Ordinary Horror

What is horror? The word evokes monstrous creatures and supernatural happenings, but also warfare and terminal illness. Setting aside the implausible circumstances typical of the horror genre, Capra focuses on what he terms "ordinary horror" – the horror that haunts our world, and that we may encounter firsthand. Drawing from ordinary language philosophy and phenomenology, he reframes horror as a common human experience tied to a sense of forced powerlessness – the shattering moment when our control over a given situation, and our very sense of reality, unravels. Capra reveals how ordinary horror manifests in literary texts beyond the horror genre and studies its significance for our time.

  Centering on modern Italian literature, Ordinary Horror shows a tradition not typically associated with horror to be rife with it. To this end, Capra emphasizes the centrality of the experience in a host of canonical Italian authors, demonstrating the power of ordinary horror to better understand, for instance, Giacomo Leopardi's pages on existential suffering, Primo Levi's writings on Auschwitz, and Elena Ferrante's descriptions of sexual violence. Literature, Capra argues, can convey horror's experiential magnitude through what he calls the "aesthetics of deformation" – scenes when otherwise realistic texts depart from verisimilitude and embrace a more disquieting style. Weaving together aesthetics and phenomenology, Capra shows that just as horror can rupture the fabric of everyday life, so too can it rupture the fabric of a literary text.