Monster Theory Research Articles

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture

EULOGIJA ZA BALKAN

This paper intends to show the significance of the specific hegemony of coded interpretations in contemporary Western cultural relation to „cultural otherness“. Rendered through West-East dichotomy, certain discursive issues of identity and difference, human and nonhuman, the phenomenon of race, nation, ethnic group, class, gender, are formulated within a polarized paradigm of Western thought. „Balkan“ is theoretically made, unmade, and remade continuously and with all the consenquences that it carries. To think of „Balkan“ is to unthink the thinking itself, to rephrase, rename, reclaim the theory and discoursive geography. Critical reading of the aspects of cultural fascination with the other, different, unknown, and foreign is based on recognition of techniques and modes of contemporary cultural environment and the cultural patterns related to the forms of marginalization and othering. Interdisciplinary approach and cross-scientific model of semiotics, sociology, anthropology, cultural studies, in recent science research examine the phenomenon of the alterity, in ethical, political, cultural and media domain, questioning the position of „the other“ in discourses of culture, language, body, race, nation, gender, sex and colonial subject, and in the field of the new, emergent monster theory.

The Gothic genre, classical allusion and other influences in Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray

This article will outline the aspects of influence and allusion in the novel, with reference to Victorian Gothic, classical mythology, the psychological double, monster theory, the Faustian bargain, the mask and a prominent memento mori in Huysmans’ A Rebours , his description of Rodolphe Bresdin’s lithograph, ‘The Comedy of Death’. Wilde’s novel is a complex, multi-layered text, and a richer, more profound understanding of it becomes possible when it is situated within this context of influence and allusion.

The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas

Reviewed by: The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games by Ebony Elizabeth Thomas Tharini Viswanath (bio) The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games. By Ebony Elizabeth Thomas. New York University Press, 2019. Every now and again I come across a book of literary criticism that is so powerful in its import that it significantly changes how I perceive and approach young adult literature. Ebony Elizabeth Thomas's The Dark Fantastic: Race and Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games is one such book. The Dark Fantastic skillfully weaves together autoethnography, literary criticism, critical race theory, and digital media culture to examine how race shapes the imagination and provide readers with counter narratives of mainstream (read: predominantly white) films and TV shows. Herein, Thomas posits that the lack of diversity in imaginative genres like fantasy and science fiction causes a discord in the Western collective imagination. The Dark Fantastic is the author's analysis of that discord "as it plays out in speculative fiction for young adults and in audience interaction with these stories" in four mainstream visual narratives: the Hunger Games trilogy, BBC's Merlin, CW's The Vampire Diaries, and the Harry Potter series (4). Chapter 1 establishes the traditional purpose of darkness—"to disturb, to unsettle, to cause unrest"—and exemplifies how this deeply rooted primal fear of the dark gets transposed onto people with dark skins (19). Building on the works of theorists such as Jeremy Jerome Cohen who position monstrous beings as analogous to people who are deemed different in the real world, Thomas asks an important question that the subsequent chapters in this book grapple with: "If monsters and people of color inhabit the same place in our stories, what would it be like to read monster theory from the monster's perspective?" (20). [End Page 435] Thomas positions the "dark other" as the "spectacle, monstrous Thing that is the root cause of hesitation, ambivalence and the uncanny" that needs to be vanquished in the Anglo-American fantastic tradition (22). This chapter also lays a strong foundation for the rest of the monograph by highlighting the relationship between the dark other in fantasy stories and people of color in the real world, and by charting a pattern—of spectacle, hesitation, violence, haunting, and emancipation—that the dark fantastic follows in speculative fiction. Titled "Lamentations of a Mockingjay," the second chapter discusses how race and ethnicity are constructed in the Hunger Games books and films by focusing on the intersections between televised state violence and the neoliberal imperative of using visual technologies to market the body. Importantly, Thomas explains how mainstream media subtly recenters whiteness and examines how the life and death of the character Rue illustrate the intersections of race, class, and innocence in the text and on screen. As the sacrificial mockingjay in the series, Rue demonstrates the prevailing cultural script in the Western world: that "some children are more innocent than others, and Black children are not innocent at all" (56, emphasis original). Thomas goes on to exemplify how this sentiment is echoed by some readers and viewers in their negative online reactions to Rue in the books and films, which in turn traps her in the dark fantastic cycle. Chapter 3, "A Queen out of Place," analyzes how "time, space, and emotion shape our experiences in the waking dream of the fantastic," and how locations—both real and imagined—affect the perception and desirability of black (female) bodies (70). Since the primary world in which we live shapes our identities, Thomas argues, our world's unconscious "laws"—especially those pertaining to race and ethnicity—are present in secondary fantastic worlds as well. Thomas goes on to demonstrate how Angel Coulby as Queen Guinevere "Gwen" in Merlin evokes and amplifies the reader/viewer's sense of hesitation because "[a]ccepting a desirable dark-skinned queen requires not only the suspension of disbelief but also the conscious rethinking of who and what is marked as beautiful and desirable" (93). This chapter also highlights the challenges of placing characters of color inside magical worlds with a medieval setting. Thomas concludes...

The Monster Theory Reader ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

The Monster Theory Reader ed. by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock

After monster theory?

After monster theory?

Constructing Imperial and National Identities: Monstrous and Human Bodies in Book of Watchers, Daniel, and 2 Maccabees

Monster theory illuminates the construction of imperial and national identities in the portrayals of monstrous and human bodies in three early Jewish texts; Book of Watchers, Daniel, and 2 Maccabees. Book of Watchers expresses anxiety about Judean/Jewish identity in the shadow of empire through its portrayal of a vulnerable humanity terrorized by voracious giants and their demonic spirits. Daniel dehumanizes empire and its agents, imaging empire as a colossal statue, an animalistic were-king, and a series of monstrous beasts, while one like a human being poses an alternative to imperial rule. Second Maccabees, by contrast, demythologizes, decapitates, dismembers, and disintegrates the imperial body in order to portray the integral Judean political body (and soul) as mature, pure, capable, and ordered.

The Monstrosity of God Made Flesh

Abstract Three times over the course of thirty-eight years, Karl Barth images God as the monster Leviathan (once each in the Epistle to the Romans, Church Dogmatics II.1 and& IV.3.1). Barth’s imagination for God in monstrous form emerges from his interpretation of Romans 11:35, in which the apostle Paul quotes a line from Job 41:11, a poem about Leviathan, to describe the greatness of God. Using monster theory and a close reading of Barth, this article will discuss how God as Leviathan answers one of Barth’s primary questions—namely, how it is that Jesus saves human beings from their headlong rush into the abyss. Moving from Barth’s exegetical insights, through Barth’s soteriology, the article ends with the ethics of a God made monstrous flesh—an ethics that Barth explicitly links to the status of prisoners and all those depicted as monstrous and cast into the abyss.

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

Monsters in the Attic: Women’s Rage and the Gothic

The Threat of Empire: Monstrous Hybridity in Revelation 13

Abstract The Apocalypse of John is filled with monsters who threaten both spatial and cultural boundaries. They are generally understood as ciphers for the Roman Empire and its ­rulers. Rather than seeking the ancient Near Eastern origins of the monstrous imagery, the intent of this paper is to use monster theory to better understand why John employs monsters throughout the apocalypse. I argue that the author’s portrayal of the threat and punishment of hybrid monsters reveals his own insecurities and fears concerning his communities’ assimilation with Roman culture. John uses monsters specifically to target rival prophets in his communities that espouse a different vision of living under Rome rule.

Literary Forms/Techniques, & Methods of Study

Literary Forms/Techniques, & Methods of Study Christopher T. Begg 887. Ryan P. Bonfiglio, "Visualizing Literacy: Images, Media, and Method," BibInt 25 (2017) 293-319. Whereas biblical scholars have long been interested in questions about textual literacy in the ancient world, relatively little attention has been given to the concept of visual [End Page 301] literacy, i.e., the extent to which images were produced and read as a type of language. This article introduces the visual literacy concept as this has been developed in recent work in visual culture studies and then presents a series of probes that attempt to assess the degree of prominence of visual literacy in the ANE world. Though it is not possible to determine a precise rate of visual literacy in the ANE, there is ample evidence to suggest that those who produced and/or commissioned art were highly concerned about questions regarding the readability of their materials and often privileged artistic motifs over epigraphic content in the design and implementation of certain mixed-media artifacts. These lines of evidence suggest that images functioned as a prominent vehicle of communication in the ancient world alongside, and sometimes in place of, text-based media. Research on visual literacy not only sheds light on the ancient media contexts of the biblical world, but also offers a more explicit rationale for how and why ancient images should be used in biblical interpretation today. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 888. Brian Charles Dipalma, "Intersections between Iconographic and Gendered Approaches to Biblical Interpretation," BibInt 25 (2017) 320-41. This paper explores the intersections between the two approaches to biblical interpretation cited in its title. Focusing on the ways that visual images from the ANE have been incorporated into the study of the Hebrew Bible (HB), I identify four such intersections. The examples of these cited here show that participation in the iconographic turn provides an important resource for the development of HB gender studies. I also seek to show that the interactions discussed in this article can be mutually fruitful. In other words, including gender as an area of inquiry can also enhance the iconographic turn in biblical studies. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 889. [Second Temple Jewish Historiography] Ari Finkelstein, "Fitting a Square Peg into a Round Hole: Categorizing Works of Jewish Historiography of the Second Temple Period," JSJ 49 (2018) 303-29. The categories of Jewish historiography of the Second Temple period used by scholars frame how they and their students approach crucial texts of this era and shape our understanding of its history. Yet, these categories are fraught with difficulties. F.'s article explores the issue via an examination of Daniel R. Schwartz's categorization of Second Temple historiography as either Palestinian or diasporan. While these categories do yield some interesting insights, they also involve far too many exceptions. Against this background, F. seeks to show that such efforts at categorization warp our understanding of Second Temple historiography. Rather than categorizing Second Temple historiographic works, F. suggests that each work ought to be considered from the perspective of its author's aims. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B.] 890. Brandon R. Grafius, "Text and Terror: Monster Theory and the Hebrew Bible," Currents in Biblical Research 16 (1, 2017) 34-49. While biblical scholars have long been interested in the monsters of the Hebrew Bible, it is only in the last several decades that theoretical approaches to the monster phenomenon have made their way into biblical studies. Originating in the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology, monster theory looks at the construction of various monsters, arguing that the way a culture creates its monsters reveals the anxieties of that culture. My article explores the uses of monster theory in recent works of biblical scholarship and seeks [End Page 302] to demonstrate that in these works the theory has been used to read the biblical monster figures studied as representations of chaos. The article further identifies monstrous imagery as a rhetoric of trauma, and notes that the boundaries between the biblical monster and the self are shifting and unstable. [Adapted from published abstract—C.T.B...

Monstret, barnet och disciplineringens konsekvens: Intermedial dialog i Allan Rune Petterssons berättelser om Frankensteins faster

Title: The Monster, the Child, and the Consequences of Discipline. Intermedial Dialogue in Allan Rune Petterson’s Novels about Frankenstein’s Aunt Between Allan Rune Pettersson’s novels Frankenstein’s Aunt (1978) and Frankenstein’s Aunt Returns (1989) there emerges a contradictory view on discipline. Whilst being a dominant motif in the first novel, discipline of the monstrous is dissuaded from in the second. The aim of this article is to explain this contradiction through an analysis of the meaning ascribed to the monstrous body in the two novels, respectively. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s monster theory and Michail Bachtin’s work on the chronotope is used whilst intermedia theory provides a framework to explain the relation between the novels in the light of a TV series based on the first novel. The first novel creates a gothic chronotope where the protagonist Hanna Frankenstein aims to atone for her nephew’s sins in the past (his creation of Frankenstein’s Monster). In the novel, the monstrous body is assigned meaning through a correlation with the discourse on the child which, thus, legitimizes her acts of disciplining the monsters. In the TV series, monstrosity is described a result of loneliness and consequently, the function of discipline is altered. The Monster falls in love with a human girl, and aunt Hanna aims to turn him into a ladies man. Finally, a wedding between the Monster and the human girl marks a harmonious ending where monstrosity is obliterated altogether. In the second novel, the Monster and his bride live a bourgeois life and aunt Hanna accuses them of betraying their individuality. However, their lifestyle is the result of her own acts of discipline in the first novel. She therefore has to atone for new sins in the past, only now committed by herself. The second novel thus reinvents the gothic chronotope and also interprets the first novel in the light of the TV series, which provides a missing link between the novels. In the end, the second novel advocates the co-existence of the monstrous alongside the human.

(The promise of) Monstrous Kinship? Queer Reproduction and the Somatechnics of Sexual and Racial Difference

This article considers the figure of the monster and monstrosity as a phenomenon as an entangled effect of kinship and reproduction, and thus as conveying specific understandings of gender, sexuality and race. While non-heterosexual reproduction and family-making has long been viewed as monstrous, increasing LGBTQ rights and recognition has instead insisted on its normality. Engaging with feminist and queer monster theory, and building on ethnographic research in Stockholm, Sweden, this article considers the monstrous remains within contemporary queer kinship. In particular, it proposes that when choice and intent rather than biological ‘facts’ constitute the foundation of (queer) family, sexual and racial difference does not cease to exist, but rather, re-emerges as monstrous attachments and embodiments. To sketch a larger argument about the potential limits of ideas about social construction, the article hones in on two examples. First, it shows that gestation and childbirth, as monstrous embodiments, can pose problems for families that insist on parental equality through the perceived sameness of shared intent. Secondly it proposes that in the context of Sweden, reproduction through donor-insemination is built on a cultural idea of white sperm as both neutral and desirable. These examples, the article suggest, point to some remaining irreconcilable dimensions embedded in the fantasy of queer kinship that, like monsters, haunt its queer normative forms. In closing, it argues for a reconsideration of hopeful monstrosities by considering both queer reproduction and the sexual and racial differences with which it inevitably engages can instead be understood as somatechnical, as kinship technologies that are inevitably entangled in the biopolitics of (queer) nation-making and its natrualised whiteness.

At the Mountains of Monstrosity: Towards Ecomonstrous Entanglements through Images of a Fjord

Twenty-first century developments in ecophilosophy argue for a growing awareness that nonhumans (‘organic’ or otherwise) possess both vibrant agency and dark interiority and, therefore, humans – even environmentally conscious ones – must relinquish their presumed centrality and apartness from other things (anthropocentrism). Standard motivations for environmental responsibility, such as appeals to the crisis of human-caused global warming, are here postponed in order to seek means of allowing nonhuman agency and interiority to ‘speak’ or make itself felt. The article claims mountains themselves initiated this human-nonhuman entanglement and tries to follow their lead into reconfigured (non-anthropocentric) visions of coexistence. Its many-appendaged ecopoetics is comprised of photographs and recollections of mountains stitched together with the conceptual tools of monster theory, object-oriented ontology, and vital materialism. Viewed through this theoretical nexus, a hole in a photograph of the Lysefjord provokes the suggestion that holes in ontology are perforations through which human being seeps into nonhuman being and is therein transfigured, emerging porous and suffused, as much ‘the environment’ as anything else. The article’s necessary provisionality means further engagement – especially from other ‘witnesses’ of mountains – is required to test its effectiveness as an aesthetic-contemplative preface to deeper, wiser ecological ethics.

Text and Terror: Monster Theory and the Hebrew Bible

While biblical scholars have long been interested in the monsters of the Hebrew Bible, it is only in the last several decades that theoretical approaches to monsters have made their way into biblical studies. Originating in the fields of psychoanalysis and anthropology, monster theory looks at the construction of various monsters, arguing that the way a culture creates its monsters reveals the anxieties held by that culture. This article will explore the uses of monster theory in recent works of biblical scholarship, demonstrating that monster theory has been used to read the figure of the monster as a representation of chaos, identify monstrous imagery as a rhetoric of trauma, and explore how the boundaries between the monster and the self are shifting and unstable.

‘Time to ride the monster train’: multiplicity, the Midnighter and the threat to hegemonic superhero masculinity

ABSTRACTThis article is concerned with how and why a figure such as DC’s Midnighter might be able both to enact the current discourse of ideal masculinity and humanity in comic books, and to usurp that discourse in order to generate new understandings which grapple with the ever-imminent realities of posthuman cyborg bodies and openly lived LGBTQIA+ experiences in a way that does not merely dismiss them as subhuman. It utilises posthumanism, monster theory, queer theory, feminist criticism, and ‘body’ theory in an analysis of the Midnighter in his New 52 run under DC, in order to take a critical look at the multiplicity of the Midnighter’s identity to identify what makes him into such ‘a rare and violent snowflake’, and to demonstrate humanity’s embedded monstrosity.

"Who Killed the World?": Monstrous Masculinity and Mad Max

In a futuristic, dystopian Australia, Max Rockatansky is a lone warrior struggling against the forces that have ripped his family, and society as a whole, to shreds. From rogue motorcycle gangs to violencebased legal systems, the Mad Max films depict a world in which the most toxic aspects of masculinity have poisoned society, mutating into something far more dangerous — something monstrous. The series presents a version of monstrosity that has sunk its claws into the very masculinity it usually serves to validate; in light of these subversions, this analysis utilizes monster theory in conjunction with gender studies to examine toxic masculinity in the Mad Max franchise

Monstrous Women: Exploring Historical Witchcraft and It's Presence in The Witch

Accusations of witchcraft in America were often death sentences for women that society considered as acting outside of the norm; however, in Robert Eggers’s film, The Witch, embodying the role of a witch becomes a powerful tool in fighting Puritanical social expectations with magic, appearance, and behavior. Through the application of monster theory, historical contextualization, and feminist theory, this essay explores the implications of portraying the film’s main villain as a grotesque hag, the meaning behind its use of gory magic, why the protagonist chooses to become a witch herself, and finally, the consequences of othering marginalized groups from society.

Monster or great fish? Peter Benchley's Jaws as ecocritical text

ABSTRACTThis article considers the bestselling novel, Jaws, as a text that reflects a range of attitudes towards the environment and provides points of debate regarding the manner in which human beings conceptualise their environment and the relationship humans have with the environment. In addressing this popular text the article explores several elements of ecocritical theory through reference to the work of Greg Garrard, Cheryll Glotfelty, Timothy Clark, and Terry Gifford. The article also makes reference to J. J. Cohen’s monster theory as an analytical tool in addressing the novel. In addition, the author locates the novel in an historical perspective by examining the relationship that exists between humans and the ocean, particularly sharks, through reference to the work of Michael Capuzzo and Juliet Eilperin.