Mortal Minds and Cosmic Horrors : A Cognitive Analysis of Literary Cosmic Horror in H.P.Lovecraft's ”The Shadow Out of Time”

Sammanfattning: This essay explores how the reader cognitively reacts to reading H. P. Lovecraft’s horror story “The Shadow Out of Time” (1936). I analyse the text to see how it invites readers to beaffected by it. I specifically look at invitations to envisionment, subjective experience andintersubjectivity. The literary horror terms uncertainty and uncanniness are used inconjunction with cognitive theory to explain how the readers may react to readingLovecraft’s stories. These are in turn reinforced by the reader's ongoing envisionment of thestory, and their sharing of the character’s experiences via subjective experience. For example,the separation between the mind and body of the protagonist creates an uncanny dissonanceto his own identity, which disrupts the reader’s understanding of the character. This maycause distress in the reader due to the subjective experience that connects the reader to thecharacter. Additionally, the disrupted sense of reality in the book affects the narrator'sperceptions of both his surroundings and his own mental faculties. Subsequently, the reader’sunderstanding of the text is also in a state of flux which affects their envisionment of thestory. This disrupts understanding and may enhance feelings of unease. My theory istherefore that unease is invited by certain horror techniques, such as uncertainty anduncanniness, which in turn influence the reader specifically through subjective experienceand envisionment.