Horror in Tragedy / Tragedy in Horror (NeMLA)
Salve Regina University, Newport, RI
Event: NeMLA
While tragedy and horror are often treated as distinct genres, both traditions ask audiences to look steadily at what ordinarily repels them. From unburied corpses and undead monsters to violated kinship and failed agency, these spectacles produce fear, pity, disgust, and sorrow alongside fascination. This session explores what might be understood as a tragedy–horror continuum, examining the aesthetic, affective, and ritual overlaps between tragic and horrific representation across historical periods and media.
This panel welcomes interdisciplinary approaches to the relationship between tragedy and horror in theater, film, literature, television, performance, and visual culture. Possible topics include abjection, affect, taboo, pollution, spectatorship, ritual, violence, mourning, trauma, revenge, monstrosity, catharsis, embodiment, psychoanalysis, genre theory, and adaptation. Papers may address how tragedy and horror construct communal affective experiences; how art and literature shape cultural understandings of taboo and trauma; or how horror inherits, transforms, or reimagines tragic structures.
The significance of this session lies in its effort to create a space for dialogue between fields that are often separated institutionally and generically despite their shared concerns with suffering, transgression, and collective spectatorship. By bringing tragedy and horror studies into conversation, this panel seeks to reconsider the boundaries between canonical and popular forms while illuminating how these shared spectacles mediate communal encounters with what culture cannot easily assimilate.
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Please submit abstracts by September 30, 2026 through the NeMLA portal: https://cfplist.com/nemla/User/SubmitAbstract/22290
https://cfplist.com/nemla/Home/S/22290
Erasmia Gorla