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University of East Anglia Digital Repository View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk brought to you by CORE provided by University of East Anglia digital repository University of East Anglia Philosophy Department Katherine Allen What Joy from Misery: the Pleasures of Horror Thesis submitted for the degree of PhD Thesis supervisors – Dr. Mark Rowe and Dr. Jerry Goodenough July 2012 © This copy of the thesis has been supplied on condition that anyone who consults it is understood to recognise that its copyright rests with the author and that use of any information derived there from must be in accordance with current UK Copyright Law. In addition, any quotation or extract must include full attribution. Katherine Allen 2012 What Joy from Misery: the Pleasures of Horror Abstract: This thesis investigates the allure of narrative genres, such as horror, that have historically been viewed as philosophically (and often morally) problematic owing to their negative content and the painful emotional responses they elicit. It departs from the majority of classical and contemporary solutions to the alleged paradox posed by such genres, in that it does not attempt to render their pleasures explicable by appealing to their fictive status, thematic or ideological meanings or the more comprehensibly-pleasurable meta-responses they inspire. Rather, this account suggests that we choose to consume stories – fictional and factual – that depict violent or distressing situations and evoke discomforting emotions, for the same reason we choose to engage with less obviously conflict-filled narratives. Fictions compel our attention insofar as they resemble potentially salient information, appealing to a set of deeply ingrained and unconscious cognitive biases that prompt us to attend to certain kinds of stimuli. We are capable of finding narrative genres such as horror, tragedy and the ‘misery memoir’ compelling – without, it is important to note, finding their content in any way pleasant – because we are predisposed to find some types of mental effort rewarding. While horror is often criticised – and defended – on the grounds that its pleasures must lie in slaking anti-social appetites, this thesis criticises the model of fiction’s appeal on which such assumptions are based. Instead it suggests that narrative pleasure characteristically resides in intellectual and emotional absorption or stimulation rather than any straightforward fulfilment of our real life desires. In support of this contention, this account incorporates analyses of a number of related topics, examining subjects such as the alleged rationality of the emotions, whether our attraction to non-factual narratives represents an adaptive trait and how fiction-making, criticism and consuming function as cultural practices. 2 CONTENTS SECTION PAGE ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ......................................................................................................................... 5 METHOD OF CITING BOOKS AND ARTICLES .................................................................................... 6 i. INTRODUCTION .................................................................................................................................... 8 1. A DISREPUTABLE GENRE ................................................................................................................ 26 1.1 Anatomy of a Panic ...................................................................................................................... 29 1.2 Disturbing Effects or Disturbingly Effective: Conflicting Rationales for Film Censorship ........ 38 1.3 From Video Nasties to Penny Dreadfuls: Recurrent Concerns about Violent Media .................. 42 1.4 Video Nasties, Misery Lit and Other Despised Genres ............................................................... 49 1.5 ‘I Know Very Well What They Are’: Common Sense and the Philosophy of Horror ................. 51 2. THE CASE AGAINST HORROR ......................................................................................................... 62 2.1 Laboratory Experiments. .............................................................................................................. 66 2.1.1 Questionable Analogues .............................................................................................................. 66 2.1.2 Aggression Versus Arousal .......................................................................................................... 71 2.1.3 Atypical Viewing Environments .................................................................................................. 73 2.1.4 Demand Cues................................................................................................................ ................ 73 2.1.5 Flawed Statistical Measures........................................................................................... .............. 75 2.2 Field Experiments................................................................................................................. ........ 76 2.3 Longitudinal Studies........................................................................................................ ............. 80 2.3.1 Centerwall.................................................................................................................... ................. 81 2.3.2 Eron and Huesman................................................................................................... ..................... 83 2.3.3 Other Explanations for any Association between Simulated Violence and Real Life Aggression ................................................................................................................................... 88 2.4 What are the Real Perils of Violent Media .................................................................................. 93 3. FROM PERILS TO PLEASURES ......................................................................................................... 98 3.1 She Who Refuses to ‘Refuse to Look’: A Profile of the Female Horror Fan............................. 100 3.2 Sheep in Wolves’ Clothing: Identification and Exploitation Horror .......................................... 107 3.3 David Buckingham on Children’s Responses to Negative Content .......................................... 114 4. SPECIAL AFFECTS ........................................................................................................................... 121 4.1.1 Emotions as Acts: Solomon’s The Passions .............................................................................. 124 4.1.2 Emotion as an ‘Assent to an Appearance’: Nussbaum’s Neo-Stoic Model ............................... 127 4.2 The Paradox of Fiction (and its Relationship to Judgementalism)............................................. 130 4.3.1 Radford on the Irrationality, and Incorrigibility, of Fictive Emotions ....................................... 131 4.3.2 Accommodating Irrationality: Walton’s ‘Make-Believe’ Model ............................................... 137 3 4.4 Problems with the Judgement Model: Untidy Emotions, Facial Feedback & the Primacy of Affect ......................................................................................................................................... 140 4.4.1 Recalcitrant Emotion and Fictional Fears .................................................................................. 141 4.4.2 The Case for Basic Emotions ..................................................................................................... 144 4.4.3 Bypassing the High Road: When Affect Precedes Cognition .................................................... 147 4.4.4 Facial Feedback ......................................................................................................................... 149 4.5 The Advantages of Embodied Appraisal Theories .................................................................... 150 4.6 Fictive Feelings as ‘Emotional Illusions’ ................................................................................... 156 5. TRUTH, LIES AND PLEASURE ....................................................................................................... 161 5.1 Addressing Lamarque and Olsen’s Critique of Truth Theories ................................................. 163 5.2 Fictions as Thought-Experiments .............................................................................................. 175 5.2.1 Examples of Fictions Employed as a Mode of Argumentation .................................................. 178 5.3 Clarificationism and the Search for Emotional Truth ................................................................ 185 6. WHAT IS FICTION FOR? .................................................................................................................. 194 6.1 The Byproduct Hypothesis ........................................................................................................ 195 6.2 The ‘Fiction Instinct’: Story as Cognitive Play .......................................................................... 199 6.3 Boyd’s On the Origin of Stories ................................................................................................ 205 6.4 Can the Byproduct Model Coexist with Boyd’s Vision of Fictions as Cognitive Play? ............ 208 7. THE PROBLEM WITH PLEASURE .................................................................................................. 214 7.1 Reviving the Boredom Model ...................................................................................................
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