pervades western societies and causes such murders.

In her short novel Florida (2004), Christine Schutt explores the multiple planes on which the traumatic absence of the narrator's mother is felt from childhood to adulthood. Freud's central concept of Nachträglichkeit sheds light on the modalities of the textual inscription of trauma. The temporal distorsions it entails account for the retroactive reverberation of events and signifiers in the novel. At the core of the narrative lies a very peculiar “Florida,” an impossible place where all the embedded traumatic memories are engulfed.

This article starts from a scene in which a victim becomes a monster under the blows of the man who is to become its future victim. It suggests a study of the way horror films illustrate the instant when a monster is revealed both to the diegetic character and to the spectator. It concludes by examining some uses of horror in Hollywood films.