![]() This article approaches the writings of Lafcadio Hearn, an exotic, wandering, homeless “ghost of no place” (Nabae 2014), born in Greece, raised in Ireland, who became a fiction writer famous for turning both New Orleans and Japan into weird, haunted, literary landscapes. keywords ruins, materiality, animation, haunting, narrative, chronotope In these imagined ruins I see the genesis of an aesthetics of haunting materially inspired by New World landscapes: the aesthetics of the American weird tale. For settler colonials in both North America and Australia, the absence of homely haunted “picturesque” ruins in the “sublime wilderness” of the New World becomes a diagnostic predicament of both folkloric and literary narratives, speaking to a broader colonial anxiety of “unsettlement.” In the final sections I explore how Americans fashioned new kinds of ruin and new forms of haunting, including imagined sublime ruins of vast age that predate European settlement. No Ghosts.” I argue first that ruins have material agency and produce destabilizing affects affording the imagination of haunting anthropomorphic figures to animate the landscape. ![]() This article explores anxieties about the unhauntability of the landscapes of New World, expressed in the aphorism “No Ruins. Kitta draws our attention to the “double stigma” of a character who is both supernatural and who circulates on the Internet, showing that the unarticulated experiences Slender Man gives voice to belong to an online environment and specifically acknowledge an “unacknowledged common experience of being watched” (72) Peck usefully replaces the term “ostensive action” with “ostensive practices,” locating ostension within a series of genres of ostension (including continuum from recognizable generic fan practices like costume play and pilgrimage to the aforementioned murder) that circulate within a networked, collaborative, self-aware, social “community of practices.”1 Tolbert is particularly concerned to show how in the first instance Slender Man isn’t a “real” monster of a “real” folkloric legend-a legend being a narrative represented as being historical or belonging to “the real”-but a “fictional” folkloresque monster assembled from the vocabulary of real folklore so as to encourage a sense of legendary believability. ![]() Using this incident to rethink ostension is central to all these papers, and each author makes important contributions to the definition of ostension. Each of the papers in this collection makes reference to a singular “Slender Man Stabbing” incident in Waukesha, Wisconsin, an incident that defines one extreme of a continuum of “ostension,” an attempt to act out or show the (legend) narrative in real life. ![]()
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