Oct 17, 2014 02:39 PM
http://www.salon.com/2013/04/11/weird_sc...t_partner/
A.C. LEE: Although H.P. Lovecraft has exerted a towering influence on the development of science fiction and horror, until recently, Brian Kim Stefans argues in an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, his work hasn’t held much interest for literary critics or philosophers.
Stefans thinks Lovecraft’s “singularly fraught metaphysical universe,” and his refusal of an authoritative “panoptic vision” of the world, spoiled both his own attempts at a novel andthe efforts of literary critics looking for a tidy interpretive framework through which to engage and explain him. But Stefans hears a Lovecraftian echo in the work of a loose grouping of young philosophers, the so-called “speculative realists,” a connection made explicit in “Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy,” by Graham Harman.
Harman sees Lovecraft’s “failures” precisely as “virtues.” Where 20th century philosophy was marked by the “linguistic turn” and various attempts at reductionism, and accordingly mixed results, Lovecraft insisted on and reveled in identifying both the limits of language and the unexplainable gaps in reality. Harman, according to Stefans, hopes to make Lovecraft “a foot soldier” in a war “against bland, realist empiricism” in the vein of Hume and Kant. --The Stone
A.C. LEE: Although H.P. Lovecraft has exerted a towering influence on the development of science fiction and horror, until recently, Brian Kim Stefans argues in an essay at the Los Angeles Review of Books, his work hasn’t held much interest for literary critics or philosophers.
Stefans thinks Lovecraft’s “singularly fraught metaphysical universe,” and his refusal of an authoritative “panoptic vision” of the world, spoiled both his own attempts at a novel andthe efforts of literary critics looking for a tidy interpretive framework through which to engage and explain him. But Stefans hears a Lovecraftian echo in the work of a loose grouping of young philosophers, the so-called “speculative realists,” a connection made explicit in “Weird Realism: Lovecraft and Philosophy,” by Graham Harman.
Harman sees Lovecraft’s “failures” precisely as “virtues.” Where 20th century philosophy was marked by the “linguistic turn” and various attempts at reductionism, and accordingly mixed results, Lovecraft insisted on and reveled in identifying both the limits of language and the unexplainable gaps in reality. Harman, according to Stefans, hopes to make Lovecraft “a foot soldier” in a war “against bland, realist empiricism” in the vein of Hume and Kant. --The Stone