“Beyond such a fortunate coincidence, however, the appearance of academic characters in weird narratives seems to me to serve a couple of ends. There’s the obvious device of furthering the plot in terms of exposition of crucial information. There’s also the less obvious — I’d almost call it a symptom of the weird narrative’s vexed relationship to knowledge. As I see it, weird fiction is shot through with a deep ambivalence about human knowledge, which may well encode a kind of skepticism towards the Enlightenment’s general faith in rationality. After all, the figures of learning in these narratives are just as likely to unleash the supernatural threat as they are to contain or expel it. The anxiety over epistemology that lies at the heart of what may be my favorite Lovecraft story, “The Call of Cthulhu,” is something that the academy has been struggling with for the better part of the last four or five decades, in the wake of Derrida, Foucault, Lacan, Deleuze, etc. So it’s another level of convergence that I’m only too happy to exploit.”
4 out of 5
http://www.demonmuse.com/the-secret-to-writing-is-writing-a-conversation-with-john-langan/
