footnotes and marginalia

Abstract

Disability or lack of health present areas of unthinkability not only to our surroundings, but to ourselves. In “footnotes and marginalia” I explore my horizon and blind spots through an analysis of James Blish’s More Light, a horror story about infectious reading. Deliberately blurring the lines between genres, my text is itself infected with horror elements and becomes a horror story, twisted and outrageously wrong. As the title implies, it deals with what happens at the borders of academic inquiry, exploring embodiment and how to approach the parts of our horizons we cannot look straight at. Interested in reception on the smaller scale as well as the larger, it probes the back-and-forth between reader and text. Working with texts we all let the text into us, letting it infect us, change our inner landscapes. I include a rather detailed sensory description of such a reading process, and I hope to encourage sensory awareness in the reader as well. I hope to make you tense up and feel uneasy. I hope to make you laugh. I hope to make you flinch. In short, I hope it is as unpleasant to read as it was to write.

Keywords

• reception studies
• disability
• horror
• infectious reading
• unthinkability
• embodiment