• The art of liveblogging the death of Osama bin Laden
  • The Twitter feed in question
• Stephen Prothero on the sea burial of Osama bin Laden
• Jeff Wright asks some questions of Christians after the week’s events
• David Brooks on bin Laden as historically significant individual
• The lost art of reading for literary context

Okay.  That’s enough with the Osama stuff.  How about some Job movies?

• Coming no time soon to a theater nowhere near you:
  • Samurai Job
  • Job: The Movie: Could you survive losing everything?
  • Hear Me Out: He only exists because you think about him.  Now just try not to think about him.
  • Angelica’s Toys: We can’t all be perfect.
  • The Ultimate Trial: Would you still have faith?
  • The assignment sheet for the Job Movie Project

• RIP John Shawcross, Milton scholar.
• How Top Gun killed the American movie.
• Jerry Salyer warns against (and admits the inevitability of) a knee-jerk Europhobia.
• Leonard Davis demonstrates the painful insularity of people whose academic worlds consist of only Research-1 schools.
• Fred Sanders and Lady Gaga?  Something is going to blow up here.
• A modern-day Nicodemus manages to hold Jesus’s radical message and Christianity’s radical grace in tension.
• On the right-wing politics of video games.
• Parchment and Pen gives a reasonable, sane introduction to the science of textual criticism. (Read this as an antidote to Bart Ehrman’s hysteria.  –NPG)
• John Stackhouse recommends some humility to those who want to “just do what the Bible says.”
• Our buddy Chris Gehrz isn’t the only stodgy white guy to try to rap.
• 

• Teka Childress interviews four writers on distributionism as a follow-up to last week’s introduction.
• Christ the Center talks politics with civility and intelligence.
• CCEL offers a selection of historic Christian texts (in English translation) on divine providence and free will.
• dr. b theorizes the five stages of grading.
• John Totten muses on evil, American theology, and Nicholas Cage.
• Joe Carter argues that there never was any such thing  as the Tea Party.
• Glenn Greenwald notes that the U.S. government has particularly selective memories about “the past.”
• Willy Wonka has this to say to the DNC:
  

• Israeli chess grandmaster Alik Gershon sets a world record by  beating 458 of 523 opponents simultaneously.
• Jenny Truax introduces distributism, an alternative to capitalism and socialism and communism.
• John Stackhouse criticizes some particularly bad exegesis of 1 Timothy.
  • Joan C. Williams comments on the social expectations that make such bad exegesis possible.
• Robert Alter’s translation of the Hebrew Bible continues.
• R.R Reno on our misplaced intellectual priorities.
• How the Narnia movies get C.S. Lewis wrong.
• Peter Leithart lectures on a Christian vision of liberal education.  (link is an .mp3 file)
• A helpful guide for this Sunday:

• Susan McWilliams laments that Modern Family has benefits that actual modern life has stripped away from most families.
• Patrick Deneen wonders whether 18th-century liberalism had inherent in its project the roots of 21st-century liberalism.
• Stanley Fish once again fails to deliver a convincing reason why there should be humanities departments at all.  (Take note, Christian college administrators–our historical moment to be the monasteries where humanistic learning continues through the next dark age is nigh upon us!)
• Karl Barth converses with the Coen Brothers about No Country for Old Men.
• Robert Pippin issues an appeal to curb the madness of post-Darwinian Literary Theory.
• Ten things that are wrong with Evangelicalism–from an Evangelical’s perspective.
• Esquire talks to Philip Roth–probably the last great novelist of his generation.
• The Great Dw. Dunphy begins a series on the 50 Best albums of Christian rock.
• Gilmour’s Excuse:

General Introduction
- Football season begins
- What’s on the blog?
- An argument about Jaws

Our History with Superheroes
- Crib notes: Only Gilmour was way into comics
- Michial played too many video games
- Marvel vs. DC

Premodern Models of Heroism
- The hero as function of a larger metaphysic
- Greek demigods
- Imperial and national mythology
- A discourse on the supernatural
- The Medieval era crosses the streams
- The virtuous hero

A New Kind of Hero
- Michial prepares a response to the wrong question
- Let’s talk cowboys
- Natty Bumppo rides off into the sunset
- Cowboys as symbols of anarchic freedom
- Abandoning your aristocratic background
- The cowboy code of honor
- Deconstructing the myth

David Rambles
- (GASP)
- The burgeoning market for “yellow literature”
- The birth of Superman/The birth of Lex Luthor
- Science fiction meets detectives

If Anyone Can, the Superman Can!!
- Parsing Nietzsche’s übermensch
- Conflating, then going two-dimensional
- Leopold and Loeb and Raskolnikov
- A response to the Nazis?
- What should the most powerful person on earth do?

The Batman; or, OH, GOOD FUH YOU
- Is Batman a superhero?
- Going dark with the dark knight
- Name that Batman!
- Power vs. time and money
- Adding the pariah superhero

Time to Pick Sides
- Nathan’s bizarre justification of Superman comics
- The tedium of the morally perfect hero
- Breaking the DC false dichotomy
- We choose our favorite X-Men

The Secret Identity
- Protecting loved ones
- Avoiding lawsuits
- Promulgating alienation
- The Scarlet Pimpernel and Zorro

Subversions
- Watchmen draws out the Nietzschean elements
- Nathan Gilmour, polyanna
- Now we fight about The Incredibles
- Who’s our übermensch?
- With great power comes great responsibility

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Batman Begins. Dir. Christopher Nolan. Perf. Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Liam Neeson, Katie Holmes, Gary Oldman, and Cillian Murphy. Warner Bros., 2005.

Beowulf. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Confucius. The Analects. Trans. Raymond Dawson. New York: Oxford UP, 2008.

Cooper, James Fenimore. The Last of the Mohicans. New York: Penguin, 1986.

—. The Pioneers. New York: Penguin, 1988.

Dead Man. Dir. Jim Jaramusch. Perf. Johnny Depp. Miramax, 1995.

Dostoevsky, Fyodor. Crime and Punishment. Trans. David McDuff. New York: Penguin,

The Epic of Gilgamesh. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 2003.

High Noon. Dir. Fred Zinnemann. Perf. Gary Cooper. United Artists, 1952.

The Incredibles. Dir. Brad Bird. Perf. Craig T. Nelson, Holly Hunter, and Jason Lee. Pixar, 2004.

Jones, Gerard. Men of Tomorrow: Geeks, Gangsters, and the Birth of the Comic Booth. New York: Basic Books, 2005.

Jurgens, Dan. The Death of Superman. New York: DC Comics, 1992.

Malory, Sir Thomas. Le Morte d’Arthur. New York: Norton, 2003.

McCabe & Mrs. Miller. Dir. Robert Altman. Perf. Warren Beatty and Julie Christie. Warner Bros., 1971.

Miller, Frank. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns. New York: DC Comics, 1997.

Moore, Alan and Dave Gibbons. Watchmen. New York: DC Comics, 2008.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. Thus Spake Zarathustra: A Book for Everyone and No One. New York: Penguin, 1961.

The Searchers. Dir. John Ford. Perf. John Wayne, Jeffrey Hunter, Vera Miles, Ward Bond, and Natalie Wood. Warner Bros., 1956.

Smith, Henry Nash. Virgin Land: The American West as Symbol and Myth. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 1950.

Spider-Man. Dir. Sam Raimi. Perf. Tobey Maguire, Willem Dafoe, Kirsten Dunst, and James Franco. Columbia, 2002.

Superman Returns. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Brandon Routh, Kate Bosworth, and Kevin Spacey. Warner Bros., 2006.

Unforgiven. Dir. Clint Eastwood. Perf. Clint Eastwood, Gene Hackman, Morgan Freeman, and Richard Harris. Warner Bros., 1992.

Vonnegut, Kurt. “Harrison Bergerson.” Welcome to the Monkey House: Stories. New York: Dial Press, 1998. 7-14.

X2. Dir. Bryan Singer. Perf. Patrick Stewart, Hugh Jackman, Ian McKellan, Halle Berry, Famke Janssen, James Marsden, and Rebecca Romijn-Stamos. 20^th Century Fox, 2003.

I’ve actually missed two opportunities to talk about Jaws on our podcast.

I realized mere hours after recording our episode on epic movies that, in other contexts, I’d made the argument that the 1975 horror movie ran parallel in significant ways to the Babylonian creation epic Enuma Elish, and of course, when Internet disappeared at Emmanuel College the morning we were supposed to record our episode on horror movies, I missed the opportunity to provide a counterpoint to Michial’s psychoanalytic take on the movie poster.

So that the opportunity is not a permanent loss and because this year is the movie’s 35th anniversary, I figured I’d try out some of the arguments that I was going to make and let the Christian Humanist readers (and my fellow bloggers) have a crack at them.

I have to give credit to Dr. Rod Werline, my thesis advisor from seminary, for starting me on this line of thought.  In an Old Testament Theology class in 2000, he was introducing one of the paper assignments for the class, an essay on Old Testament images and themes in popular culture, and he mentioned Jaws as one of the films that he’d always like to see a paper on.  (I didn’t write the paper, and as far as I remember, nobody in my class did either.)  He read an excerpt from a plot summary he’d found, a passage describing how the movie version (which differed radically, in the face of protests from Peter Benchley, from the novel’s ending), then a summary of the climax of Enuma Elish.  In both cases, the figure in the story who represents the newcomer and the upholder of law faces down a monster from the primordial salt water, destroying the beast from the inside with the power of air.  When he read those passages, everyone in that seminary class had an audible moment of recognition (if you’ve ever been in a classroom where an audible moment of recognition happened, you know what it sounds like), and for the next decade I’ve been thinking on such things.

(I found out this year that Steven Spielberg does not seem to  be aware of his Babylonian parallels; he put the blow-up-the-shark ending in to get the crowd cheering.)

Michial has made his point about the movie poster and the anxieties that it plays into (listen to CHP episode 16.1 if you’ve forgotten), and there’s not much more to say about Bruce, the giant robot shark, that even in 1975 had people wondering about Spielberg’s judgment as a director.  What I’d like to add to the conversation is a look at the epic conventions that make an audience actually care about what’s happening to the people on screen and overcomes, I think, even the Freudian anxiety and the bad special effects to make Jaws a movie worth some genuine thought.

The Pantheon at Amity

I used to think that the first half of Jaws was the worst bit of cinema ever attached to a brilliant second half, and it still might be, but I can see more merit to those opening minutes now than I used to, largely because I’ve paid more attention Babylonian and other literary antecedents to the first half of the shark movie.  The Massachussetts town of Amity (a thinly veiled fictional version of Martha’s Vineyard) is a tourist town, a place where things go well when people are complacent, happy, and eager to spend money.  The mayor of the town and the chamber of commerce know how fragile such an industry is, and in the opening minutes of Jaws, not long after Chief Brody has discovered the mauled corpse of movie-poster-girl, the first clash between the forces that govern Amity arises: on one hand, Brody, the movie’s embodiment of law, wants to shut down the beach, his main aim being the safety of the people and the containment of whatever chaotic force has claimed its first life.  Mayor Vaughn, the figure in the film who represents commerce, pulls rank on the police chief and forbids his using the word “shark” in public appearances.  Already the stage is set for disaster, and whether or not this scene comes faithfully from the novel (no, Dad, I’ve still not read it), the echoes from Henrik Ibsen’s Enemy of the People begin here.  Two conflicting goods, each depending on a very different outcome, are immediately at odds, and the logic is not unlike Pascal’s wager: if the town shuts down and there’s no more shark activity, the loss in tourism money will do great harm to the people who live there.  But if the town does not shut down, and if the shark returns to kill again, then even greater damage will have been done to the town’s money situation, and the leaders of the town will have blood on their hands.  These tensions intensify as Matt Hooper, the representative of Science in the movie’s pantheon, and Captain Quint, the representative of War, enter the story.  Each is convinced that the mayor’s path of inaction is not only dangerous but willfully ignores the evidence that in fact a giant killer shark is in the water, and when the monster from the deep has finally wreaked enough havoc that even Commerce cannot ignore the danger, Brody/Law catches him in a vulnerable moment and convinces him to fund an expedition in which Law, War, and Science will venture forth to battle the force of Chaos in the great sea.

What’s brilliant about the movie is that the veteran Robert Shaw, the very young Richard Dreyfus, and Roy Scheider somewhere in the middle take these archetypal forces of civilization and play them in ways that do not assign random vices to them but really let the character of their position develop in human ways.  The old sailor Quint’s vengeance certainly comes from his encounter with sharks in the waters of the Pacific at the close of World War II, but they also fit the character vices that readers of Homer will recognize as the vices of Ares.  Likewise Matt Hooper’s arrogance and resentment of the older characters is the impetuous impatience of the young (in terms of the history of civilization) cultures of Enlightenment and science.  Finally, Brody’s impatience with Hooper and outright fury with Quint are certainly parts of a character’s personality and connect with his history as a former New York cop but also make perfect sense as the shortcomings of Law personified.

The Clash of Order and Chaos

In the second half of the movie, the camera never does catch sight of any land: there is only the boat and the water, and the visual setting makes perfectly clear that the action is taking place in Chaos’s element.  As Michial and David rightly noted on the podcast, the first full-bodied sighting of the monster happens late in the film, allowing the audience to enjoy the terror of the unseen beast before the sight of Bruce begins to test all of our abilities willfully to suspend our disbelief.  More importantly, the second half allows viewers to watch as the three gods of Amity go through mutual suspicion to a kind of resentment based on each one’s desire to govern the expedition to (after the shark has appeared) an alcohol-lubricated amiability that disintegrates once Chaos resurfaces and destroys (with the help of Quint/War) the only means that the men have to travel with any speed across the surface of the Chaos-monster’s element.  The film is far more self-contained after the boat leaves the land, and the three remaining characters and the monster are all the viewer has to focus on.

This part of the movie progresses from the failure of War’s shark-barrels to do anything significant to the monster; to the monster’s nearly wrecking the boat with sheer pulling power; to Quint’s hubristic act of redlining and blowing out the engine in an attempt to lead the monster back to land; to Hooper’s failed attempt to use the fragile instrument of the physician to destroy the beast in its own element; to Quint’s final destruction; to Brody’s destruction of the beast.  (I would have put in a spoiler alert, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do so for a 35-year-old movie.)  A look at these raw plot details–without John Williams’s pirate-adventure-to-impending-doom soundtrack that is far richer than the two-note anthem that most folks think of when they think of the movie– shows Brody not only as the eventual hero, and the one who comes out as the ordering master of Chaos, but also as someone who overcomes Chaos after Chaos has overcome everything that War and Science could throw against it.

A Babylonian, not a Christian Epic

This epic structure is what makes Jaws such a compelling movie: Law, the force whom Commerce ignores at the outset and whom Science and Law find an irritating hindrance, eventually overcomes Chaos, the force that could not be ignored by Commerce, contained by Science, or conquered by War.  The inclusio structure of the movie is deeply satisfying, and like the gods in the Babylonian Enuma Elish, I come away from the movie somewhat glad that there is a force in the universe powerful enough to combat the primordial destruction that comes from the sea.

But for a Christian Humanist, the story cannot end there.  As emotionally satisfying as the movie stands (we’ve all got a little Babylonian in us), there’s no overarching sense of an order that extends beyond Law’s ability violently to throw down Chaos.  This sort of universe operates within the rules of what John Milbank calls an agnostic metanarrative, a metaphysics that presumes a primordial conflict that goes back as far as the story can go back and does not, in the story’s own terms, ever end.  Such a universe stands in stark contrast to Christian metanarratives which (in most cases) begin with a free and gracious creation and in which evil is not primordial but stands as the ungrateful rebellion of free creatures against a benevolent creator, a rebellion that, like Satan’s in Paradise Lost, founders upon absurdity when it tries to justify itself.  In that sort of universe, heroism (as Milton recognized) consists not in confronting and destroying Chaos but in standing faithful to the good God who gives one being.

That doesn’t negate Jaws as something worth watching, but it should at the least give Christians some pause.  And I am not suggesting, of course, that someone should construct some sort of “Christian Jaws” any more than I would want anyone to write a “Christian Iliad“: both works appeal precisely because they construct and play within coherent universes, and to try to situate the events in a different universe would be to destroy the context that makes them compelling.  I’m not going to play Plato’s Socrates here, suggesting that we excise these stories.  Instead, I would have Christians watch Jaws with an eye to the creativity possible within a different metaphysics and to know that the metaphysics is indeed different.

We’re a little rusty, but give us a break: It’s been a month. Also: No bibliography today. Also also: Our special guest is my wife, Victoria Reynolds Farmer.

General Introduction
- David keeps his office
- Introducing our guest

Our Credentials
- Hanson, Supernatural, and Rent
- Victoria’s academic work with celebrity culture and fandom
- Metallica, Marvel Comics, and Pokeman
- Lord of the Rings, kung fu movies, and Flash Gordon
- Disney and obscure 1980s Christian rock

Being a Fan and “Being a Fan”
- What’s the difference?
- Being active in fan communities
- Proof of a body of knowledge, shorthand, and language
- Michial’s theory no one agrees with
- Fan vs. partisan (Metallica vs. Guns N Roses)
- Why Hanson aren’t the Jonas Brothers
- The Boy Band battles of 1998

Speculative Fiction
- What makes science fiction and fantasy have such devoted fans?
- The Pre-Raphaelites, of all things
- Rejection of culture
- A New Kind of Being Human
- And what’s so bad about escapism?
- There’s no rage like nerd rage

Music
- Expressing sexuality
- But why music?
- I’ll see your Hegel and raise you Kierkegaard
- Music’s demoniacal temporality
- What about recorded music?
- Outsiders and insiders
- Insane Hanson fans

Fandom and Idolatry
- Nathan soothes the Calvinist conscience
- Fandom then and now
- Creativity and fan fiction
- Gilgamesh vs. Metallica
- A long argument about fan fiction

Our theme song this week is Chagall Guevara’s “Murder in the Big House” from their self-titled 1991 album–a forgotten gem.

General Introduction
- The Christian Humanist Circus
- Responses to listener email
- Our attempts at creative writing

Getting Down to It
- Bringing respect to detective fiction
- Let’s leave phrenology out of this

Mysteries in the Hebrew Bible
- Oh, Susanna
- The evolution of Hebrew Law
- Bel and the Dragon

Crime and Punishment in the Old World
- Trial by torture, combat, and ordeal
- Catching the conscience of the king
- Ann Radcliffe as Scooby Doo predecessor

An American Invention
- Poe’s “tales of ratiocination”
- Michial gets to say things in French
- Dupin’s “intuitive science”
- Poe shatters his own conventions
- Relationship between mystery and horror

Sherlock Holmes
- Why do we remember Holmes and not Dupin?
- The romanticism of “The Purloined Letter”
- Sherlock Holmes, Victorian über-mensch
- Some love for Dr. Watson, the reader’s surrogate
- “Hello? 911? This is Robin!”
- Humanizing Greg House
- The homo-erotic turn

The Wounded Detective
- Relationships, not crimes
- Lampshading Bones
- The deep-seated tragedy of The Wire

Father Brown Breaks the Pattern
- Religious not-belonging
- Beating the purely rational
- The devils in the detective’s heart

Justice and Law
- Why PIs don’t trust the police
- A preference for local law enforcement
- The strange conservatism of detective fiction
- Our need for an outsider
- Going maverick—going rogue
- Michial Farmer’s Existential Detective Agency

A New Kind of Detective Fiction
- The Crying of Lot 49
- The fruitless search of Oedipa Maas
- Trying to find patterns in the static

Jessica Fletcher and Lord Peter Wimsey
- Satisfying Sam Mulberry
- Michial gets the sad trombone
- Dorothy Sayers turns down the invitation
- Why detective stories aren’t like real life
- What is it with Catholic intellectuals and mysteries?

Procedurals
- Technology gets ahead of the real world
- Oracular and magic computers
- The King of All Procedurals
- Problems in the real world
- Another Farmerian rant about democracy

Our Recommendations
- Monk
- Kinky Friedman’s Roadkill
- The Wire
- Father Brown
- Lord Peter Wimsey
- Jeremy Brett’s Sherlock Holmes

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Adler, David A. and Susanna Natti. Cam Jansen: The Mystery of the Dinosaur Bones. New York: Puffin, 2004.

Chesterton, G.K. “The Blue Cross.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 9-22.

—. “The Hammer of God.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 118-130.

—. “The Secret Garden.” The Complete Father Brown. New York: Penguin, 1987. 23-38.

Christie, Agatha. Murder on the Orient Express. New York: Berkley, 2004.

Dixon, Franklin W. The Hardy Boys Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Doyle, Arthur Conan. The Complete Sherlock Holmes. Seattle: CreateSpace, 2010.

Eco, Umberto. Foucault’s Pendulum. New York: Mariner, 2007.

Friedman, Kinky. Roadkill. New York: Ballantine, 1997.

Hope, Laura Lee. The Bobbsey Twins at Pilgrim Rock. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 1956.

Irwin, John. American Hieroglyphics: The Symbol of the Egyptian Hieroglyphics in the American Renaissance. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1983.

Keene, Carolyn. Nancy Drew Starter Set. New York: Grosset and Dunlop, 2009.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Man of the Crowd.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 388-396.

—. “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 397-431.

—. “The Mystery of Marie Rougêt.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 506-554.

—. “The Purloined Letter.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Sketches. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn and G.R. Thompson. New York: Library of America, 1984. 680-698.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. New York: HarperPerennial, 1999.

Queen, Ellery. Ellery Queen: Five Complete Novels. New York: Avenel, 1988.

Radcliff, Ann. The Mysteries of Udolpho. New York: Penguin, 2001.

Sayers, Dorothy L. Lord Peter: The Complete Lord Peter Wimsey Stories. New York: Harper, 1986.

—. The Mind of the Maker. New York: Continuum, 2004.

Sobol, Donald J. Encyclopedia Brown Boxed Set. New York: Puffin, 2007.

Stout, Rex. The Rubber Band / The Red Box. New York: Bantam, 2009.

Warner, Gertrude Chandler. The Boxcar Children, Books 1-4. Park Ridge, Ill.: Albert Whitman, 1990.

Another Gilmour-less episode. It may be until tomorrow before it gets added to iTunes, etc. I’m sure you’ll recognize the theme music.

General Introduction
- No Nathan
- What’s on the blog?

Our Emotionally Scarring Experiences
- The Shining haunts Michial’s dreams
- Slasher movies
- Beetlejuice and a man in a yellow wolf suit
- Toy monkeys
- Why dolls are so scary
- FREDDY KREUGER!!!!

Ancient Horror
- What Nathan was going to talk about
- Monsters vs. monster-slayers
- Were these supposed to be scary?
- Lilith
- Scandinavian sagas
- Skipping Renaissance drama

English Gothic
- Horace Walpole
- A list of gothic conventions

American Gothic
- Charles Brockden Brown
- Ditching the castle
- Why Wieland is a failure
- Pseudo-science in Poe and Hawthorne
- The difference between Hawthorne and Poe
- “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” and the folk legend

Frankenstein and Dracula
- David clarifies
- Scientific anxiety
- Does Frankenstein still resonate with us?
- Dracula and the Victorian nightmare of devolution
- Why Dracula is cooler than Edward Cullen
- Vampiric sexuality

20^th-Century Horror and “Weird Fiction”
- Kafka as pseudo-horror
- Crazy worlds and paranoia
- H.P. Lovecraft
- Existential horror
- “Dover Beach” as horror poem

Movies and Television
- What film does that literature can’t do
- The amorphous and the concrete
- The Twilight Zone
- The X-Files and its real-world grounding
- Jaws as Enuma Elish
- Michial gets very graphic

Why Do We Love Horror?
- Katharsis
- Making anxiety into fear
- Facing your fear
- Corruption of childhood

The Christian Response
- A spirit of fear?
- Didactic purposes
- The Christian and torture porn
- Analyzing the Pig People

BIBLIOGRAPHY
Aristotle. Poetics. Trans. Malcolm Heath. New York: Penguin, 1997.

Arnold, Matthew. “Dover Beach.” The Poems of Matthew Arnold. Boston: Adamant Media, 2005.

Beowulf: A New Verse Translation. Trans. Seamus Heaney. New York: Norton, 2001.

Brown, Charles Brockden. Edgar Huntly; or, Memoirs of a Sleep-Walker. Kent, Oh.: Kent State UP, 1987.

—. Wieland; or, the Transformation, Together with Memoirs of Carwin the Biloquist. San Diego: Harcourt Brace, 1926.

Eirik the Red and Other Icelandic Sagas. Trans. Gwyn Jones. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

The Epic of Gilgamesh: A New Translation. Trans. Andrew George. New York: Penguin, 1999.

Enuma Elish: The Seven Tablets of the History of Creation. Trans. L.W. King. New York: FQ Classics, 2007.

Hawthorne, Nathaniel. “The Birthmark.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 147-164.

—. The Blithedale Romance. New York: Norton, 1978.

—. “Rappacini’s Daughter.” Hawthorne’s Short Stories. Ed. Newton Arvin. New York: Knopf, 1946. 179-209.

Irving, Washington. “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow.” New York: Signet, 1981. 329-360.

Kafka, Franz. The Castle. Trans. Anthea Bell. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.

—. “In the Penal Colony.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 140-167.

—. “The Metamorphosis.” Trans. Willa and Edwin Muir. The Complete Stories. Ed. Nahum N. Glazer. New York: Schocken, 1971. 89-139.

King, Stephen. The Shining. New York: Pocket, 2002.

Lovecraft, H.P. Tales. New York: Library of America, 2005.

Meyer, Stephanie. Twilight. New York: Little, Brown, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Black Cat.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 597-606.

—. “The Imp of the Perverse.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 826-832.

—. “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays. Ed. Patrick F. Quinn. New York: Library of America, 1996. 555-559.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein. New York: Penguin, 2003.

Walpole, Horace. The Castle of Otranto: A Gothic Story. New York: Oxford UP, 2009.