Poaching the Print: Theorising the Scrapbook in Stephen King's The Shining and Misery

By:
Amy Palko
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Walter Ong states that print ‘encourages a sense of closure, a sense that what is found in a text has been finalized, has reached a state of completion’ (Ong, 1982, p. 132). What happens to this sense of closure, however, when the print is removed from its original context and repositioned within a new text? This paper seeks to explore the fictive representation of the scrapbook in Stephen King’s The Shining (1977) and Misery (1987), in order to establish the scrapbook as a site of struggle. Taking the form of bricolage, the scrapbook usurps authorial control through the removal of print from its original context and by manipulating it typographically, thus allowing the insertion of blank spaces ripe for interpretation. Engaging with the theorists Umberto Eco, Walter Ong and Michel De Certeau, this paper aims to analyse the contexts in which King’s scrapbooks are created and read, in order to assert that the material text’s representation acts as a locus for anxieties surrounding authorship and the practice of reading.


Keywords: Stephen King, Scrapbooks, Reader Reception, Authorship, Typography
Stream: Books, Writing and Reading
Presentation Type: 30 minute Paper Presentation in English
Paper: Poaching the Print

Amy Palko

Phd Student, Department of English Studies, University of Stirling
Stirling, UNITED KINGDOM

Amy Palko completed her MLitt in the Gothic Imagination in 2004 at the University of Stirling in Scotland, where she has now embarked upon her Phd. The main focus of her research is the fictive representation of the material text in the work of Stephen King, looking particularly at the way in which it acts as a locus for struggles between high and low, popular and serious, heteronomy and autonomy. Last year she received funding from the Carnegie Trust to carry out research at the Stephen King archive at the University of Maine’s Raymond Fogler library. She has presented papers on ‘The Marriage of Popular and Serious in the work of Stephen King’ and ‘The Gothic Pedestrian: An analysis of the role of Steerpike in Mervyn Peake’s Titus Groan and Gormenghast’, and she recently co-organised the conference Fashioning Fiction at the University of Stirling. Her research interests are book history, twentieth-century literature, popular culture, modernism and nineteenth-century American literature.

Ref: B06P0182