Monsters and the Monstrous Research Papers (original) (raw)

co-authored with Verena Bernardi

- by Frank Jacob
- •
- History, Cultural Studies, Media Studies, Monster Theory

Just as Neon Genesis Evangelion remains a cultural touchstone that signalled the end of Japan’s unfounded optimism of the bubble economy era, Attack on Titan is the revenant marking the post-2008 cultural shift from the free movement of globalised neoliberalism to the rising populism of the far-right and the normalisation of conspiracy theories. Game of Thrones, in the end, succumbed to the temptation of uncomplicated crowd-pleasers, which is why it has no re-watch value for me under lockdown. AoT and Eva, on the other hand, tackle what Mark Fisher termed the sense of a cancelled future under capitalist realism.

- by Cristina Diamant
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- Comparative Literature, Comparative Politics, Cyberpunk, Fascism

The study of Old Icelandic saga literature has long been dominated by structuralism and its assumption of fixed categories and binary structures. Longer than in most other fields were scholars looking for patterns of plot, character or genre, 1 and only in recent decades have some of them turned away from this pursuit. The supernatural and the monstrous, too, have been subjected to attempts of categorisation and the finding of patterns and structures underlying it. 2 When the paranormal finally became recognised as intrinsic to saga narratives and not just distracting flights of fancy in otherwise realistic plots, some scholars tried to put it into dichotomies of a cultured centre versus a wild periphery, or of the self versus the other. 3

The three Íslendingasögur about major outlaws have long fascinated scholars and readers alike, and the question why medieval Icelanders told tales in which social outsiders play the part of the hero has been the concern of scholarship for a number of years. At the heart of this scholarship has been a preoccupation with the characters and their families, for these families play a prominent role in the texts: Gísli is outlawed for killing one brother-in-law to avenge another; Hörðr does not trust any of his male relatives, and this eventually leads to his downfall; and Grettir's difficult relationship with his father seems to lead to his reckless and arrogant behaviour later in life. But why are these stories about outlaw heroes so focussed on the relationships between the individual and his kin group? And why were Icelanders – medieval and modern – so fascinated by these marginal, destructive figures?
In this article these questions are addressed by approaching the outlaw from the perspective of monster theory. The monster, as a creature that points towards or even embodies meaning beyond itself, lends itself well to such an investigation into social and cultural concerns whose reflection we might see in the literary products of said culture. So far, outlaws have not been included into the corpus of Íslendingasögur monsters, and therefore, the article consists of four parts. First, the concept of social monstrosity is established, based on Cohen’s monster theory but more suited to the unique situation in the Íslendingasögur. This concept is then applied to the three major outlaws before turning to the discussion of outlaws within their matrix of family ties. In the final step, the monstrous outlaw in his disrupted, disruptive family will be read as symptomatic of medieval Icelandic socio-cultural concerns about the fragmentation of family structures.

- by Rebecca Merkelbach
- •
- Cultural History, Medieval Literature, Old Norse Literature, Family

Etyka troski rozwija teorię uogólnionej troski poprzez wyjście od naturalnych (biologicznych) praktyk opiekuńczych. Jednak ze względu na jej uwikłanie w naturalizm (stanowisko głoszące, że natura jest źródłem ładu ontologicznego, etycznego i politycznego) efektem
często jest zarówno wąska definicja kobiecości, jak i wąskie rozumienie troski – może ona dotyczyć tylko ludzi. Przyjęcie opieki nad dzieckiem jako paradygmatu sprawia też, że etyka troski powiela reprodukcyjny futuryzm (termin Lee Edelmana) – fantazmatyczne ujęcie
polityczności jako jednolitej wspólnoty ucieleśnianej przez postać Dziecka. By pokazać, że etyka troski nie musi być naturalistyczna, konfrontuję ją z postulatem Donny Haraway, by ograniczyć reprodukcję w imię dbałości o inne niż ludzie istoty, oraz z pojawiającym się
w powieściach Octavii Butler motywem opieki nad dzieckiem, które nie jest ludzkie – „potwornego macierzyństwa” – by zarysować nieantropocentryczną etykę troski.

- by Joanna Bednarek
- •
- Feminist Theory, Posthumanism, Science Fiction, Feminism

HAL is a multidisciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of scientific research documents, whether they are published or not. The documents may come from teaching and research institutions in France or abroad, or from public or private research centers. L'archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire HAL, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d'enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires Introduction : Pour une histoire des animaux aquatiques des mers septentrionales Thierry BUQUET, Brigitte GAUVIN, Catherine JACQUEMARD & Marie-Agnès LUCAS-AVENEL 2018  53  2 anthropozoologica art. 53 (2)-Publié le 30 janvier 2018 www.anthropozoologica.com Anthropozoologica est une revue en flux continu publiée par les Publications scientifiques du Muséum, Paris, avec le soutien de l'Institut des Sciences Humaines et Sociales du CNRS.

- by Benoît Clavel
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- History, Archaeology, History of Zoology, Fishing

Il lavoro, attraverso un'esegesi delle fonti rilevanti, affronta il regime giuridico dei monstra vel prodigia

- by Gabriele Trombetta
- •
- Roman Law, Storia Romana, Diritto Civile, Monsters and the Monstrous

The art film Naked Lunch (1991) may have marked a turn away from the horror genre for David Cronenberg, but it also features both monsters and monstrosity. Protagonist Bill Lee wanders passively through a surreal landscape populated with fantastical creatures feeding him orders that correspond to the impulses he does not recognize within himself. By Cronenberg’s own description, these monsters are projections, excusing and externalizing Lee’s internal, unacknowledged anxieties. Since these monsters are embodied outside himself, Lee never has to confront his
internal conflicts as such. Engaging with writings on horror and monsters by Julia Kristeva, Noël Carroll, and Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, this essay uses Naked Lunch to develop a Cronenbergian theory of monstrosity. Monsters objectify the abject, but in doing so evade the sources of abjection. Cronenberg, a filmmaker constantly exploring abjection and monstrosity, for the first time in his filmography articulates this problematic relationship between them explicitly in Naked Lunch.

- by Adam C . Hart
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- Film Studies, Film Theory, Genre studies, Horror Film
- by Taieb Asma
- •
- Cultural Studies, Psychology, Philosophy, Philosophy of Mind

This article develops new models for the study of Italian Gothic prose in an international context. Poststructuralist paradigms that consider the intersections of subjectivity, identifications, and power structures (knowledge practices and spatial dispositions pertinent to the Gothic castle in particular) are applied for the purpose of explaining how Tommaso Landolfi generates two conflicting narrations in his 1947 novel Racconto d'autunno and puts one of them on top.

- by Keala J Jewell
- •
- Animal Studies, Monster Theory, Italian Literature, Gothic Literature

Морские чудовища, стремительно плывущие, резвящиеся среди волн, атакующие корабли или просто внезапно представшие перед нашим взором, являются на средневековых и ренессансных картах одними из наиболее визуально привлекательных элементов. Тем не менее, они никогда тщательно не изучались. Данная тема имеет большое значение не только для истории картографии, искусства и зоологической иллюстрации, но и для истории «географии чудесного», а также западноевропейских представлений об океане. Кроме того, изображения диковинных животных на морских картах могут предоставить важные сведения об источниках, культурных влияниях и методах работы картографов, которые их чертили или рисовали.
В этой книге автор анализирует наиболее важные примеры изображений морских чудовищ на средневековых и ренессансных картах, созданных в Европе, начиная с самых ранних mappaemundi X в, на которых они впервые появляются, вплоть до морских карт конца XVI в. Книга снабжена большим количеством иллюстраций и может надолго послужить образцом монографии по данной тематике.

In this paper, I explore the book of Job in terms of the symbolic and ideological warfare waged between God and the human protagonist, Job. Specifically, I argue that the invocation of various kinds of creatures under the “monster” rubric (such as Leviathan, Rahab, Yamm, the Twisting Serpent, and Behemoth) can be illuminated through a consideration of contemporary work—in the history of religions, literary theory, and film studies—that categorizes the monstrous in terms of ecological disorientation, metaphors of the torn human body, and the boundaries of the “home.” Moreover, I draw on the work of Marie Hélène Huet in her book Monstrous Imagination to argue that some of God’s showcase animals in Job 38–41 (most prominently Behemoth and Leviathan, but also others) should be discussed as monsters with reference to their ambiguous species representation and their “false resemblance” to other known creatures. When discussed within the context of Job’s pervasive themes of geological and animal violence (e.g., Job 4:9–11; 8:8–19; 12:15–25), Joban monsters take their place among the menagerie of creatures adduced by Job’s speaking characters as rhetorical gestures of disorientation, redemption, and even the meaning of empire.

- by Robert Gutierrez-Perez
- •
- History, Gender Studies, Intercultural Communication, Women's Studies

In this course, we will trace the history of "the Americas" as a history of zombies and zombification. The contemporary zombie, inaugurated in 1968 by film director George A. Romero, did not emerge from nowhere. Anthropologists, historians, social theorists, comic book and graphic novelists teach us that the viral, cannibal, flesh-eating, collective zombie traces its direct lineage to the Haitian religion of vodou. By introducing ourselves to pertinent examples in fiction, film, and scholarship, we will critically engage the history of zombies as a dual-history of slavery and resistance.

St Augustine suggested that monsters (monstra) serve to show or to signify (monstrare) something, whilst Foucault argued that one ancestor of today's abnormal individual was the human monster, a class of being characterised by a composite nature. In this essay I examine what two very different mixed human monsters can show us. The donestre, a medieval race of fearsome lion-headed polyglots, exhibit a corporeal violation of natural and social law. The strange case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, meanwhile, illustrates the modern monstrosity of deviant, instinctual character. The careful study of monsters helps to debauch our minds with learning and thus, in the words of William James, to make the natural, explanatory power of 'instinct' seem strange.

- by Tom Tyler
- •
- Critical Theory, Philosophy, History of Ideas, Medieval Literature

The year 2017 was a genuine breakthrough year for horror cinema, with multiple massive box office successes and surprising dominance on both critics lists and award shows. I’d like to look at the three successes that defined the genre in 2017 and seemed to indicate a resurgence in film’s importance to the broader landscape of horror. The horror landscape is far too variegated at this point to be adequately represented by three theatrically released movies, but they are useful objects in that we see in them a representation of the influences of TV, games, screamers, etc. These show how the cinema can serve as a point of convergence for the traditions inaugurated, emphasized, and, even, elevated by other mediums.

- by Adam C . Hart
- •
- Media Studies, Film Studies, Film Theory, Television Studies

Este estudio muestra la gárgola medieval como un programa iconográfico perfectamente regulado y apoyado en simbolismos asociados a las aguas primordiales como sostén universal y al pecado, entre algunos otros. El texto revela el profundo orden detrás de su manufactura y contrapone las visiones que hacen de ellas productos exclusivos del imaginario de escultores aburridos y descarriados. Se propone como tesis el origen de la gárgola gótica en Chartres, a finales del siglo XII.

- by Marco Antonio Lopez Sanchez
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- Iconography, Medieval History, Medieval Studies, Hermeneutics

The talk will open with a discussion of a set of poems from Lyn Hejinian's The Unfollowing, which puts a positive spin on the association of old age with childhood. a trope that is often deployed to infantilize and disenfranchize older people. By contrast, Hejinian uses it to highlight life's openness and contigency. Taking a cue from the poet, I will mobilize the notion of "the old child" to explore questions like: do we get less creative as we age? Are we born with certain talents and/or do we keep acquiring and developing them later in life? What obstacles get in the way of the expression of our multiple valences as we get older? We will survey the latest research on the epigenetic development of giftedness across the life span, dwell on the lives of exemplary polymaths and late bloomers and discuss how these matters relate to the topics of labor division, meritocracy and leisure.

- by João Paulo Guimarães
- •
- Children's Literature, Aging, Contemporary Poetry, Epigenetics

Quiroga. Lewisburg: Bucknell UP, 2016. 231 pp.

This article (written in German) traces the history of the monstruous or marvellous races of India (called Indian or Plinian races, too), the monsters that almost ubiquitous appear in Medieval art and literature. Unfortunately, due to limit of space, the allegorical interpretation of the monsters had to be left untouched. Instead it is argued that these monsters are still pretty alive today - although in far away regions, of course.

- by Marc Steinmann
- •
- Monsters and Monster Theory, Pliny the Elder, Star Wars, Ancient Paradoxography

The present catalogue text discerns between two kinds of eco-centric works the Austrian artist Herwig Scherabon presented in his latest solo exhibition “Against Nature“ (July 2021, Berlin Neukölln): landscapist and objectivist. Whereas Herwig's landscapist works are both nets-of and knots-in, and thus ontology-wise rather conventional; his objectivist works are ontologically most striking as they exclusively are nets, but no knots. For this reason, they are focused on here. The artist conjures these singular existences by means of black space that is isolating, yet not weakening, but rather empowering, even “monstrouizing“ them. In so existing, they emit an ontologically provocative statement: Distance is not debilitating, but rather an invitation to become.

- by Swantje Martach
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- Ontology, Art Theory, Teratology, The Other

Despite horror films representing business ventures intended to turn profit, box office analyses of the genre have remained rare in scholarly literature. Our study fills that gap through an examination of 117 horror films that reached the top 100 in domestic grosses in the North American film market in the period 2006-2016. This period saw fundamental change in Hollywood film production and the rise of low-budget studios such as Blumhouse Productions, which has become a major player in horror film production. Our study identifies ten sub-types of horror films, and using a quantitative statistical approach, we identify a strong presence of supernatural horror films in the period under discussion as well as a relatively weak presence of zombie, vampire, and torture porn films. We argue that supernatural horror films have dominated the top-grossing films in the timeframe because such films have topical resonance and are appealing to filmmakers because they are comparatively cheap to produce yet turn substantial profit on average. Moreover, we show that compared to the period 1978-2010, horror films from 2006 to 2016 increased only slightly in budgets yet increased significantly in profits. Even in rapidly changing industrial and social contexts, horror films retain a crucial place.

- by Todd Platts and +1
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- Film Studies, Popular Culture, Film Analysis, Film Genre

Review contained in Kohnen, T. , Kohnen, T. , Weidle, R. , Heyl, C. , Freiburg, R. , Haekel, R. , Pittel, H. , Göhrmann, M. , Schulze-Engler, F. , Wells, A. , & Roxburgh, N. "Reviews". Anglistik, no. 32, vol. 2 (2021), pp. 149-77... more

- by Harald Pittel
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- Cultural Studies, Law, Criminal Law, Literature
- by Camila Alves Jourdan
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- Death, Ancient Greek History, Ancient Seals and Sealings, Morte

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.

- by Dalila Honorato
- •
- Aesthetics, Stigma, Monsters and the Monstrous

Localizamos no convite feito por Freud um termo-chave que nos serve muito bem para se pensar a tensão dos limites entre o sujeito e a sociedade. Se vê prescrito nesta formulação freudiana o elemento que convida a psicanálise a encarar os mortos-vivos, não apenas enquanto um folclore cultural, mas também enquanto uma reminiscência anímica integrada simbolicamente na realidade e que, designa por meio deste uma figura do sofrimento humano extremamente cabível à atualidade. Falamos aqui da investigação necessária acerca da narrativa do terror e das metástases do horror, hoje tão cruciais na compreensão da gramática do sofrimento enfrentado na contemporaneidade. E não por menos, a figura que por um lado encarna com excelência elementos psicossociológicos, que dispõe em seu aspecto mítico a retomada da imagem daqueles que atravessaram o Acheronte e que encontraram um caminho de volta, conta por outro com o imaginário já da crença haitiana de que o escravo quando morto, poderia ser ressuscitado para trabalhar com escravo-zumbi para sempre. Desta maneira, o convite aqui é justamente, o de dar dignidade ou promover outro lugar para os “mortos-vivos” que imperam hoje em na nossa cultura.

- by Rodrigo Gonsalves and +3
- •
- Marxism, Horror Film, Jacques Lacan, Sigmund Freud

The article provides a brief comparative study of the reception history of Shakespeare's Caliban in the early modern period and in the contemporary literary criticism. The analysis aims to delineate a fundamental difference in the reception of the character of Caliban throughout the ages which I attribute to a historical shift in the understanding of the notions of humanity and monstrosity.

Le monstre joue un rôle essentiel dans The Philosophy of Horror de Noël Carroll, l’ouvrage de référence pour la philosophie anglo-saxonne du cinéma d’horreur. Il n’est donc pas étonnant que ce livre ait suscité une réflexion sur l’essence du monstre, qui mobilise autant les ressources de la philosophie la plus traditionnelle, que l’expérience des films d’horreur les plus contemporains. Cet article vise à présenter cette réflexion et à défendre la nécessité d’un « changement focal » conceptuel qui accompagne les mutations cinématographiques du monstre.

- by Hugo CLEMOT
- •
- Philosophy of Film, Horror Film, Aliens, Philosophy Of Horror

Collected in the latest issue of Minchō Magazine, this is an article on the work of the French-Jewish comic-book author and filmdirector, Joann Sfar. The complete issue is dedicated to monsters and their depiction in the world of arts, especially in the field of illustration. The article presents an overview on the humane universe that Joan Sfar has created for his own monsters to dwell. The magazine can be found here: http://minchomag.com/issue-13/

- by Andres Romero-Jodar
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- French Studies, Comics Studies, Comic Book Studies, Illustration

Nella tumultuosa primavera del 1977, su Lotta Continua e sulle fanzine dell'area creativa Pablo Echaurren inizia a rappresentare la gioventù ribelle che agita le piazze e le università. Dal suo lavoro di quei mesi scaturisce una «teratologia politica» che registra la radicalità del movimento del 1977, ma segnala, al contempo, la crisi di un'idea di militanza.

- by Jacopo Galimberti
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- Art History, Marxism, Italian art, The Grotesque Body