The Journal of Gods and Monsters Special Issue: The Monstrosity of Displacement Volume 1 Number 1 Summer 2020 Editorial Team (original) (raw)

The Journal of Gods and Monsters Vol. 2 No. 1 (2021)

The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2021

Welcome to another issue of The Journal of Gods and Monsters. We trust that you’ll find plenty in this issue to unsettle the boundaries between the sacred and the monstrous. As editors, one of the things that drew us to this topic was the wide variety of ways in which deities and monsters intersect, overlap, and help define each other, all while complicating any sense of stable boundaries or identities. As most who have studied religion know, the things we worship and the things we are afraid of are often difficult to distinguish from one another. This means that questions of Gods and Monsters can be found in a wide range of disciplines, over an abundance of texts, and in times both ancient and modern. Not only do these explorations question the boundaries between Gods and Monsters, but they also destabilize boundaries between academic disciplines, literary genres, and even so-called high and low culture. But in the midst of this bewildering range of diverse topics, there are also fascinating thematic connections that keep bubbling to the surface. The three articles in this issue come from very different corners of the scholarly world: Matthew Goff’s essay on the Enochic traditions, Steven Engler’s study of the Brazilian religion Umbanda, and Gerardo Rodríguez-Galarza’s exploration of how close attention to monsters can help unravel what the author refers to as “the colonialism of time.” Even though they might seem to belong in very different journals – perhaps journals on the topics of Second Temple Jewish literature, religious studies, and postcolonial theory - these articles are brought together through the lens of monsters, and through the attention to what we can learn by analyzing the figure of the monster (and the narrative in which it appears) through a variety of lenses. Perhaps most importantly, these articles pay attention to the myriad ways in which the figure of the monster announces a rupture in conventional thought, an anxiety which cannot be captured through traditional semantics – and which escape confinement by traditional modes of theological thinking. As Jeffrey Jerome Cohen has noted, the monster always escapes; in these three essays, that escape is something akin to Ricouer’s “surplus of meaning,” an escape from an interpretation that can be exhausted through explanatory modes of thought. In essence, the monster calls to the places where intellectual understandings – of texts, of historical events, of religious practices, of the oppressive forces of colonialism – fall short. The monster begs us to interpret it, and through this act to come at least a few steps closer towards understanding the system that the monster inhabits. --The Editors

Gods as Monsters: Insatiable Appetites, Exceeding Interpretations, and A Surfeit of Life

Monster Anthropology Ethnographic Explorations of Transforming Social Worlds Through Monsters, 2019

How can gods be monsters and vice versa? This chapter explores the interpenetrations between sacrality and monstrosity in a village in Tamil Nadu, India. Minis are amoral fertility spirits which must be appeased to secure agricultural productivity. Muniswarar is a tutelary deity who guards against chaos and evil. Minis and Muniswarar are not absolutely distinct entities but part of a spectrum of sacredness premised upon ritual attempts to govern the land's volatile potency and channel it to instrumentalist purposes. Based on how the Minis' and Muniswarar's shared ritual cult disrupts stable categories-deities and demons and good and evil-I offer two premises to demonstrate how the sacred is also inherently monstrous. First, the sacred possesses an insatiable appetite which cannot be satisfied through mere human rituals and has an excessive wrath when defied. The sacred will always want more than the devotees can give. Second, the sacred inevitably eschews cultural conceptions and social expectations. It has a life that always exceeds the human grasp. Finally, I take up this volume's brief to consider monsters in contexts of change and detail how amid gathering socioeconomic transformations and habitat destruction, the sacred is becoming even scarcer. It refuses, unlike good monsters, to demonstrate and to forewarn. It resists being probed for meaning. It just wants to be. This meta-sociality is what makes the sacred truly monstrous.

The Journal of Gods and Monsters Volume 3 Number 1 (Winter 2022)

The Journal of Gods and Monsters, 2022

Books Maja Bondestam (editor). Exceptional Bodies in Early Modern Culture: Concepts of Monstrosity before the Advent of the Normal. MICHAEL E. HEYES Christopher Bell. The Dalai Lama and the Nechung Oracle. NATASHA MIKLES Films, Television, and other Media "I can't shake the feeling that You must have saved me for something greater than this": Faith, Meaning and Connection in Saint Maud AMY BEDDOWS

From mythical monsters to future horrors: towards an understanding of the function of monstrosity:

This BA thesis investigates the function of the Monster from the 5th century onwards, with particular attention to whether, and how, this function has changed over time. To this purpose, three texts are analyzed: 'Beowulf', 'The Island of Doctor Morreau' and 'The Calcutta Chromosome', with a narrow focus on how the monsters in the chosen texts function and are described. Anthropological, philosophical, historical and literary approaches to the monster are outlined and to varying extents applied in the analysis of the individual texts. Subsequently, the texts are analyzed in chronological order, with particular emphasis on the function, description, and location of the monsters, with emphasis on the Monsters of 'The Calcutta Chromosome'. Subsequently, I undertake a comparative analysis of the monsters of 'Beowulf', 'The Island of Doctor Morreau' and 'The Calcutta Chromosome', this time focusing on the geographical location of the monsters, and its meaning. Finally, I attempt a theoretically founded analysis of how the monster functions in literature, with particular emphasis on its symbolic function. Here the theory that was explained in the opening chapter is drawn in, in an argument that the monster basically has different layers of functions. Furthermore, it is argued that the functions of the monster has various facets, symbolic and concrete, and that it refuses any clearcut definition. This is supported by McCormack's argument that the core feature of the monster is that it defies categorization. This is used to support the argument that the monster is fundamentally ambiguous. Throughout the thesis, it is argued that the monster is fundamentally a complex entity, and that any attempt to approach the monster from any one theoretical angle will be incapable of grasping this complexity. It is concluded that my thesis, that the monster has always resided beyond the border of what is known, but that this border has moved over time, is fundamentally correct. However, it is also concluded that this is but one aspect of the ambiguous nature of the monster. Furthermore, it is concluded that the monster is a fundamentally transgressive construct, and that the breaching of borders is one of the key functions of the monster. It is noted that general conclusions can only be drawn to a limited extent on the basis of the examined source material. Furthermore, it is emphasized that the purpose of this thesis is more to point to a general trend in the depiction of monstrosity across literary eras, than to make a definitive statement about the monster as a literary concept.

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...