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What is Horror?

Horror is an inherently sensational and popular phenomenon. Extreme violence, terrifying monsters and jarring music shock, scare and excite us out of our everyday lives. The horror genre gives shape to the particular anxieties of society but also reveals the fundamental nature of what it is to be human.

This volume provides an introduction to horror in compact and accessible essays, from classics such as Stanley Kubrick’s The Shining to contemporary throwbacks like the Duffer Brothers’ Stranger Things. Beginning with the philosophical and historical background of horror, this book touches upon seminal figures such as Poe, Lovecraft, Quiroga, Jackson, King and Suzuki and engages with the evolution of the genre across old and new media from literature, art and comics to film, gaming and social media. Alongside this is a consideration of established and emerging areas like smart horror (Jordan Peele’s Get Out), queer horror (Brad Falchuk’s American Horror Story), eco-horror (Alex Garland’s Annihilation), horror video games (P.T.) and African American horror (Tananarive Due’s Ghost Summer: Stories).

This volume provides an invaluable resource for experts, students and general readers alike for further understanding the horror genre and the ways it is developing into the future.

La figura di Růžena Zátková (České Budějovice 1885 – Leysin 1923), artista boema generalmente associata al futurismo italiano ma per alcuni versi più vicina all’avanguardia russa, risulta tanto affascinante quanto ancora semisconosciuta al grande pubblico e non solo. Affascinante perché la sua vita, e tutta la sua straordinaria storia, costituiscono di per sé la trama esemplare di un romanzo avventuroso e tragico al contempo. Figlia di una prestigiosa famiglia dell’aristocrazia boema, si legò in un matrimonio infelice a Vasilij Khvoschinskij, coltissimo diplomatico dell’Ambasciata Russa a Roma, dove entrò immediatamente negli ambienti più rinomati e prestigiosi. Musa e amante platonica dello scultore croato Ivan Meštrović, del pittore messicano Roberto Montenegro e del compositore russo Igor’ Stravinskij, cara amica del maestro futurista Giacomo Balla, gravitò inoltre nell’orbita dei Balletti Russi di Djagilev, legandosi in una profonda e sincera amicizia a Larionov e alla Gončarova. Protagonista di una serie di sedute spiritiche tenutesi alla presenza delle personalità più eminenti e stravaganti della capitale italiana, scoprendo grazie allo spiritismo "la legittima realtà dell’astrazione", si ammalò gravemente di tubercolosi e venne ricoverata in un isolato sanatorio svizzero per ben tre anni. Sposò in seconde nozze Arturo Cappa, membro eminente del Partito Comunista italiano vicino ad Antonio Gramsci e futuro cognato di Filippo Tommaso Marinetti. Fu infine amica sincera e confidente di Benedetta Cappa Marinetti e dell’archeologo e umanista Umberto Zanotti-Bianco. Morì a soli 38 anni per l’aggravarsi della tisi proprio mentre la sua carriera stava decollando.

Seit einiger Zeit ist Brasiliens Neokonkretismus in Ausstellungen, Katalogen und Publikationen in Europa präsent. Die Autorin nimmt erstmals auf Deutsch umfassende Werkanalysen vor und stellt den Schlüsselcharakter der neokonkreten Praktiken dar. Die Kunst- und Lyrikproduktion der Bewegung führte, so die Autorin, zu einer Umwertung und Neuauslegung des konkret-konstruktivistischen Gedankenguts der europäischen Avantgarden des frühen 20. Jahrhunderts. Diese Umwertungen schufen in Brasilien erst die Voraussetzungen dafür, haptische und sensorielle Komponenten ästhetischen Erlebens zum zentralen Ausgangspunkt künstlerischer Praxis zu erheben, für welche die späteren Arbeiten der brasilianischen Avantgarde-Ikonen Lygia Clark und Hélio Oiticica bekannt sind. Die Arbeit ist ein wichtiger Beitrag dazu, moderne und zeitgenössische künstlerische Praktiken aus Brasilien zu dekolonisieren, denn die Analysen zeigen auf, dass haptisch und plurisensoriell erfahrbare Kunstwerke aus Brasilien eben nicht auf einer angenommenen genuin sensorisch-sensiblen Konstituierung des Menschen in Brasilien beruhen, sondern vielmehr auf einer eigenwilligen, lokalen Rezeption europäischer Avantgardepraktiken.

Bruno Munari was one of the most important and eclectic twentieth-century European artists. Dubbed the «Leonardo and Peter Pan» of contemporary art, he pioneered what would later be labelled kinetic art, playing a key role in the constitution and definition of the aesthetic programmes of groups such as Movimento Arte Concreta and Programmed Art. He became an internationally recognized name in the field of industrial design, winning the prestigious «Compasso d’Oro» prize four times, while also being a prominent figure in Italian graphic design, working for magazines such as Tempo and Domus, as well as renowned publishing companies such as Einaudi and Bompiani. He left an indelible mark as an art pedagogue and popularizer with his famous 1970s artistic laboratories for children and was the author of numerous books, ranging from essays on art and design to experimental books.

Capturing a resurgent interest in Munari at the international level, the exceptional array of critical voices in this volume constitutes an academic study of Munari of a depth and range that is unprecedented in any language, offering a unique analysis of Munari’s seven-decade-long career. Through original archival research, and illuminating and generative comparisons with other artists and movements both within and outside Italy, the essays gathered here offer novel readings of more familiar aspects of Munari’s career while also addressing those aspects that have received scant or no attention to date.

This book breaks new ground in drawing on evolutionary psychology in support of advocacy for music education, and the presentation of innovative musical pedagogy. The book adopts the perspective that musical experience is the birthright of all human beings through the decisive role it played in the evolution of our species, the traces of which we carry in our genes. The author draws on scientific developments in acoustics, neuroscience, linguistics, archaeology and anthropology to examine theories that have emerged powerfully during the last twenty years and which argue for the significance of the practice of music as foundational to human culture. This position is examined in parallel with research into how children learn musically, and the role that creative decision making plays in this. A series of strategies is presented that explores collective creativity which draws on vocalisation, the use of gesture, and instinctive responses to harmony to develop musical imagination.

What if the human species were to get in touch with another intelligent species, thus far unknown?

This question is the impetus for a vast, exciting catalogue of science fiction and fantasy stories. They serve as hypothetical answers in narrative form but can also be regarded as cognitive exercises by which we investigate the nature and destiny of humanity. In other words, any creature and any story produced in response to this question requires an assessment of our notion of the human and a redefinition of our position and role in the world.

This volume aims at mapping and analysing the very rich catalogue of non-human figures which inhabit our contemporary imagery, with particular regard to science fiction literature and film. It is suggested that monsters, clones, zombies, aliens, artificial beings, cyborgs and mutants can function as ideological tools intended to confirm the role of humankind (and Western civilization) as the only possible standard of intelligent and ethical life. But they can also become cognitive instruments devised to question or criticize our vision of and behaviour toward the world, other species and ourselves. This privileged critical perspective – and the point of arrival of the book – is the category of the posthuman, which is regarded as the symbol of a possibly revolutionary vision of humanity, a wish and an invitation to embrace a new, more humble way of being and living.

В русскоязычном поэтическом пространстве последней четверти века можно наблюдать целый ряд тенденций писательских стратегий, так или иначе направленных на определение места и роли пишущего (но не только) субъекта в мире возникших после крушения СССР «сценариев» (Кукулин). На примере творчества А. Сен-Сенькова и группы «Орбита» мы обращаем внимание на выразительные, формальные и композиционные средства, с помощью которых авторы пытаются снова ре-индивидуализировать (Кузьмин) личное высказывание и модальности самовыражения в контексте «постправды» и «текучей» современности.

Das Ziel der vorliegenden Studie ist die Untersuchung der Spezifik des Wort-Ton-Verhältnisses in Ludwig van Beethovens Schaffen sowohl auf struktureller als auch auf semantischer Ebene. Da Beethoven selbst nie eine Abhandlung über Komposition schrieb, erscheint es natürlich und naheliegend, als hauptsächlichen Bezugspunkt die musiktheoretischen Schriften aus dem 18. Jahrhundert heranzuziehen, um die musikästhetische Landschaft seiner Epoche zu rekonstruieren. Die durchgeführte Analyse von Beethovens Vokalmusik aus der Sicht der im 18. Jahrhundert üblichen Konzeption eines «Singstücks» beantwortet einige wesentliche Fragen nach den Prioritäten des Komponisten im Bereich der technischen und ästhetischen Aspekte der musikalischen Bearbeitung eines Textes.

The author of the book analyses selected 19th-century operas based on Shakespeare’s plays from the perspective of their relations to the literature, aesthetics and philosophy of the Romantic period. The texts discussed here include Verdi’s Macbeth, Otello and Falstaff, Rossini’s Otello, Halévy’s The Tempest, Gounod’s Romeo and Juliet and Thomas’s Hamlet. The study aims to indicate diverse traces of the Romantic interpretation of Shakespeare’s works in the history of the 19th-century opera. Individual chapters present the librettos of the selected operas, analysed in the context of Shakespeare’s plays and their 19th-century reception, reconstructed on the basis of 19th-century historic-literary texts (of, among others, A. W. Schlegel, L. Tieck and V. Hugo), critical studies and press articles. The analyses conducted in the book succeed in presenting the evolution of the phenomenon of Romantic Shakespeareanism in the 19th-century opera theatre.