Shane Baker (University of California - Santa Cruz)
shba@****.com (Log-in to reveal)

This special session invites panelists to get lost in the wild spaces still within densely inhabited places, and to consider Los Angeles as particularly productive of the aesthetic categories of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie, using literature, film, or other media. What unsettling accidents may happen within the expected flows of human, synanthropic, vehicular, commercial, data, or drug traffic? What falls through L.A.’s grid system, cutting across this city of angles? Papers may make excursions through theories of chaos, emergence, or complexity, or may entertain philosophies of the event, cityscaped drug “trips,” the relationship between wandering and wondering, slips of the feet, nocturnal topographies, the failed shortcut of the horror film, the spiritual pilgrimage, the celestial cities of “imaginal” realms glimpsed in mystical visions: All may involve the emergence of the new, whether wonderful or terrible, from within the already considered –­– defamiliarizing, reenchanting, or revitalizing known places.

This special session invites panelists to get lost in the wild spaces still within densely inhabited places, and to consider Los Angeles as particularly productive of the aesthetic categories of the uncanny, the weird, and the eerie, using literature, film, or other media. What unsettling accidents may happen within the expected flows of human, synanthropic, vehicular, commercial, data, or drug traffic? What falls through L.A.’s grid system, cutting across this city of angles? Papers may make excursions through theories of chaos, emergence, or complexity, or may entertain philosophies of the event, cityscaped drug “trips,” the relationship between wandering and wondering, slips of the feet, nocturnal topographies, the failed shortcut of the horror film, the spiritual pilgrimage, the celestial cities of “imaginal” realms glimpsed in mystical visions: All may involve the emergence of the new, whether wonderful or terrible, from within the already considered –­– defamiliarizing, reenchanting, or revitalizing known places.