Monster Culture in the 21st Century : A Reader (original) (raw)
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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...
Big, Bad and Ugly – The concept of “the monster” in western culture
Aesthetics in Turkey: Turkish Congress of Aesthetics Proceedings
In this essay the concept of “the monster” is analyzed (a) as an augury for some notable fact such as a catastrophe or a divine message in order to bring about human repentance, (b) as a being escaping the physical borders of human dimension and (c) as a person responsible for a dreadful crime. All of these definitions have in common the fact that they correspond to a type of being whose hybrid form is somewhere between the human and the inhuman.
Beyond the Crisis in the Humanities: Transdisciplinary Transformations of Contemporary Discourses on Art and Culture. Collection of Papers, 2016
Since the second half of the twentieth century we have been witnessing an overwhelming proliferation of monster narratives in contemporary art and visual/textual culture. With prime time TV shows like Dexter, True Blood or Hannibal, this trend peaked at the beginning of the new millennium when wider audiences completely succumbed to a fascination with monsters, horror, grotesque, serial killing and bodies turned inside out. Although monstrosity entered popular culture as early as at the end of the eighteenth century, a consolidated critical discourse on the topic appeared only with the emergence of cultural studies of the 1970’s and 1980’s. Today monster studies present themselves as that which transcends academic, national and disciplinary boundaries, merging biology, evolutionism, disability studies, Marxism, psychoanalysis, material culture studies and media studies, while treating ‘high art’ of Oscar Wilde as structurally no different from a performance of Lady Gaga. The main premise of the monster studies in the last century was that the marginal is the ‘constitutive outside’ of an identity, that the monster populates ‘zones of uninhabitability.’ But what happens with these studies when the monster stops dwelling on the margins, and enters the very core of identity, like in aesthetics of Lady Gaga? What happens with the monster studies when the monster stops being an abject and becomes a subject, like in so many contemporary narratives? The paper has two distinct intentions: 1) to present the academic underground called the ‘monster studies,’ that, like mycelium, spreads its object of study across contemporary cinema, literature, and material art; 2) to suggest that this conglomerate of ideas, academic disciplines and objects of study reflects (or responds to) contemporary practices (needs and desires) of globalization and consumerism.
Mapping the Potentials of Monster Studies
Hungarian journal of English and American studies /, 2021
Weinstock, Jeffrey Andrew, ed. The Monster Theory Reader. University of Minnesota Press, 2020. ix + 560 pages + 33 b&w photos. ISBN 978-1-5179-0525-5. $35.00. Pbk. Jeffery Jerome Cohen's 1996 seminal essay, "Monster Culture," marks the beginning of modern monster studies as a separate sub-discipline, which since then has produced an immense amount of valuable material in the form of journal articles, monographs, and anthologies specialized in a segment of teratology. Therefore, compiling an anthology of essential theoretical texts for those who study the field is a welcome addition. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock undertook this task of no little importance and difficulty, and the result is "monstrously" impressive: the nearly 600-page-long collection of theory may look