Lovecraft’s Fear of the Unknown and Unimaginable

• Název práce v češtině: Lovecraftovský strach z neznámého a z nepředstavitelného
• Název v anglickém jazyce: Lovecraft’s Fear of the Unknown and Unimaginable
• Klíčová slova: H. P. Lovecraft|Neznámo|Kosmicismus|Lovecraftovský horor|Anti-antropocentrismus|Teorie hororu
• Klíčová slova anglicky: H. P. Lovecraft|The Unknown|Cosmicism|Lovecraftian Horror|Anti-anthropocentrism|Theory of Horror
• Akademický rok vypsání: 2018/2019
• Typ práce: bakalářská práce
• Jazyk práce: angličtina
• Ústav: Ústav anglofonních literatur a kultur (21-UALK)
• Vedoucí / školitel: PhDr. Zdeněk Beran, Ph.D.
• Řešitel: skrytý - zadáno a potvrzeno stud. odd.
• Datum přihlášení: 15.05.2019
• Datum zadání: 15.05.2019
• Schválení administrátorem: zatím neschvalováno
• Datum potvrzení stud. oddělením: 03.06.2019
• Datum a čas obhajoby: 03.09.2020 00:00
• Datum odevzdání elektronické podoby: 07.08.2020
• Datum proběhlé obhajoby: 03.09.2020
• Odevzdaná/finalizovaná: odevzdaná studentem a finalizovaná
• Oponenti: Mgr. Pavla Veselá, Ph.D.

Zásady pro vypracování

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear, and the oldest and strongest kind of fear is fear of the unknown.” – H.P.Lovecraft
What is the unknown?
In Lovecraft’s works, the supernatural is connected with what was at his time new for the readers. He worked with the overwhelming emotion produced by the vast, infinite or obscure that evokes terror and the sublime. But Lovecraft found his “new” in an entirely different area: he did not care for Satan or Death and rather turned to the cosmic depth and the gulf of time for his inspiration. He also created new mythology to back up the credibility of his stories; however, he served the readers only hints and pieces of information, which added basically nothing to the whole picture but increased the amount of the unknown since it requires not only concealment of facts but also a certain degree of readers’ imagination to promote the unknown over the known.
This paper aims to demonstrate that Lovecraft creates the sensation of the unknown by using elements such as uncanny ideas, impossible physics, inconceivable images, unfamiliar expressions and forbidden knowledge, and to show how these contribute to the fear of the unknown.
The most powerful of these element are the uncanny ideas as they stimulate the imagination of the reader. The concept of the sublime is presented at its best; one might ponder how vast must be a period of time across which an immortal creature forgets its own past and nature.
The use of physics seemingly brings the reader back to the familiar territory, but in fact, physics is a mere tool to tear down the blissful ignorance and to reveal that there is more to fear. Lovecraft aptly employs new discoveries of the space or Antarctica and theories such as time travel, non-Euclidean geometry or fourth dimension.
Lovecraft’s disturbing description of otherworldly scenery and alien creatures induce the notion of the strange that cannot be related to our own world.
The expressions such as eldritch, stygian or cyclopean only give hints of the new reality but its true nature still remains obscured even if described and the forbidden knowledge bound in grimoires such as Necronomicon and Pnakotic Manuscripts equally nourish the unknown by showing the extent of what is yet to be uncovered, if ever.

Seznam odborné literatury

List of primary sources:
Lovecraft, H. P. The Dreams in the Witch House, The Call of Cthulhu,Outsider, Nameless City, In the Mountains of Madness, The Meadow, Imprisoned with Pharaoh, The Silver Key, The Terrible Old Man, Within the Walls of Eryx, The Unnamable, Music of Erich Zann, Colour out of Space, Dagon, Out of the Aeons, The Shadow out of Time.

List of secondary sources:
Lovecraft, H.P., and Klinger, Leslie S., ed. The New Annotated H.P. Lovecraft. New York, NY: Liveright, 2014.
Lovecraft, H.P., and Joshi, S.T., ed. The Annotated Supernatural Horror in Literature. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press, 2012.
Joshi, S.T. I Am Providence: The Life and Times of H.P. Lovecraft. New York, NY: Hippocampus Press, 2010.
Hite, Kennet. Tour de Lovecraft: The Tales. Alexandria, VA: Atomic Overmind Press, August 2008.
Houellebcq, Michel. H.P.Lovecraft, Against the World, Against Life. London: Gollancz, 2008.
Lovecraft, H. P., David E. Schultz, and S.T.Joshi, ed. Lord of a Visible World: An Autobiography in Letters. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2000.
Wilson, Eric. The Republic of Cthulhu: Lovecraft, the Weird Tale, and Conspiracy Theory. Punctum books, 2016.
The Sublime : From Antiquity to the Present. Cambridge University Press, 2012.
Todorov, Tzvetan. The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre. Translated by Richard Howard. Ithaca, NY: Cornell Paperbacks, 1973.
Halpern, Paul, and Michael C. Labossiere. “Mind out of Time: Identity, Perception, and the Fourth Dimension in H. P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Shadow Out of Time’ and ‘The Dreams in the Witch House.’” Extrapolation, no. 3, 2009, p. 512.
Koçsoy, Fatime Gül. “Dreams/Fantasies of Science in H.P. Lovecraft’s ‘The Dreams in The Witch House.’” Journal of Graduate School of Social Sciences, vol. 21, no. 1, Mar. 2017, pp. 197–207.
Poole, W.Scott. “‘Historicizing Lovecraft’: The Great War and America’s Cosmic Dread.” Interdisciplinary Humanities, vol. 33, no. 3, Fall 2016, pp. 36–52.
Miller, John J. “Master of Modern Horror.” Claremont Review of Books, no. 2, 2014, p. 64.
Janicker, Rebecca. “New England Narratives: Space and Place in the Fiction of H.P. Lovecraft.” Extrapolation, no. 1, 2007, p. 56.
Matthews, Carol S. “Letting Sleeping Abnormalities Lie: Lovecraft and the Futility of Divination.” Mythlore, no. 2, 2018, p. 165.
Timothy H. Evans. “A Last Defense against the Dark: Folklore, Horror, and the Uses of Tradition in the Works of H. P. Lovecraft.” Journal of Folklore Research, vol. 42, no. 1, 2005, p. 99.
Chou, Christine Hsiu-Chin. “The Impossible out of the Net of Words: Rethinking the Fantastic through Todorov, Tolkien and Lewis.” Fu Jen Studies: Literature & Linguistics, no. 48, 2015, p. 103.
Lovecraft, H. P. Supernatural Horror in Literature.