Brittany Nunez
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Breaking The Audience
Breaking The Audience: Methods of Fear Elicitation in Stephen King’s The Shining By Brittany Nunez Abstract: This article analyzes Stephen King’s novel The Shining (1977) using a psychological and formalistic approach. Focus is placed on King’s methods of elicitation of fear in readers, which are argued to be (1) use of narrative elements such as setting, point of view, character, plot, and style in combination with prior successful writing styles by King to make readers feel empathy for the characters and their relatable problems; (2) exploitation of the vulnerable emotional state of the empathetic reader to induce a feeling of dread through specific phobias; (3) grasping at the insecurities of readers and implanting the fear of judgment by those whose opinions have significant meaning to them; and (4) capturing of multiple subgenres of horror to ensure fear is evoked from all readers based on their preferred form of horror. Several examples of narrative elements are provided with relevance to highly relatable themes. Stephen King’s On Writing is used to emphasize how his previously successful writing techniques are used in The Shining. Conclusions from an experiment on induced fear from “Relating Experimentally-Induced Fear to Pre-Existing Phobic Fear in the Human Brain” (Levine et al.) are used to prove the ability to create new forms of fear during heightened vulnerability with an explanation of specific phobias from the text. “From Big Sticks to Talking Sticks” (Davenport) is cited for its analysis of Jack Torrance with relevance to how King wrote this character to tear into the readers’ self-image. Horror is broken down into subcategories as defined in “The Genre of Horror” (Prohaszkova) and these are proven to each be present in The Shining, ensuring a scare from all horror enthusiasts.
By Brittany Nunez4 years ago in Geeks
Marishka
Marishka is one of those online friends that you’ll probably never get to meet in person, but they’ve changed your life in one way or another. We ‘met’ through a tight-knit Facebook group, and when she joined everyone instantly fell in love with her. She’s an intimidatingly beautiful traveling bartender who drives a motorcycle and has the feisty personality to match. She immigrated from Kharkov, Ukraine as a child.
By Brittany Nunez4 years ago in Humans
