STEPHEN KING AS AN EDUCATOR: FEAR, MORAL ATTENTION AND THE INFORMAL PEDAGOGY OF HORROR FICTION

Abstract

This paper proposes that Stephen King’s fiction can be considered an educational process, not didactic or incidental but that it can be considered pedagogy without falling into metaphor. The statement is not biographical. It is about the manner in which King’s stories focus the reader’s attention. The study suggests that fear in King’s fiction is a way of exposure, based on narrative ethics, reader-response theory and recent work on horror as a simulation of threat, which places characters in situations where the normal social protections are not in place, thus making visible moral commitments that comfortable circumstances allow people to leave untested. Four interrelated operations that are traced through close readings of Carrie, The Body, It and The Shining and The Green Mile are the documentary apportionment of responsibility, the portrayal of learning outside of institutions, the systematic failures of adult custodians and the positioning of readers in relation to socially invisible suffering. The paper does not aim to uphold the well-known claim that literature makes readers more empathetic, which is not well supported by the empirical evidence. What King’s fiction offers is more modest and more interesting: repeated opportunities to attend to moral matters under stress. It is on that basis that Stephen King as an educator is considered to be an analysis and not a slogan.