![]() ![]() In the late Victorian genre of weird tales, due to the technical difficulties of visualizing unknown forces, these narratives depended less on concrete depictions of objectively identifiable events than of disturbing encounters tinged with erotic, chthonic, and/or mystical sublimity. By conducting selective readings of narratives by Edgar Allan Poe, Hermann Melville, Ambrose Bierce and Arthur Machen, the present study retraces the historically problematic explication of forces that breach norms of identity by exposing protagonists to cosmic obscurities that destabilize visualization and embodiment, and hence, the self-understanding of both the individual and her community. ![]() These complimentary modes of distinguishing phenomena, which epitomize the “two cultures” of academia, abruptly manifest their strengths and weaknesses when confronted by indeterminate forces of a predatory or polymorphic nature. When strange forces impose on us and command our attention from the sky or oceanic depths, when they rustle invisibly or naked in the vegetation of a desolate grove, the sciences and humanities have different responses to the alterity of the encounter-the first presupposing a stable object or “content” that it seeks to identify, the latter presupposing an unstable meaning which it seeks to explicate.
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