Joann Sfar and the Community of Monsters (original) (raw)

Monsters: Classic to Contemporary Symbols

Culture, Society and Praxis, 2008

This paper reviews different literatures that use Monster's as methods to strike fear within the reader, and the characters in the story itself. Popular childhood monster stories are explored in terms of the monsters role in the story, and the monsters method of engaging fear into certain characters. The author poses personal questions for our readers; such as: what if you engaged in thoughts that could potentially deem you as a monster?

Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous

The field of monster studies has grown significantly over the past few years and this companion provides a comprehensive guide to the study of monsters and the monstrous from historical, regional and thematic perspectives. The collection reflects the truly multi-disciplinary nature of monster studies, bringing in scholars from literature, art history, religious studies, history, classics, and cultural and media studies. The companion will offer scholars and graduate students the first comprehensive and authoritative review of this emergent field. Contents: Foreword, John Block Friedman; Introduction: the impact of monsters and monster studies, Asa Simon Mittman; Part I History of Monstrosity: The monstrous Caribbean, Persephone Braham; The unlucky, the bad and the ugly: categories of monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment, Surekha Davies; Beauteous beast: the water deity Mami Wata in Africa, Henry John Drewal; Rejecting and embracing the monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome, D. Felton; Early modern past to postmodern future: changing discourses of Japanese monsters, Michael Dylan Foster; On the monstrous in the Islamic visual tradition, Francesca Leoni; Human of the heart: pitiful oni in medieval Japan, Michelle Osterfield Li; The Maya 'cosmic monster' as a political; and religious symbol, Matthew Looper; Monsters lift the veil: Chinese animal hybrids and processes of transformation, Karin Myhre; From hideous to hedonist: the changing face of the 19th-century monster, Abigail Lee Six and Hannah Thompson; Centaurs, satyrs, and cynocephali: medieval scholarly teratology and the question of the human, Karl Steel; Invisible monsters: vision, horror, and contemporary culture, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock. Part II Critical Approaches to Monstrosity: Posthuman teratology, Patricia MacCormack; Monstrous sexuality: variations on the vagina dentata, Sarah Alison Miller; Postcolonial monsters: a conversation with Partha Mitter, Partha Mitter with Asa Simon Mittman and Peter Dendle; Monstrous gender: geographies of ambiguity, Dana Oswald; Monstrosity and race in the late Middle Ages, Debra Higgs Strickland; Hic sunt dracones: the geography and cartography of monsters, Chet van Duzer; Conclusion: monsters in the 21st century: the preternatural in an age of scientific consensus, Peter J. Dendle; Postscript: the promise of monsters, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen; Bibliography; Index.

Here be monsters: a choreomaniac's companion to the danse macabre

Consider this a vade mecum: an invitation to "walk with me" through more or less uncanny terrains of worlds in the making in search, of(f) course, of monsters. The search will be delving into the areas of "creepypasta:" pieces of cursed prose and pictures that circulate online, waiting to contaminate and possess the next reader. Using a theoretical framework of posthuman and feminist theory, not least the work done by Jacques Derrida and Donna Haraway, this vade mecum asks what it might mean to engage ethically with that which is not supposed to exist, but which haunts us nonetheless. In other words: what does it mean to move, live and engage with spectres in digital times?

Below the metaphor of intent: one author-illustrator's view of the monstrous, and what he didn't see

2005

This paper details the findings of a project that focused on illuminating how one o f Australia’s leading graphic-novelists, Marcello Baez, created the ideal o f the monster and the monstrous in his best selling text, Diablo. The interviews with Baez revealed he deliberately inserted a series of symbolic elements in his visual storytelling; in particular he deliberately underpinned his text-illustration journey with what he considered to be generic view o f what constitutes a more global ideal o f the monster in the Western World. However, during the course o f the interviews an ideographic set o f highly personal fears relating to the concept o f the ‘monstrous’ also emerged. Unaware that he had unconsciously inserted these manifestations of his “false self, or mask””' , Baez recognised that he had also centred on a deeply held view o f the monstrous that centred on sexuality, the binding o f time and the need for an affirmation o f living. While this paper gives further weight...

Monsters: interdisciplinary explorations in monstrosity

Palgrave Communications, 2020

There is a continued fascination with all things monster. This is partly due to the popular reception of Mary Shelley’s Monster, termed a ‘new species’ by its overreaching but admiringly determined maker Victor Frankenstein in the eponymous novel first published in 1818. The enduring impact of Shelley’s novel, which spans a plethora of subjects and genres in imagery and themes, raises questions of origin and identity, death, birth and family relationships, as well as the contradictory qualities of the monster. Monsters serve as metaphors for anxieties of aberration and innovation (Punter and Byron, 2004). Stephen Asma (2009) notes that monsters represent evil or moral transgression and each epoch, to speak with Michel Foucault (Abnormal: lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–75, 2003, p. 66), evidences a ‘particular type of monster’. Academic debates tend to explore how social and cultural threats come to be embodied in the figure of a monster and their actions literalise our deep...

Editorial: Making Monsters, Building Terror

Journal of Adaptation in Film & Performance

This is the editorial for the Special Issue Making Monsters. The Special Issues comes out of my own academic interest and a two-day symposium. This editorial outlines the need for research around the practice of making monsters, placing the production processes needed to make the creatures in horror media as central to the adaptation of monsters into various media forms. It also will introduce the contributors to the Special Issue and briefly lay out their specific approach to this broad and engaging topic, whether that be looking at the practical effects used to bring monsters to the stage and screen or new ways we conceptualize the monstrous in the digital forms.