Set in a post-apocalyptic world ensuing from a power struggle between the selfproclaimed Antichrist Michael Langdon (Cody Fern) in season one's ‘Murder House’ (2011) and the witches in season three's ‘Coven’ (2013), ‘Apocalypse’ (2018) is, to date, the odd season out in the American Horror Story universe. Even though some characters have appeared in multiple seasons, the crossover in ‘Apocalypse’ proposes a new approach to the anthology. Popularized by classical series such as The Twilight Zone (Serling, CBS 1959–64), the anthology series format consists of a series of unrelated episodes which, however, rely on the same genre or generic conventions (the horror genre and the fantastic in the case of The Twilight Zone) (Jowett 2017, 9). Before ‘Apocalypse’ aired, AHS concluded each season's storyline with its finale, even though characters from previous seasons sometimes made significant appearances, such as the human Voodoo doll from ‘Coven’ in Queenie's cameo in ‘Hotel’ (FX, 2015). Yet ‘Apocalypse’ directly reprises elements and storylines from ‘Murder House’, ‘Coven’ and ‘Hotel’.

Among the returning characters is New Orleans’ legendary Voodoo Queen Marie Laveau (Angela Bassett). Based on a historical figure, Laveau was introduced in ‘Coven’, a season which tackles racism through the parallel set up between slavery in the Southern states and the rivalry between white witches and black Voodoo practitioners in the early 2010s (Toulza 2020, 243–60). Characterized by the codes of classic Voodoo zombie films, which tend to simplify this syncretic religion and resort to sensationalistic images that exacerbate its Otherness, Laveau first appears to be an antagonist to the witches in ‘Coven’. Inscribed in what Jason Mittell labels ‘character elaboration’ – a ‘model of change [which] exploits the serial form to gradually reveal aspects of a character over time so that these facets of the character feel new to the audience’ (Mittell 2015, 136) – Marie's character development reveals both her identity and magic to be far more complex than first meets the eye. On the one hand, Laveau can be the antagonist US society has shaped her to be. On the other hand, she becomes a helper in ‘Apocalypse’, while Dinah Stevens (Adina Porter), who has replaced her after her death, sides with the Antichrist. Voodoo's development in ‘Apocalypse’ ultimately strikes as a way for the producers to bring back actress Angela Bassett for fan-pleasing purposes, while Laveau and Stevens’ presence only re-centres whiteness as the norm (Dyer 1997).

Emergence of Modernism in Brazil

Whilst a large part of Brazilian historiography, since its ‘patron’, Francisco Adolfo de Varnhagen (1816–1878), ignores precolonial times and considers the arrival of Europeans in 1500 as the beginning of national history, the chronology of its arts is even more limited. It commonly starts in 1816, when the French Artistic Mission led by Joachim Lebreton (1760–1819), a former director of the Louvre, arrived in Rio de Janeiro to establish the capital's artistic institutions and canons. According to historian Fernando Azevedo, it is with the installation of the Portuguese court in Brazil that, ‘broadly speaking, the history of our culture begins, for, until this time, one cannot find anything, but sporadic manifestations of exceptional figures educated in Portugal and under foreign influence’ (as cited in Williams, 2001, p. 622). Eight years before the arrival of the French Artistic Mission, the Portuguese royal family had moved to Brazil, escorted by the English fleet, fleeing from Napoleonic expansion. Subsequently the capital of the United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and the Algarves (1815–1822), Rio de Janeiro required a cultural apparatus compatible with its new status as the centre of a European monarchy. Portugal's King John VI (1767–1826) revoked the colonial prohibition of printing, and the royal library was brought from Lisbon. Lebreton and his cohort devised a Royal Academy dedicated to visual arts, crafts and architecture. The Academy, which was later transformed into the Imperial School of Fine Arts and finally the National School of Fine Arts (Escola Nacional de Belas Artes – ENBA), would drive the development of Brazilian visual arts, through its salons and prizes. Championed by officialdom for over a hundred years, Brazil's visual arts were still attempting to emulate standards imported from Europe throughout the nineteenth century. Eventually, a nationalist quest to subvert the European influence emanated from the arts establishment, and this became an essential characteristic of Brazilian Modernism, as defining of the movement as the common attributes of universal Modernism listed by Peter Gay in his classic ‘Modernism’: subjectivism or self-scrutiny and the rupture with conventions (2010). The apparent anachronism between breaking with old aesthetics and continuously importing established patterns is explained by Daryle Williams, for whom ‘the Brazilian elite worked to invent a civilised Brazil for Brazilian and international eyes.

Introduction

Since it began in 2011, the multiple and continuing series of American Horror Story (AHS) have explored the diverse motifs, icons and narratives of horror and the popular Gothic. As a major part of this, AHS stands as a fascinating example of performance practice, creating and deploying what can be regarded as its own repertory company or even performance ensemble. In this regard, AHS echoes the old ‘stock system’ of casting that evolved from nineteenth-century theatre to cinema. Pamela Robertson Wojcik explains that this practice would continue throughout classical Hollywood – frequently with the loan and exchange of headline stars – until ‘actors become free agents in the 1960s, (and) the official stock system breaks down’ (Robertson Wojcik 2003, 240). Looked at like this, we detect an echo of popular cinematic horror such as Universal Pictures, indelibly associated with stars such as Boris Karloff and Bela Lugosi in the 1930s and Lon Chaney Junior in the 1940s; Tod Slaughter and his regular company of actors in the screen adaptations of stage melodramas in Britain in the 1930–40s; British director Pete Walker working with core actors, most notably Sheila Keith, in his 1970s horror movies; and Hammer Films in the 1950–70s which had a stable of core stars – most prominently Peter Cushing and Christopher Lee – and supporting character actors like Michael Ripper (who appeared in more Hammer films than either of the major stars). Although we could draw parallels between AHS and the icons and repertoire of 1930–70s cinematic horror, the sheer range of AHS finds a particularly nuanced and compelling parallel with horror culture beyond the screen. In other words, AHS can be seen as belonging to the rich ensemble tradition of popular horror performance across media, encouraging in its audience playful suspensions of disbelief and equally audacious displays of virtuosity. Thus, AHS is to contemporary television what, for example, the Théâtre du Grand-Guignol (1897–1962) was to horror theatre – especially in its 1920s heyday – and programmes such as The Witch's Tale (1931–38) and others were to live horror radio in the 1930–50s. This chapter will explore key features and ramifications of the performance practices of AHS in relation to other repertory and ensemble traditions in the history of popular horror culture. First of all, however, we need to explore AHS as an example of horror television.

Witchcraft has a long and indeed, multifaceted relationship with feminism. From suffragist Matilda Joslyn Gage's 1893 book Woman, Church and State through to the radical feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, the witch has been regularly deployed as both a martyr to institutional misogyny and a symbol of female insubordination. The meanings attached to her can be manifold and even contradictory. In her literary and political incarnations, she often embodies radical, or at least progressive, ideas about women's social roles. On television, however, she appears as a more ambivalent figure. Magical women like Bewitched's (1964–72) Samantha Stephens and I Dream of Jeannie's (1965–70) title character simultaneously subvert and bolster the normative constructions of femininity dominant during their particular cultural moments. Moreover, because television is an essentially domestic form – Cecelia Tichi describes the TV as an ‘electronic hearth’- it is an inherently populist medium, with televisual witches providing a window into the mainstream reception and interpretation of feminist ideologies (Tichi 1993, 42).

In the following pages, I adumbrate how T.V. witches contort themselves to alternately embody and challenge distinct modes, or waves, of feminist thought. In particular, this chapter employs the series AHS: ‘Coven’ (2013–14) as a prism through which to investigate popular representations of fourth-wave feminism and its role in the lives of adolescent girls. I argue that as a mode of feminism driven by online activism and bound up with popular culture, the fourth wave finds a ready home in mass-market television horror. ‘Coven’ offers sensationalized engagements with many of the concerns of fourth-wave feminism – notably, issues of consent, sexual violence and intersectionality – while also engaging in a dialogue with earlier feminisms. Because the series represents intergenerational conflict between witches born in different eras, it self-consciously portrays the fourth wave as defined by and against previous iterations of feminism. Nevertheless, ‘Coven’ shows that fourth-wave feminism may not be so easily disentangled from its successors. Despite the rhetoric and iconography of intersectionality that define the series, aesthetically if not philosophically, its feminism remains as white, middle-class and nondisabled as its predecessors. Moreover, the competition for the ‘Supremacy’ around which much of the plot pivots, aligns the series with the individualist modes of empowerment associated with the postfeminism of the 1980s and 1990s.

In the previous chapter, relatively simple computational analyses were discussed without any comparison to human response data. In this chapter, I compare the predictions of more sophisticated theoretical and computational models to human ratings collected during the reading of entire chapters, books and poem collections.

Story Analysis I: Plots

After having discussed the complexities of computational analyses of multiword expressions in the last chapter, it is now time for considering the biggest text units readers can process: stories, novels and poems. Two superfeatures playing a major role at this macrostructural level of the reading act are plots and characters, discussed in the first two sections of this chapter. Narratologists and literary critics still continue to debate on the exact definition of the term plot. For the present purposes, I adopt a structuralist position according to which plot is considered a pattern that yields coherence to the narrative by enchaining story events in a limited number of typical sequences. As we will see, such prototypical plotlines can well be identified via computational analyses.

Plot, Event Detection and Sentiment Analysis

Plot is about the causal and temporal patterns arranging the events in a story and how this arrangement in turn facilitates identification of their motivations and consequences. This ‘plot as global structure view’ facilitates the application of sentiment analysis to the identification of story plotlines and it is also closely linked to the psychological concept of situation model building. Abstractly, a story can be represented as a partially specified trajectory in situation-state space: a temporally ordered sequence of events. Story comprehension then can be seen as the problem of inferring the most probable missing features of this trajectory, a cognitive process which is driven by affective-aesthetic processes of suspense or surprise. If the incoming information from the text is consistent with the situation model currently under construction (e.g. shares characters and locations), it is mapped onto the current model. If it does not overlap with the current model, a reader will shift the focus of attention to begin building a new structure that satisfies the constraints of the current information.

As outlined in Chapter 2, readers’ brains code these in the form of situation models with the dimensions:

• • Time. One event relative to another, and to the time of narration.

• • Space. The spatial relations between events or protagonists in the situation model.

• • People and objects.

Despite the profound disruptions that have shaken the economic world since the war, the 1920 crisis and the 1929 crisis have demonstrated the persistence of our phenomenon.

No doubt the driving industries have changed: with the crisis of 1929, the car industry takes its place alongside the electrical industries and the railways. However, these industries are far from having achieved their full potential. The era of electricity and combustion engines that began in the nineteenth century is not over. Aviation is only just beginning. Steam networks have yet to be transformed into electrical networks, countries have yet to be equipped with power lines, hydraulic power has yet to be used and new countries have yet to be equipped. Housing must be rebuilt and improved everywhere. Large quantities of capital will be required. Their creation and use will be accompanied by alternating periods of growth and depression. Observation of the metal and machine industries will continue to bear fruit, with oil and electricity now having a place comparable to that of coal.

This is why we can still see the very keen interest of the industrialist, the merchant, the financier, the capitalist, the worker and even the politician, the criminologist or the sociologist, in recognizing the approach of a general crisis. The crisis often means the ruin of the merchant, the industrialists and the financier and a reduction of the capitalist's income. It signals unemployment, poverty, or at least a reduction in wages for the worker. Even the politicians are caught up in this kind of economic cyclone. Sometimes public opinion will blame the government; public finances will always be shaken.

How do we predict the onset of a crisis?

Since the time, already long ago, when the French Ministère du travail conducted the first study of the economic indexes that enabled the observation of economic trends and the forecasting of crises, considerable progress has been made. In almost every major country there is now a large service specializing in the creation and publication of these indexes and in their use as a tool for forecasting crises.

From 1908, the Bulletin du Ministère du travail and the Bulletin de législation comparée du Ministère des finances began publishing a selection of monthly indexes.

Introduction

‘Rubber Man’, the eighth episode of AHS's ‘Murder House’ season, opens with a scene in which Nora Montgomery, the wife of the original owner, wanders through the 21st century version of her Victorian manor in a state of confusion: she is weepy and hysteric over the loss of her child. This scene is followed by one in which Tate consoles the hysterical Nora, promising he will heal her and give her what she wants: a baby. It is unclear whether Tate's need to please Nora is rooted in his longing for a mother figure or in other desires. The ambiguity intensifies when Tate promptly retrieves a rubber suit from the trash, a BDSM costume stored in the Murder House attic and proceeds to rape Vivien Harmon to orgasm. Vivien is the current wife and mother of the house, who, like Nora, is anxious after the loss of a child, and wants another. The rape to orgasm effectively impregnates Vivien, apparently giving both hysterical women what they want.

‘What does a woman want?’, Doctor Sigmund Freud famously asked (Freud 1963). Murder House has a long history of being owned by male doctors who struggle to understand women's needs, a fact that is not lost on Moira, the Murder House maid: ‘Doctors are charlatans! […] They make you think you’re crazy so they can have their fun! Haven't you read “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman?’ (Murphy 2011, ‘Rubber Man’.) Moira looks at a pregnant, medicated and sexually violated Vivien and she compares her situation in the Murder House to the narrator in ‘The Yellow Wallpaper’ (1892) and to so-called hysterical women throughout Western history. This comparison positions Vivien and the Murder House mythology within the broader context of the haunted house genre in American literature and film, linking the horror haunting the house to trauma that is both historical and psychosexual. Self-conscious of its position within the American haunted house story, AHS's ‘Murder House’ season engages the trope to ask provocative questions about authorship.

Introduction

The opening of AHS: ‘Asylum’ takes place in the ‘present day’. In this first scene, ghost-hunting newlyweds visit the fictional, infamous and dilapidated Briarcliff Asylum. As they attempt to navigate the labyrinthine corridors of this disused mental institution, looking for signs of the paranormal, their timeline dissolves into the hospital of forty years ago. The orderlies and patients appear to walk over the couple as each group overlaps visually. This adjacency of past and present leads to an entanglement not across space but instead across time. Acting as a cornerstone of the narrative, the drawing together of two chronologies in an exterior and visible movement likewise establishes both an interior displacement of rationality and an existential dilemma. According to Michel Foucault, admittedly, there is no perfect perception. However, the viewer is at this moment nonetheless offered a privileged insight into both the historical world of the hospital's heyday and the present world of what the asylum has become. Through this heightened awareness, the spectator is likewise implicated in their confluence. Much like Foucault's madman who denies delineation, under the influence of this aberration in logical linearity, the narrative, the characters and the location come to function as symbolic palimpsests. Indeed, as the temporal continuum increasingly folds upon itself, exi sting outside of time, increasingly divorcing itself from the possibility of past memories or present knowledge, this madness becomes as infectious as it is invasive. In other words, if identity is based upon a discrimination of difference, and knowledge based on an awareness of one's distinct identity, as Foucault suggests, then the contagion of the irrational let loose in Briarcliff draws things together within a fluidity that both obfuscates and effaces first perception, then knowledge and finally subjectivity.

In an attempt to locate these mechanisms of irrationality that underpin ‘Asylum’, and to understand their effects, this chapter will analyze the second installment of this long-running televisual series both textually and extra-textually.

Brad Falchuk and Ryan Murphy – the co-creators and showrunners of American Horror Story (AHS) since its inception in 2011 on the FX cable network – have been pioneering and prolific figures in the production of ‘Quality Television.’ From medical drama Nip/Tuck (2003–10) to the high school drama Glee (2009–15), Falchuk and Murphy have become key figures in the landscape of American television production. Some themes and settings recur in their work: the high school melodrama of Glee is echoed in the satirical world of high school politics in The Politician (2019–20). Heightened glamour and characterdriven melodrama can be found in Pose (2018–21), about the 1980–90s drag scene in New York City, similar to the qualities that imbued Feud (2017) and its vivid exploration of the camp folklore surrounding Bette Davis and Joan Crawford during the filming of Whatever Happened to Baby Jane? (Robert Aldrich 1962). This fascination with the myths, intrigue and glamour of a long-gone Hollywood is also evident in the aptly titled Hollywood (2020), an idealised reimagining – an ‘alternate history’ – that reclaims ‘real’ figures such as Rock Hudson and others and strives to liberate them from the systemic homophobia and racism of the era. Hollywood had a divided reception – some critics taking exception to what they saw as its naïve alt-historicization – but the work unmistakably reveals numerous tropes that pervade the Falchuk and Murphy universe, such as their recurrent use of favourite actors and their trademark displays of sexuality, sexual politics and sexiness.

Feud and Hollywood's animation of genuine characters from history is most profoundly developed in the American Crime Story (2016 onwards) series strand, which has dramatized, true stories such as the O. J. Simpson trial, the murder of Gianni Versace, the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky scandal and the rise and fall of the Studio 54 club in the 1970s. When it comes to horror – and it must be said that some of the scenes and narratives in American Crime Story can be as horrifying as anything in AHS – series such as Scream Queens (2015–16) stand as deliriously comedic counterpoints to AHS. In many respects, Scream Queens can be seen as being positioned in the territory between Glee, The Politician, Pose and AHS: a profound satire of youth culture, school/college life and its brutal prejudices, vendettas and hierarchies.

It has been an interesting challenge and a unique opportunity to research and to write about a virtually unheard-of yet relevant historical phenomenon. During the process of uncovering, reconstructing and interpreting the Exhibition of Modern Brazilian Paintings, a number of intriguing questions have arisen. Perhaps the most important was to explore into the motivations behind such an atypical and meaningful art display in the midst of a World War. It is noteworthy that the Olympic Games planned for summer 1944 in London were cancelled due to WW2, while a show of unknown paintings from the other side of the Atlantic Ocean reached the British capital and was hosted by its most traditional art institution.

This improbable event was started by non-governmental players – Brazilian Modernist painters – as widely publicised at the time. An uncritical reading of 1940s newspapers might indicate that this was indeed a mainly private endeavour, as labelled by artists and civil servants. The in-depth cross-examination of pieces of news, letters and official documents discarded this hypothesis and proved that the initiative was only made possible by the championing of Brazilian diplomacy and its commander, Oswaldo Aranha. At a second stage, once offloaded on British soil, its organisation relied on the decisive support of UK government interests. A thorough analysis of primary sources clearly showed that MRE acted as the main driving force that planned and undertook this ambitious endeavour, which, even though inspired by Modernist painters, came to fruition as an official and diplomacydriven enterprise. This book argues that the initiative was part of a broader diplomatic programme developed by Minister Oswaldo Aranha. Aiming at advancing bilateral ties with the United Kingdom, Aranha sought to foster closer relations between Brazilian and British societies. Furthermore, the Exhibition worked as a cultural component of the part in the War played by Brazil, the only Latin American nation to deploy an important contingent – of 25,000 troops – to fight on the European front. Both the military and artistic contributions must be understood as diplomatic attempts to amass international prestige and reposition Brazil in the post-War emerging order.

Having dedicated two chapters to the discussion of methods of computational poetics able to predict behavioural aspects of the reading act such as liking ratings or line choice, I now turn to Neurocomputational Poetics studies. In these, I combine computational with experiential, behavioural and neuronal analyses that inform about the validity of the NCPM 's hypotheses and predictions regarding reading acts for diverse materials from single words to multiword expressions, stories and poems.

The central hypothesis of the NCPM mesomodel discussed in Chapter 2 with regard to the upper route is this: texts that have clearly more background than foreground elements likely trigger immersive experiences through activation of the brain's automatic reading network and implicit processing leading to a fluent reading mode. In contrast, those with a low background/foreground elements ratio tend to evoke an aesthetic trajectory associated with the operation of larger neural network including more right-hemispheric regions and explicit processing resulting in a dysfluent reading mode, that is, they activate the lower route. Empirical studies can test this hypothesis by finding traces of the operation of the upper and lower routes assumed by the NCPM at the three levels of observation: the neuronal, experiential and behavioural. Chapters 7 and 8 discuss key studies that examined the NCPM's central and other key hypotheses over the last decade. The upper route studies of Chapter 7 deal with the reading of prose and mainly examine the first boon of reading, immersive processes. The lower route studies presented in the next chapter focus on the second boon, aesthetic processes, mostly examined in poetry reception.

A short recap concerning the other main assumptions of the NCPM seems in order here before we consider the empirical evidence. In the introductory Chapter 1, I discussed the likely neuronal bases of immersion expressed in the symbol grounding and neuronal recycling hypotheses. In short, the first hypoth-esis claims that the neuronal processes evoked by words and sentences are similar to those evoked by the objects they refer to. The second postulates that ‘exapted’ structures in the brain, like the visual word form area, enabled efficient reading and the countless fast inferential and figurative processes ‘running’ in other brain regions that underlie it. The neuronal recycling hypothesis is tightly linked with what I called the Panksepp–Jakobson hypothesis in honour of these two pioneers whose work inspired mine so much.

AHS is a television franchise created by Ryan Murphy and Bradley Falchuk in 2011 for the FX cable channel. The series are available for mass consumption on streaming media platforms on the internet (such as Netflix and Amazon Prime Video). In addition, it is very frequently praised by television studies scholars to be a progressive franchise for its engagement with the representation of gay and lesbian characters and racial issues through queer theory lenses (Taylor 2019; Sellin-Blanc and Doro 2019; Clarke 2019; Coker 2019; Earle 2019; Geller and Banker 2017; Cox 2017; Schottmiller 2017; Austin 2017; Simpson 2017). In this essay, I will analyze the characters representations and narratives of the ‘Asylum’ and ‘Cult’ seasons as technologies of gender (De Lauretis 1984, 1987) from intersectional lenses (Ahmed 2017, 2014; Lugones 2008; Hill Collins 2002, 1993; Lorde 1997, 1993; Crenshaw 1991).

AHS's second season ‘Asylum’ shows the struggles of white lesbian journalist Lana Winters (performed by Sarah Paulson) in reporting and successfully fighting against male psycho-killers, homophobia and the evil structures of a Christian sanatorium in Massachusetts in the 1960s. The story of ‘Cult’ shows the effects of Donald Trump's presidential victory in November 2016 in a fictional town in Michigan by unfolding the links between Trump supporter, psycho-killer and cult leader Kai Anderson (Evan Peters) and a progressive white lesbian partners and parents, including Ally (performed by Paulson too) and Ivy McFair-Richards (Allison Pill). At the end of both seasons, the characters performed by Paulson (Lana and Ally) become the heroic protagonists since they achieve social and professional success as a result of all the violence they have struggled with.

Taking into account Jasbir Puar's (2007) definitions of homonormativity and homonationalism, J. Halberstam's understandings of Gothic technologies of monsters (1995) and Sara Ahmed's reflections on fear (2014) and lesbian feminism (2017), I will argue how ‘Asylum’ and ‘Cult’ privilege white homosexual characters as subjects of national exceptionalism while oversimplifying the representation of racism and gender issues.

Intersectionality, Representation and Fear in AHS

In her article about Ryan Murphy's television series and queer television studies in the US, Lynne Joyrich (2014) considers the potential of gay artists and representations of queer characters within mainstream TV.