Frankenstein's Creature Research Articles

ASEAN and the Frankenstein dilemma: Will ASEAN become a monster?

Background: International organizations are pivotal as actors in international relations. Although its establishment represents a state, they have their objectives separate from their creators. The Association of Southeast Asian Nations [ASEAN] was created to handle cooperation and maintain peace and security in Southeast Asia. Although ASEAN was equipped with institutional organs to fulfil its purposes, member states' influence is unavoidable. This situation raises the Frankenstein dilemma in which creators cannot fully control its creature. This research aims to elaborate on ASEAN as a separate institution with independent objectives and how far member states can manage ASEAN as its creation. Methods: This study uses descriptive-analytical legal research as a method to examine ASEAN constitutional instruments and its first legal text to elaborate on its capacity as a legal person and its role in distinguishing interests between member states. The two ASEAN constitutional instruments are the Bangkok Declaration, 1967, and The ASEAN Charter, 2007, while the first legal instrument is the Treaty of Amity and Cooperation. All of the resources were gathered from ASEAN legal instruments database. Results: After carefully examining the documents, since its establishment ASEAN has kept member states at arms-length to realize their interests; the ASEAN position is only to legalize what its member state wants. Even after 40 years, this situation has not changed. While ASEAN has independent objectives and structures, its member states always made institutional designs to control ASEAN's capacity to act in the international forum. In this case, ASEAN is always under the authority of its member states and has never evolved like Frankenstein's creature. Conclusions: ASEAN will never turn into a monster as ASEAN never has sole interests that contradict its members. ASEAN member states always design ASEAN constitutional and legal instruments to restrict its role as an independent legal person in international forums.

Cultural Representations of Other-than-Human Nature

Cultural Representations of Other-than-Human Nature

Frankenstein's Creature on Film in the Twenty-first Century: Posthuman Monster, Saviour, and Victim Narratives

Abstract This article offers an original reading of six contemporary cinema and television adaptations of Frankenstein by arguing that the creature's depiction reveals three previously unheralded narratives of posthuman embodiment. Collectively, these engage with—and, often, subvert—the culturally dominant filmic reading of the creature as monstrous, while also displaying an urgent engagement with the ethical concerns around modern technophilic science, particularly synthetic biology. Posthuman monster narratives are, superficially, the most reactionary in their depiction of the creature as a threat to the human subject. Nevertheless, in films such as Frankenstein Reborn (Leigh Scott 2005) and Frankenstein vs. the Mummy (Damian Leone 2005), the creature's intertextual stylization also reveals an underlying hybridization of identities that gestures toward Haraway's notion of cyborgean fusion. The posthuman saviour narratives, Frankenstein (Marcus Nispel 2004) and I, Frankenstein (Stuart Beattie 2014) continues this arc by promoting identity confusion over stability, a concept that is replicated by the films’ discordant amalgamation of diverse genres. By exploring the subjective embodiment of Frankenstein's creatures, these adaptations move toward the concerns of Frankenstein (Jed Mercurio 2007) and Frankenstein (Bernard Rose, 2015), posthuman victim narratives that consider the suffering of those engineered/synthetic beings that capitalistic bioscience increasingly has the potential to create.

"Deus in Animo": Kantian Ugliness and the Narrative Aesthetic of Frankenstein

Where they are based in Immanuel Kant's categories of the sublime or monstrous, recent aesthetically based accounts reflect the conventional view of Victor Frankenstein's creature as a monster. This project instead engages Kant's category of the ugly, which makes possible a dialectical, narrative-based aesthetic, one folding both Victor's and the creature's interiority to within the social form of disinterested play otherwise known as intersubjectivity. Robert Walton's encounter with the creature provides a fleeting example of this phenomenon: employing Mojca Kuplen's "positive aesthetic of disgust," it offers a stimulus to revised forms of ethics or agency, thus invoking Theodor Adorno's end of aesthetic inquiry.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Disability, and the Injustice of Misrecognition

This article makes the case that the normative aspirations of recognition politics are worth pursuing as a dimension of disability politics— although the tactics need to be revised— through an interpretation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Specifically, I read Frankenstein's Creature as a visibly disabled subject, as someone who is misrecognized and mistreated due to his body's physical features, in order to analyze the tragedy of the novel: how the not-so-monstrous Creature can never see himself as anything other than a monster since he is never afforded the positive recognition he desires. The article concludes by considering how the tragedy could have been avoided in an attempt to envision a better path toward social justice for people with disabilities and other victims of identity-based subordination. More broadly, this article attempts to bring Mary Shelley into the political theory canon, casting her as a progressive social critic who believed that misrecognition creates monsters out of those who are negatively labelled as such.

A Study to the Self through Prefixes

A Study to the Self through Prefixes Ae Hee Lee (bio) 1. Multi-: more than one; many, especially variegated. Example: "multicolor." Think kaleidoscope. A spinning circus of several colored-glass. From the Latin multus, much, many. The existence of more than one. In one. Another example: "multicultural." Think you. Think of those you loved. Think myriads of others. 2. Notice people applaud at the word "unity." Strangely enough, words like "mixture," "composite," and "amalgamation" are often attributed to Frankenstein's creature. Abomination. The "monster" (from the Latin monere or warn) must be hidden, devoured, or assimilated (notice though, "monster" sounds closer to the Latin monstrare which means "to show"). Notice you are not alone in your desire for this being to have a name of its own. 3. Another prefix: inter-. From the Old French entre- or Latin inter-. Between, among. Poet Kimberly Blaeser once talked about a liminal space in which mixed bloods and mixed cultures find themselves. She called the in-between not a phase of being but a state of being, not a tragedy but a position of power. A strength and balance that only bridges possess. Don't forget "Intermediary"—don't underestimate it. 4. Read Andersen's "The Little Mermaid," again. The ending: the little mermaid cannot go back to be a mermaid, having been human, and cannot become human, having been mermaid. Her sisters at the sea, the prince for whom she endured the pain of invisible knives needling her soles—neither understood her love. When she turns into foam, don't cry for her, don't hate the story. Read it again. 5. Prefix: cross-Surprise: originating from the word "cross." Can refer to the shape of a cross, or across. Example: "Crossroads": An intersection of two or more roads. Neither here nor there. Figuratively, a meeting place. A shared place, a place of sharing, which belongs to no one for those that belong nowhere. Old European folklore tells stories of fairy processions happening at crossroads. A threshold to new worlds. 6. Recall the Venn diagram from your math class: a diagram of logical relations between different sets. The more circles, the closer to a field of flowers. Admire Venn diagrams, watch how the circles always converge in the middle. Ask: who fits outside these spaces of meeting? Who can live untouched and alone? 7. Paradox: Everyone belongs, but belonging is not easy. [End Page 24] 8. Another prefix that means across: trans-. Also means beyond and through. In Third Factory, Viktor Shklovsky writes, "There is no third alternative. Yet that is precisely the one that must be chosen." To transform oneself is to transcend. An unchanging thing is a dead thing.1 9. Learn from words. Words know that they cannot be restricted to a single meaning, and that their many meanings become their history and identity. Learn from people: words come from people—they were made in their image. 10. In his essay "The Argentine Writer and Tradition" Borges thought there were no camels in the Koran and wrote that "[Mohammed] knew he could be Arab without camels." Wonder: what do you not need, to be what you are?2 [End Page 25] Ae Hee Lee Lisa Beech Hartz directs Seven Cities Writers Project, a non-profit that brings cost-free creative writing workshops to underserved communities. She currently guides poetry workshops for men and women in a city jail and a memoir workshop at an LGBTQ community center. "Mural" is drawn from a manuscript exploring the life and work of Abstract Expressionist Lee Krasner. Lisa's ekphrastic collection, The Goldfish Window, was published by Grayson Books in 2018. Footnotes 1. Translation by Richard Sheldon 2. Translation by Esther Allen Copyright © 2020 Pleiades and Pleiades Press

A Singular Experiment: Frankenstein's Creature and the Nature of Scientific Community

A Singular Experiment: Frankenstein's Creature and the Nature of Scientific Community

Enough About Adaptation. Let's Talk About Adapting

Enough about adaptationLet's talk about adapting Thomas Leitch (bio) Literature, Film, and Their Hideous Progeny: Adaptation and ElasTEXTity by Julie Grossman (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). Pp. 228. $99.00 cloth. $34.99 paper. Any eyebrows that are raised by the authorship of the volume that inaugurates Palgrave Macmillan's new series on Adaptation and Visual Culture, edited by R. Barton Palmer and Julie Grossman, should immediately be lowered because Grossman's approach to the subject of adaptation is novel, illuminating, and provocative. A brief perusal of the table of contents might suggest that this is just another collection of case studies ranging from the latter-day quasi-human creations of Gods and Monsters and Hugo to the intertextual daisy chain running from Cape Fear to the "Cape Feare" episode of The Simpsons to Anne Washburn's Mr. Burns, A Post-Electric Play. But Grossman's case studies are so inventively conceived, intelligently organized, and imaginatively analyzed that together they mount a formidable challenge to received wisdom about adaptation. A writer seeking material or inspired by earlier reading produces an adaptation of that earlier material. The two texts—books or plays or comics or movies or television shows—are alike in some ways, different in others. Knowing audiences, in Linda Hutcheon's resonant phrase,1 are invited to enjoy both the similarities and the differences, and critics are invited to compare and contrast the two texts and the two experiences of encountering them. Grossman does not reject this model, but she [End Page 507] complicates it by emphasizing the agency of the adapted and adapting texts over that of their adapters. These texts, "hideous progenies" like Frankenstein's Creature whose births are difficult and often "monstrous," are marked by " elasTEXTity," a "state of being for sources and adaptations that are indivisibly connected" (2). The central insight that drives Grossman's analysis is the scandalously intimate connection between these two seemingly opposite qualities. On the one hand, adaptations are deformed monstrosities, often delivered under considerable stress, that the authors of the original texts may well regard as parodies rather than duplicates. On the other, their very existence demonstrates the tropism of the original texts toward replication, rejuvenation, and renewal, all qualities that emphasize their chameleon fluidity and call their very status as originals into question. Adaptation studies has grappled with this problem before, most notably in the model Kamilla Elliott has derived from Lewis Carroll of "verbal/visual looking glass analogies . . . predicated on the reciprocal power of words and of pictures to evoke verbal figures in cognition" (153)2 and in Robert Stam's application of an intertextual model derived from Mikhail Bakhtin and Julia Kristeva to discuss adaptation as one of a legion of processes by which texts are inevitably produced, inflected, deformed, and recreated by other texts in an "ongoing whirl of intertextual reference and transformation" (186).3 What Grossman adds is a shift in emphasis from adaptations as a series of texts variously participating in these intertextual revels to adapting as an often monstrous practice of textual generation, degeneration, and regeneration. The "state of being" of elasTEXTity turns out to be indistinguishable from a state of becoming, whereby texts are most truly themselves when they spawn unholy offspring that challenge their primacy, integrity, and identity. Grossman has chosen a series of case studies that dramatize this process and arranged them to mount an increasingly sweeping series of challenges to models of textual integrity that have long served as a basis for Western aesthetics, more general models of identity that continue to anchor theories of selfhood and humanity, and the canons and methodologies of adaptation studies itself. Beginning with the Frankenstein's Creature and Hugo's Automaton, mechanical creations who paradoxically "illuminate the importance of human bonds and creativity" (32), she considers the transformative journeys, sometimes adaptive, sometimes anti-adaptive, undertaken by both the heroes and the creators of Apocalypse Now and O Brother, Where Art Thou? Next she turns [End Page 508] to the anatomies of marginal identity in the two film versions of Imitation of Life, "The Yellow Wallpaper," and [Safe], and films like Dogfight, Far From Heaven, and Kinky Boots whose hideous progeny include Broadway...

The Interactive Theater of Video Games: The Gamer as Playwright, Director, and Actor

In storytelling, films, and novels, is traditionally an observer, and by necessity a passive observer. In these media artists can often be seen as telling rather than sharing stories. To be sure, author provides space for a readers imaginative input, but you cannot change words. Both theater and, more recently, video games have been experimenting with, twisting, and turning on its head this traditional view of Unless you're Roger Ebert and believe that video games cannot and will never be art, video game designers, writers, and directors are starting to blur lines between interactive theater and games. (1) In recently released video game Gone Home, for example, is a young college student who returns home from Europe to find her parents missing and a note from her younger sister taped to front door. Reviewing game in The New York Times, Chris Suellentrop comments on work's gripping fiction, its closeness to literary realism. One of designers, Steve Gaynor, influenced by current hit Sleep No More, an interactive theater production to be examined later in this essay, observes that in Gone Home audience ... occupies same three-dimensional space as fictional inhabitants and that inside that space, players, like theatergoers, can choose where to focus their attention. Lucy Pebbles writing in The Observer speaks of game as if it were a video equivalent to audience's experience with Sleep No More: You piece together a sense of who everyone is and what happened through seemingly disconnected items and evidence hidden around house. And those connections are intentionally weak. It allows plot and conclusions to take place in mind of and not in action of game. For her, Gone Home takes gaming element away from screen, and into your head, making room for player/audience directly ... because they are alive to flexibility of choice and narrative. (2) We use video games and interactive theater here as reverse mirrors to raise larger aesthetic questions. Is this increased role for audience, whether offstage or at controls, ultimate goal, reality of both media? What happens to concept of plot or narrative when becomes a collaborator with playwright or with game designer? Is notion of author challenged, reduced, potentially rendered irrelevant with time, as audience's or player's control grows exponentially in these more recent experiments in theater and in video games? And is video game now a legitimate rival of, some would even go so far as to say successor to, legitimate theater which has been described, even dismissed as the fabulous invalid? (3) When filtering play through his or her own life experiences, needs, agenda, interests, preoccupations, spectator in theater has always been a player in loose sense of that word. But idea of spectator's having a direct role in action onstage or even a hand in plot, becoming a player in literal sense as it applies to interactive video games, is of more recent origin. The 1960s saw numerous productions that drew onstage, willingly or not, thereby blurring line between stage and house. As a result, performances were half scripted, half improv, latter coming into play when members joined actors onstage, their role ranging from nonverbal members of a crowd to new characters in ongoing story. Behind such experiments was principle of, even political need for, inclusivity, making spectator more than a passive receptor and challenging what innovators saw as stilted, even undemocratic theater of past. (4) An actor friend tells of a workshop performance in 1980s that offered a variation on such inclusion of audience. Those present were confronted with an actor dressed as Frankenstein's creature, standing motionless before them. …

Patagonian Giants, Frankenstein's Creature, and Contact Zone Catastrophe

“Patagonian Giants, Frankenstein’s Creature, and Contact Zone Catastrophe” historicizes Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an intervention in the discourse of exploration predicated upon the Creature’s affinities with the pseudo-scientific Patagonian giants of eighteenth-century debate. Famously associated with the circumnavigator John Byron, described by his grandson Lord Byron, and evidently known to Mary Shelley from her reading, the Patagonian Giants strikingly resemble Frankenstein’s eight feet tall, ice-dwelling Creature. I enlist Mary Louise Pratt’s investigation of representations of encounters in the “contact zones” to reconstruct the important context of three centuries of European reports of Patagonian giants, trace Mary Shelley’s evident exposure to the legend of the giants and their meeting with Commodore John Byron, and argue that by displacing, replacing, and surpassing Robert Walton in the role of explorer-protagonist, the Patagonian-like Creature reproduces the violent actions and rhetoric of...

Is Frankenstein's creature a machine or artificially created human life? Intentionality between searle and turing

To bring to the fore some elements of truth both in the Turing Test and in Searle’s Chinese Room thought experiment, we need to distinguish between two different senses of intentionality: a reflexive-transcendental sense and a positive-empirical one. In the first sense, intentionality is intimately connected with thought experimentation and denotes the capacity of the mind to assume as merely possible any actually given reality. Pace Searle, we have no idea as to how intentionality, in this transcendental sense, may be implemented not only in a Turing machine, but also in any robot, brain or living being produced by our scientific and technical intelligence. This is why, in case a machine passed the Turing Test, neither science nor philosophy can find an answer to the question whether the artificial life so produced, or the creature in Frankenstein’s novel, is a human being or a dangerous machine. However, such a choice could and should be made by assuming the supreme value of the human person and by applying the principle of precaution. La distinzione tra due differenti sensi dell’intenzionalita, riflessivo-trascendentale e positivo-empirico, aiuta a porre in luce validita e limiti sia del test di Turing sia dell’esperimento mentale della stanza cinese di Searle. Nel senso trascendentale, l’intenzionalita e intrinsecamente connessa alla sperimentazione mentale e denota la capacita della mente di assumere controfattualmente, come meramente possibile, qualsiasi realta effettivamente data. Pace Searle, non riusciamo a concepire in quale modo sia possibile implementare l’intenzionalita intesa in questo senso non solo in una macchina di Turing, ma neppure in un robot, cervello o essere vivente prodotto grazie alla nostra intelligenza scientifico-tecnica. A rigore, questo significa che, nel caso in cui una macchina superasse il test di Turing, ne la scienza ne la filosofia sarebbero in grado di rispondere alla domanda se la vita artificiale cosi prodotta (o il mostro del romanzo Frankenstein) sarebbe un essere umano o una macchina pericolosa. Questa scelta, pero, potrebbe e dovrebbe essere compiuta assumendo a guida il valore supremo della persona umana e il principio di precauzione.

Persons and Things (review)

Reviewed by: Persons and Things John Frow (bio) Persons and Things. By Barbara Johnson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. 266 pp. Paper $35.00. The conjunction of persons and things names, for Barbara Johnson, a fundamental ethical problem: if it's the case that the relation between them structures the way we live, if we tend to treat persons as things and our "humanness is mired in an inability to do otherwise," then how is it possible to disentangle them, to imagine living "in a world where persons treat persons as persons" (2)? We dream of things (Pygmalion's statue, Frankenstein's creature, an automaton) becoming persons, and in slavery and its myriad informal forms we treat persons as objects of our will. What's normal is the entanglement of personhood and thinghood, an ambiguity spelled out in the passage between the four sections of the book: "Things," "The Thingliness of Persons," "The Personhood of Things," and "Persons." The relation, and the ambiguity, can be understood in terms of three divergent and perhaps incommensurable dimensions of analysis: "the reality of desire, the reality of materiality, and the reality of rhetoric" (3). A series of figures running through the book corresponds, although never explicitly, to each dimension: to the reality of desire, the figure of narcissism and its constitutive lack; to the reality of materiality, the figure of the statue and its cognate forms, the doll, the puppet, the automaton, and so on; and to the reality of rhetoric, the figure of address. Of these, the dominant dimension is that of rhetoric, and one way of reading the book is simply as a set of meditations on that encounter "with something inanimate at the heart of what we think is ourselves" (229) that so constantly provoked Paul de Man's attention in the act of reading. But rhetoric is, before this, a way of bringing inanimate things to life. Emile Benveniste's argument that only the "I" and the "you" are grammatical "persons" is grounded in the assumption that "the notion of 'person' has something to do with presence at the scene of speech [End Page 221] and seems to inhere in the notion of address" (6). The converse, then, holds true: that the way to treat a thing (the "it") as a person is to address it, to treat it as an interlocutor in the scene of speech. Four key tropes effect the transformation of things into persons. Two of them—prosopopoeia (which Johnson associates with the epitaph, the feigned speech of the dead to the living) and apostrophe—are figures of address; anthropomorphism and personification, by contrast, are direct assertions of being. The question of personhood takes place in the interstice between these two pairs: we assume that the human self is a person rather than a thing, but—in an argument that has also been central to Charles Taylor's thinking about selfhood—"if the 'self' becomes an object of knowledge, it can only be known as an object among other objects" (47). The figure of Narcissus condenses some of the complexity of what's at stake here. On the one hand, it plays out a confusion of the self with the other and of selfhood with aesthetic form. On the other, it dramatizes the question of whether the self can have a content, since Narcissus's self-recognition is constitutively a misrecognition that gives form to that self that seems to precede it: "The image offers a fiction of wholeness that the subject will strive to resemble" (58–59), a thing that the self will always, necessarily, fail to become. That otherness of the mirror image is akin to the exemplary otherness and thingness of Kleist's puppets, the embodiment of a superhuman grace, and it may thus be the case that the structure of human subjectivity must be thought in terms of our ability to be or to be like a thing, that "identity is an object … without which there would be no subject" (181). The book explores this insight through a range of types of animated thingness. Each chapter brings together, in an argument that is essayistic rather than linear, a complex of thing...

A developmental theory of synaesthesia, with long historical roots: A comment on Hochel & Milán (2008)

The recent surge of scientific investigation into synaesthesia, ably reviewed by Hochel and Milán (2008), is representative of an increasing recognition that our various sensory modalities are intimately interconnected rather than separate. The origin of these interconnections is the subject of an intriguing theory by Maurer and Maurer (1988). They suggest that all of us begin life as synaesthetes, with subsequent neural development reducing the connections among the senses. We present some historical roots of the idea that human life begins with the senses intertwined. The influential 18th-century philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau described an early theory of child development in his book Emile (1762), hypothesizing that if “a child had at its birth the stature and strength of a man … all his sensations would be united in one place, they would exist only in the common ‘sensorium’.” A half-century later, a young Mary Shelley (1818) brought this idea into popular culture with the Frankenstein creature's recollection of his early experience: “A strange multiplicity of sensations seized me, and I saw, felt, heard, and smelt, at the same time; and it was, indeed, a long time before I learned to distinguish between the operations of my various senses.” William James in The Principles of Psychology (1890) expressed a similar idea. In this context, the assumption of many 20th-century scientists that the senses were largely separate appears to be an historical aberration.

Wild Humans: The Culture/Nature Duality in Marie Darrieussecq's Pig Tales and Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde

This, too, was myself. Robert Louis Stevenson, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, 1886 Jungian analysis has the virtue of stating for us in a new way the problem of the nature and origin of evil. It warns us that, when we finally return to Ithaca, we will find evil there too. --Roger Bartra, The Artificial Savage, 1997 The part-human, part-animal character refers to a semi-bestial being that lives between the human and the natural world. This hybrid creature shares characteristics of two different realms. Since the character is composed of two different and contrasting tendencies, each corresponding to a specific disposition and environment, the human/animal character is caught between two personalities. Be it female or male, the character lives a life of negotiation between two worlds drawn in conflict against each another. The Wild Human is a mythological figure that serves as undercurrent for the human/animal characters featured here. The figure has been recognized as a mythical subtext through literary history, from antiquity (the hairy Enkidu) through the biblical tradition (Nebuchadnezzar, John the Baptist, Mary Magdalene), the Middle Ages (Merlin, Mary the Egyptian), and the Renaissance, as well as in romantic literary characters (Spenser's Sir Satyrane, Ariosto's Orlando, Shakespeare's Caliban, Rousseau's Noble Savage, Frankenstein's creature, and Kipling's Mowgli). The Wild Human is a place of contingency where the human realm encounters the animal one. The figure is made up of two essences which he or she internalizes from abstract notions of that which is conventionally considered human (culture) and that which is conventionally considered animal (nature). The human and the animal are then organized within the figure in a false binary opposition. The pair is falsely opposed because, as has been well established already, more recently by the ecological sciences, the human element coincides with the animal. (1) Indeed, the culture/nature binary in its civilization/wilderness form is at the heart of the figure of the Wild Human and thus the human/animal character. The civilization/wilderness binary derives from the timeless culture/nature binary, focusing on the antagonism between the human environment and the nonhuman one. The aspect of civilization brought forward here is that of an ordered community based on human interaction and cooperation and providing the individual all that is needed in order to lead a satisfying life, including protection from chaotic external forces. On the other hand, wilderness, exemplified by the desert or the forest, is nature in its most frightful guise. Uncultivated and peopled with all kinds of mysterious beasts, the wilderness is dangerous, out of human control or influence, incapable of sustaining human life--the world untamed. Wilderness differs from nature in that, because the latter has been molded and altered by the human will, it is now useful and complementary to society, not detrimental to it, and thus has become part of civilization. The opposition between civilization and wilderness can thus only be understood hierarchically, for both cannot be seen as desirable simultaneously; one is always preferred to the other. (2) Like the human/animal character the Wild Human engenders, this personage is defined by his or her duality of essences. Richard Bernheimer, who has studied the figure of the Wild Man in detail through the Middle Ages, (3) describes him: It is a hairy man curiously compounded of human and animal traits, without, however[,] sinking to the level of an ape. It exhibits upon its naked human anatomy a growth of fur, leaving bare only its face, feet and hands, at times its knees and elbows, or the breasts of the female of the species. Frequently the creature is shown wielding a heavy club or mace, or the trunk of a tree; and since its body is usually naked except for the shaggy covering, it may hide its nudity under a strand of twisted foliage worn around the loins. …

Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism (review)

Reviewed by: Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism Jeffrey Longacre Youngquist, Paul . 2003. Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. $59.95 hc. $19.95 sc. xxxi + 224 pp. "The monstrosities of Romanticism," writes Paul Youngquist in his introduction to Monstrosities: Bodies and British Romanticism, "trouble the matter of normality" (2003, xxix). And troubling—or problematizing—the matter of normality, specifically as normality works as a regulator function for conceptions of embodiment, is precisely Youngquist's aim. His decision to focus his study on the British Romantic period is no arbitrary decision either, as he notes that it "coincides with the cultural consolidation of a "proper body" (xv). Working from the intersection of Judith Butler's ideas on individual agency and embodiment as performance and Michel Foucault's theory that "liberal society operates by means of a dispersed network of regulatory norms that discipline bodies toward the end of a socially serviceable docility" (xv), Youngquist probes the tensions between regulatory norms and the subversive monsters that haunt them. He provides an interesting and useful dissection of the Romantic origins of the "proper body" and how deviations from this norm—monstrosities—always return, like Frankenstein's creature, to challenge the political discourses that define, regulate, and enforce normality. Youngquist states a twofold purpose in writing this book: "first to examine further the emergence of the proper body as a regulatory norm, and second to show how monstrosities of various kinds become occasions for advancing, resisting, or transforming its operations in British culture of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries" (xxx). He divides his book into three parts: "Incorporations," "Habituations," and "Appropriations." Part I sets the theoretical, cultural, and historical groundwork for the book by defining and examining the norm of the proper body and then presenting several examples of deviances which haunt the stability and power of this cultural norm. Part II consists of two chapters juxtaposing divergent reactions to opium and addiction, first in the case of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who represents the repentant addict, and then in the case of Thomas De Quincy, who represents an apologist for addiction. In Part III, Youngquist concludes his study with two chapters on the rise of institutional appropriation of the flesh and its cultural ramifications. [End Page 229] Chapter 1 examines how the norm of the "proper body" came into being in the first place through the rise of anatomical science, especially in the work of the surgeon John Hunter, and the materialist ideology of John Locke, culminating in polarized reactions to the French revolution; ultimately represented on the ultra-conservative side by Edmund Burke and on the radically liberal side by Thomas Paine. "Between them," writes Youngquist, "Burke and Paine consolidate the force of the proper body as a cultural norm" (2003, 26). The proper body is what's at stake in the paranoid climate of 1790s England, dominating political and cultural discourses of the time. Revolutionary France represents the monstrous deviation from this norm, the horrific other, threatening to infect England's "healthy" body like a disease. Youngquist's analysis of the confluence of medicine and politics during this period is one of the strengths of his book. In the next chapter, Youngquist considers, "the fate of monstrosities in liberal society," where only proper bodies matter (2003, 28). This eclectic chapter moves from a discussion of William Wordsworth, to Daniel Lambert, the 700-plus pound man, to Sarah Biffin, the armless miniature painter, finally cohering a bit around Youngquist's analysis of the carnivalesque atmosphere of Bartholomew Fair, "a space of deviance, a collective social practice that for a few days each year challenged the normative force of the proper body" (45). It culminates in a brief, obligatory for monstrosity studies, snippet on Frankenstein. On the other hand, chapter 3, entitled "Possessing Beauty," is one of the strongest chapters in the book. In it Youngquist examines the confluence of anatomy, anthropology, and aesthetics, noting how "[b]eauty converges with civility to race the proper body" (64). Comparing the institutionalization of aesthetics from Immanuel Kant to Joshua Reynolds with contemporary studies of racial anatomy, such as Charles White's An Account of the Regular Gradation in Man (1799...

The Eye of the Panther: Rilke and the Machine of Cinema

T HE ASSORTED OBJECTS described in Rilke's Neue Gedichte make up a collection whose variety and opulence are reminiscent of the Baroque, as are the Jardin des Plantes and the Jardin du Luxembourg, respective settings of two of the most famous of these poems, Der Panther and Das Karussell. These and other of Rilke's so-called thing (Dinggedichte) are fraught with a baroque tension between the economy of form and the unstable worldly economies that poetic closure works to exclude. Figures of precarious control, panther and carousel alike gyrate, defining an empty center that exists solely in relation to a periphery. The accelerating carousel in particular illustrates how this geometry dissolves into entropy and how the periphery threatens to triumph as empty though dazzling facade. The panther too, turning in circles on tensed loins, reveals form as energy held in reserve. It is no coincidence that these poems occur at a time when the formal dynamism of Baroque art and architecture was receiving new and unprecedented attention. This rediscovery of the Baroque projected modern anxieties onto an earlier epoch torn between containment and expansion. Thus, it should come as no surprise that Heinrich W6lfflin's discussion of animated stone, of restless and unstable forms, and especially of a chiaroscuro that makes objects appear to leap out of the picture plane, might well have applied to the advent of cinema (ca. 1895), which placed the spectator in the path of oncoming locomotives, and whose own use of chiaroscuro helped fold the technological monster back into a more archaic fear of the outside. Monsters proper, such as Dr. Frankenstein's creature, not only became commonplace in cinema but came to personify an often disquieting process of animation, a final violation of the law of beauty which, almost two centuries earlier, neoclassicism had installed as a bulwark against Baroque monstrosities (Wellbery 192-94). Likewise, if Rilke's New Poems brim with classical relics, most notably a marble torso whose inner life makes itself felt as the uncanny ability to return the beholder's gaze, his carousel, by contrast, is blind. An afterimage of Baroque spectacle as well as a protocinematic machine, its whirling menagerie uniquely demonstrates the crisis of modernist form.