The Weird: a discussion of fiction and politics with China Miéville

Event Date: 2 March 2011
Kingston University
JG0002, John Galsworthy Building
Penrhyn Road Campus
Kingston KT1 2EE

At the start of the twentieth century, H. P . Lovecraft summed up the encounter between horror and strangeness as ‘pictures of shattered natural laws’ and encounters with ‘cosmic outsideness’. At the start of the 21st century, the weird has alerted us, once again, to the persistence of this ‘mood or feeling’. The new weird – generically indeterminate as it is – offers a potent trope linking pasts and presents and opening new terrains for writing creatively and differently even though its political, philosphical and cultural ramifications may be less easy to fathom.This talk with China Miéville and the Faculty of Kingston’s London Graduate School and School of Humanities seeks to revisit the idea of the weird in fiction and politics. The session will betake the form of an open discussion where contributions from faculty and audience will consider the relevance of the idea of the weird to various fields of study in the humanities.

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