Death is a staple of AHS, as are themes of mortality, loss and mourning. Death is so much present in the series that Keetley (2013, 90), examining the first season, writes that it ‘incarnates the death drive’. She argues that for this reason it is one of ‘the most unrelentingly pessimistic cultural texts of the contemporary moment’ (Keetley 2013, 90). Yet at times, a more hopeful reading might also be made of this remarkably popular show. As character Mallory informs audiences (season eight, Ep. 8, 00.35.45), ‘nothing ever truly dies’. This is certainly the case in the imagined world of AHS, where death almost never equates with absence and the dead return in myriad forms. In this chapter, the first season, ‘Murder House’ (2011), and fifth season, ‘Hotel’ (2015), are examined in terms of their treatment of the (un)dead, exploring the ways in which the series can be understood to negotiate the complexities of what it would mean to extend hospitality ‘without reserve’ (Derrida 2005, 6), to choose to live with the (un)dead, and to join them. In particular for mothers who have suffered the traumatic loss of their children in life, AHS blurs the dystopian and the romantic by offering an eternity of mother/child bonding. ‘Murder House’ and ‘Hotel’ both imagine lives where instead of giving up your dead, you get to die (and live) alongside them.

What Does (Un)dead Mean in AHS?

The term (un)dead is adopted here for three reasons. First, because the vast array of (un)dead characters across the existing seasons of AHS calls for a term that is broad and can encapsulate vampires, ghosts, characters reanimated via magic and more. Various projects have sought to delineate the (un)dead in popular culture (Williams and Schafer 2013; Thompson 2014), but many of the (un)dead in AHS resist categorization. The (un)dead characters in ‘Murder House’ are ghostly because they are bound to a location that calls into mind a haunted house – as character Violet Harmon says when she sees the house (season one, episode one, 9:20): ‘Great, so we’re the Addams family now’. Referencing the Addams family signals both AHS's tendency towards intertextuality and its concern with the playful Gothic, whilst also, by referencing an iconic American nuclear family, the specific concern with this familial construct in ‘Murder House’.

As sketched in the metamodel of Chapter 2, literary experiences result from the dynamic interaction between author, (con-)text and reader. Neurocomputational Poetics focusses on text and reader because these can best be characterized by quantifiable features. In the previous chapter on text analysis, I presented methods for computing text features that, according to the NCPM, can bias a reader's mind more towards the upper or the lower route of processing. This bias can be induced globally by the choice of a novel instead of a poetry collection, for example, or locally when re-reading a section of a text to reflect upon its form or content. In this chapter, I deal with both the reader and the act of reading. The ‘reading motivation and mode’ box of the mesomodel in Chapter 2 brings a number of reader-related factors into play that also influence this bias towards one of the two routes. Among those are stable personality variables called ‘traits’ or more transient, local aspects like spontaneous mood management called ‘states’ in personality psychology. Here, I discuss methods for analyzing these in Neurocomputational Poetics studies.

Reader Analysis

Most empirical studies of literature and reading psychology focus on the ‘average reader’: a purely statistical creature typically represented by mean values averaged across the data from some rather small (N∼20) and generally non-representative sample. Indeed, the large majority of empirical studies on reading so far have used undergraduate psychology students. When examining the processing of non-literary, short expository texts – so-called textoids – typical for these studies, the distortion in the data produced by this overselective sampling method may not be as detrimental as when studying the reception of verbal art. But even if the error introduced by this sampling method were negligible, reading ultimately remains a solitary, subjective and private act. It goes without saying that readers have different cultural and social backgrounds, education, habits, skills, personalities and preferences. And all these produce variables that contribute to the reading act and can be more or less well assessed. Luckily, psychology also offers methods to study readers’ reading skills, personalities or interests, and these provide useful data when trying to predict the outcome of a reading act via models like the NCPM. Indeed, empirical studies have shown that reading can change both personality states and traits, and these, in turn, can change the way texts are read and appreciated.

It is Christmas Eve, and a character interpreted by Joan Collins has killed her husband. The punishment comes to her soon. Imprisoned in the house during a heavy snowfall, she is stalked by an escaped psychopath dressed as Santa Claus. The description above is not from the British horrorthemed portmanteau film Tales from the Crypt (Freddie Francis 1972) but from episode seven of the eighth season of AHS: ‘Apocalypse’ (FX 2018), which recreates the famous tale of a femme fatale hunted down by a serial killer donning a Santa Claus costume.

One of the elements that remains from the classic horror tale is the glamour that Collins always carries with her. As argued by Carol Dyhouse, ‘Joan Collins's career as a glamour icon spanned more than half a century’ (Dyhouse 2010, 142) since she was featured in the 1950s in the aptly named magazine Glamour. Interestingly, Dyhouse traces the origins of the word ‘glamour’ to its roots in association with black magic and the sinister. According to her, ‘the word “glamour” was obscure before 1900. It meant a delusive charm and was used in association with witchery and the occult’ (2010, 9). Indeed, the Encyclopedia of Wicca & Witchcraft explains that glamour is ‘the art of enchantment. In occult lore, glamour is the ability to create an illusion around a person, place, or thing’ (Grimassi 2000, 184). It was related to gypsies, Spanish ‘duendes’ (goblins) and the art of visual manipulation or ‘deceptio visus’ (Blanco-Carrión 2016, 27–52).

AHS, an anthology series known for its mix of camp aesthetics and queerness, evokes this first meaning, returning glamour to its historical roots: a charming surface with a dark side. Beyond the glitz, feathers, furs and sequins, we will argue, lies an underside that has often gone unnoticed but that the series emphasizes: as Postrel (2013) notes ‘the flip side of glamour is horror. Glamorous archetypes like the vampire, the con man, the femme fatale and the double agent remind us of how easy it is to succumb to manipulation and desire’ (Postrel 2013, 121), as glamour anaesthetizes and aestheticizes horror via prettiness. The glamorous component is the ‘up’ side of the fabric, and the horror is the ‘under’. As Liz Taylor (Denis O’Hare) says in AHS: ‘Hotel’ (2015); ‘cut me and I bleed Dior’:1 horror and glamour synthetized in one short sentence.

Introduction

The first warning was given in the first episode of ‘Murder House’, season one of AHS, in 2011. In the first episode, a little girl named Adelaide with Down's syndrome warns, ‘You are going to die there’. Later, the same girl warns again, more ominously, ‘You are going to die here’. Maybe if someone older we know and trust were to give such a warning, we might listen to them. However, the characters in the story ignore the girl. The consequences of their doing so are inherently predictable, and the story's flow confirms the predictable. Adelaide warns at the beginning of the story, etching it in viewers’ minds. Her warning indicates that horror does not just come from dark basements, deserted streets at night, haunted houses, the souls of the deceased, postapocalyptic zombies, creatures from outer space or serial killers. Horror can come from anywhere, any person or any situation – depending on how we perceive it. The context of our relationship with a place, person or situation is also essential for perceiving fear. Maybe we would not have been afraid if Adelaide had been a different girl. How and with what elements fear is presented to us are essential.

The horror genre thrives on many different elements. These elements are structured based on cinematography, sound, narrative and characterization. If all these elements are used successfully and appropriately balanced, the viewer will encounter a more successful experience of a sense of horror through the genre's narrative. This is because the horror genre is more successful when it is believable with its story, impressive with its visuals, surprising with its sound, and identifiable with its characters. AHS, which Ryan Murphy and Brad Falchuk created, was first screened in 2011. Every season, the show explores a different horror theme. This anthological structure has made it possible to examine the horror genre from a more diverse perspective. As a result, the series has been a success because it can appeal to a more diverse audience and those who like different narratives of the horror genre, revitalizing audience interest in the horror genre. Given the diversity of the horror elements used in AHS, finding a common method of examining the horror genre across all seasons of AHS is essential to determine the series’ place within the genre.

The horror genre has incorporated identity politics within literary and visual studies.

Many readers of this first English translation of Jean Lescure's Des crises générales et périodiques de surproduction will have limited access to the two-volume French fifth edition, and even less so to the earlier editions of the work. A brief account of Lescure's revisions in each successive edition is a necessary beginning to any attempt to orient the reader toward appreciating Lescure's lifelong commitment to grappling with the issues he first raised in his groundbreaking and prize-winning doctoral thesis of 1906.

Lescure's doctoral thesis centred on the Crisis of 1900; the second edition (1910) contained the most information on the Crisis of 1907; the third (1923) presented the most thorough discussion of the crises before and shortly after the First World War; the fourth (1932) provided Lescure's first appraisal of the Wall Street Crash of 1929 and the first years of the global depression that followed it; and the fifth and final edition of 1938 gave a fuller account of the 1929–30 crisis and what would come to be known as the Great Depression. The fifth edition included a new section on the global recovery of 1933–37, which gave an account of the somewhat similar paths toward recovery followed by the major European states and the United States in the 1930s. Lescure also expanded the theoretical section with each new edition to include his criticism of the latest ‘doctrines’ and statistical methods, which were shaped not only by the changing course of events but also by the development of economics as a specialized discipline and the increasing number of statistical services that informed its research.

Incorporating new material on subsequent economic crises and including the latest statistical evidence and theoretical approaches entailed changing the balance between narrative and analysis, ultimately necessitating the reorganization of the work into two volumes. In effect, each successive edition enacts the conceptual model of crises that the early editions first described, with the aim of illustrating the analytical purchase of the author's ongoing theoretical and methodological commitments. The best-known modern example of the resulting intertextuality of successive editions can be found in Charles Kindleberger's Manias, Panics, and Crashes: A History of Financial Crises (1978), which is now in its eighth edition, four of which appeared posthumously. There are more than superficial similarities in their methodological approaches to crises and in their conceptualizations of international economic relations.

In the preceding chapters, I have laid the ground for actual applications in Neurocomputational Poetics: we have the model and a set of methods for text, reader and reading act analyses. The next two chapters discuss concrete examples of how we can apply this toolbox.

My aim in the present chapter about simple applications is to

• • make people who love literature aware of methods for computational poetics and their utility to further our understanding of how the pleasures of reading are constructed in the brain in response to a myriad of simple features that, in concert produce a complex symphony;

• • show people who have no skills or interest in programming languages how to apply simple tools and ready-to-go apps so that they produce fascinating analyses of complex texts that not only offer new insights about verbal art but also testable predictions for scientific studies.

Euphony and Eusemy: Sound and Meaning Beauty

According to Tenet 2 in Chapter 2, poetic effects start at the micropoetic level of single words, and already young children are able to both perceive and produce them. There are a number of simple methods to compute the potential of single words to create such effects based on two fundamental aspects: sound and meaning. No doubt, words can have a more or less pleasing sound such as in ‘pee’ vs. ‘piss’ and they can have more or less ugly meanings such as in ‘murder’ vs. ‘beauty’. But how do these two potential sources of micropoetic effects interact at the lexical level? And what role do they play when acting in the context of a line or stanza?

From the very beginning of poetry on Sumerian plates in the twenty-fourth century BC, poets knew that sound and meaning must not be independent – as posited in de Saussure's famous first principle of general linguistics – but could very well influence each other. A book summarizing results of the annual elections of the most beautiful German word is full of examples for words in which ‘euphony ∼ eusemy’, that is, they are beautiful in both sound and meaning. On the other hand, there are words that mean something beautiful, a colourful butterfly for instance, but they do not sound nicely. The German word for butterfly, ‘Schmetterling’, is a notorious example.

Meanings

By a circular reading of its components and circumstances, it was possible to form a coherent idea of the initiative as a whole and to offer answers to the intriguing questions that inspired this book. The interpretation of the corpus in its context allows this book to explain why the MRE, headed by Oswaldo Aranha, devoted uncommon efforts to promote the Exhibition. Thanks to a time horizons fusion that involved the cross-examination of past and present viewpoints, it was possible to build the understanding that the Exhibition was conceived as a Public Diplomacy initiative avant la lettre, aimed at transforming Brazil's international reputation and advancing broader diplomatic objectives. More specifically, it constituted an action of Cultural Diplomacy intended to create a better environment for operating inter-state relations. Thought by its governmental planners as an action of Propaganda – the current term at that time, but today not appropriate for analysing the initiative – the superlative efforts devoted to produce the Exhibition were motivated by the foreign policy goal of renewing Brazil's cultural image among the British and the Allies. The pursued enhancement of Brazilian prestige was perceived by President Vargas and Minister Aranha as a means of positioning the nation as a major player in the global order that would emerge from the War. Analogously, the British government, which had organised shows in Brazil in the preceding years, saw the Exhibition as a foreign policy endeavour, opportune in a period when the South American country was growingly under the United States’ sphere of influence. Magno's detailed 1936 diplomatic report about the intellectual environment in the United Kingdom and the hosting of British art shows in Brazil prior to the Exhibition show that it was, differently from what characterises the unidirectional Propaganda, a reciprocal action, which involved listening and understanding the host nation, so as to efficiently frame the Public Diplomacy enterprise. The message of solidarity in wartime was appealing for the British audience and succeeded in attracting its attention to a nation that was not especially memorable at that time.

The fifth edition of 1938 did not include a bibliography. The following has been prepared by the translator to assist the reader. This list includes all published sources cited in the text and footnotes. Following standard practice, it excludes most newspaper and magazine articles, statistical annuaries, most untitled or anonymous works and most encyclopaedia and dictionary entries, all of which are, whenever possible, given full references in the footnotes.

For the past twenty years, the problem of periodic crises has retained the special attention of economists. Many works have been published and official commissions named. A price research service – a kind of observatory for the economic world – has been created by the Statistique générale de France. Thanks to the concerted efforts of science and administration, the analysis of the curious periodic mechanism that characterizes our modern societies has gained in detail and precision.

From here on, the crisis appears as a point in the evolution of capitalist society. In order to understand it, one must study the period of growth that precedes it and the period of depression that follows. And the study of crises is concerned with alternating periods of prosperity and depression, with the crisis placed at the junction of the two – so much so that one speaks of economic cycles in the United States and of industrial fluctuations in England when identifying the phenomenon we seek to study here.

Points of view have changed, and horizons have broadened. The entire economic system is influenced by these pendulum swings [balancement]. During the growth period, the production of goods, consumption and credit develop; incomes (wages, dividends, interest) rise. Unemployment diminishes or even disappears. Savings increase. Prices rise. After a number of years (three to five), we note an inversion in the curves. It is a drop all down the line: production, consumption and incomes sag; unemployment reappears. Business prosperity is followed by stagnation.

Not only is the entire economic organism affected, but the crisis also reaches nearly every other country; an ever-closer economic interdependency [solidarité] unites the economic markets, transforming the crisis into an international or global phenomenon. The most recent crises, in 1907, 1913 and 1920, have been global. And now the observations are numerous and precise enough and cover a sufficiently long period of time (almost a century) for there to be no appreciable divergence of opinion among economists about the phenomenon itself or about its scope. This consensus allows us to affirm the scientific nature of these observations.

Yet, after having established the phenomenon, one is tempted to search for its causes. Herein lies the disagreement. For some economists, these cycles [alternatives] may occur because production is sometimes lower and sometimes greater in relation to demand. If supply falls below demand, prices rise and with them profits. New businesses are created.