Stephen King and Philosophy

Jacob Held has written extensively on philosophy and popular culture, having edited Dr. Seuss and Philosophy and Roald Dahl and Philosophy, coedited James Bond and Philosophy, and contributed to volumes on the Beatles, South Park, and Watchmen, to name a few. He teaches philosophy at the University of Central Arkansas and lives in Conway, Arkansas.

Author Stephen King, despite his popularity, is largely derided in academic circles, typecast as a genre-fiction horror novelist. In this collection of essays concerning different philosophical views as they relate to King’s work, Held argues that horror is the perfect category in which philosophy can thrive because it forces readers to be aware of things hidden deep and dark within our basest selves. What we fear goes a long way toward defining us as people, and King has always been well known for tapping into these anxieties and exploiting them in his writing. It is refreshing to see King finally viewed through a scholarly lens, with pieces on topics such as reading The Dark Tower as a nihilistic text, using Carrie to discuss the definition of womanhood as 'Other' in a male-centric society, and Aristotelian friendship in The Body and Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption. VERDICT King’s 'Constant Readers' will rejoice in this appreciation of their academically misaligned hero; students of philosophy, collegiate or casual, will also enjoy this text, giving them a familiar context to a field that can confuse the best of us.

• Introduction: On Writing Popular Philosophy 1Jacob M. Held1 There Is No God in Desperation: Tak and the Problem of Evil 13C. Taylor Sutton and Jacob Held2 Female Subjectivity in Carrie 35Kellye Byal3 “Sometimes Dead Is Better”: King, Daedalus, Dragon-Tyrants, and Deathism 47Katherine Allen4 “Gan Is Dead”: Nietzsche and Roland’s Eternal Recurrence 71Garret Merriam5 Rama of Gilead: Hindu Philosophy in The Dark Tower 83Matthew A. Butkus6 What’s Wrong with Roland?: Utilitarianism and the DarkTower 97Greg Littmann7 Stephen King and Aristotelian Friendship: An Analysis ofThe Body and Rita Hayworth and the ShawshankRedemption 113Bertha Alvarez Manninen8 Propaganda and Pedagogy for Apt Pupils 131Michael K. Potter and Cam Cobb9 The Shining’s Overlook Hotel as Heterotopia 147Elizabeth Hornbeck10 Broadcast Dystopia: Power and Violence in The RunningMan and The Long Walk 161Joseph J. Foy and Timothy M. Dale11 Stephen King and the Art of Horror 173Greg Littmann12 “You Weren’t Hired to Philosophize, Torrance”: The Deathof the Author in The Shining 195Charles Bane13 What Happens to the Present When It Becomes the Past:Time Travel and the Nature of Time in The Langoliers 207Paul R. Daniels14 Notes on Foreknowledge, Truthmaking, andCounterfactuals from The Dead Zone 219Tuomas W. Manninen15 Time Belongs to the Tower 231Randall Auxier16 Ur 88,416 253Randall Auxier17 From Desperation to Haven: Horror, Compassion, andArthur Schopenhauer 277Jacob M. HeldKa-tet: Author Biographies 299