Monstrous Characters Research Articles

Missing a Horse: Richard and White Surrey

begin with the Globe Theatre's Facebook page on February 4, 2013, the day of the press release from the University of Leicester announcing the discovery of Richard Ill's body: Our neighbours Southwark Cathedral have a beautiful stained glass window depicting the death of Richard III. Next time you are on your way to us stop off and have a look. Providing a link to the Cathedral's own website, they shared this image, part of Christopher Webb's Shakespeare Window, unveiled in 1954 as a replacement for the war-damaged memorial window, originally installed in 1897: is the Cathedral's version of the death of #RichardIII, which is shown in our Shakespeare Window. Come and see it for yourself. (1) A typical online chat followed, by turns banal and witty: Where's the car park?; cathedral has a lot of interesting and beautiful memorials--worth the trip; I thought he was a horse when he was slain? This last comment gives me the starting point for the argument in this essay: the thing everyone knows about Richard III is that when he died he was missing a 5.7 Alarum, excursions. Enter CATESBY Catesby: Rescue, my lord of Norfolk! Rescue, rescue! The King enacts more wonders than a man, Daring an opposite to every danger. His horse is slain, and all on foot he fights, Seeking for Richmond in the throat of death. Rescue, fair lord, or else the day is lost! Enter [KING] RICHARD. King Richard: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! Catesby: Withdraw, my lord. I'll help you to a horse. King Richard: Slave, have set my life upon a cast, And will stand the hazard of the die. think there be six Richmonds in the field. Five have slain today, instead of him. A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse! [Exeunt]. (2) As Catesby makes clear, however, Richard is not just missing a horse: he's his horse, White Surrey, to whom we are introduced at 5.3.62 in the immediate run-up to the battle (Saddle white Surrey for the field tomorrow [5.5.17]), and who continues to hold his place in the events that follow, up to this point, where we learn of his death. In this essay, want to consider the implications of the fact that Richard's death is so closely associated with this animal. How is the curious fact that we are sympathetic to this notoriously monstrous character tied to his relationship to White Surrey? [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] It may seem an unnecessary question. Surely, since horses were a pervasive feature of everyday life in the society of which Shakespeare's theatre was also a part, we should not be surprised that they make their presence felt in his plays, albeit only in a (necessarily) offstage capacity. But White Surrey is a member of a very elite group of Shakespearian horses: named horses; a fact, as have argued elsewhere, that demonstrates a significant nexus between the defining values of the action and those of the worlds in which their respective plays are embedded, either at the point of writing, or in successive contexts of production. (3) Commissioned in 1952 in the aftermath of World War II, Webb's window is a particularly interesting context of production. It brings together the visual cultures of the stained-glass window, medieval and Renaissance painting, and London's Shakespearian theatrical community, (4) all combined in Webb's own highly personal vision of the possibilities of his medium. (5) [FIGURE 2 OMITTED] [FIGURE 3 OMITTED] The Richard III image is part of a triplet presenting characters from Shakespeare's plays. Prospero is in the middle; Richard and White Surrey are on the upper right. The window is positioned above a statue of Shakespeare, installed in 1912 as a complementary feature of the original memorial. While our immediate response to this statue might be to see it as some kind of funerary monument, closer inspection reveals that the niche framing it includes images of Stratford, the Globe Theatre, and Shakespeare's contemporary London. …

City of Clowns

After all, the corpses, the man bound to the pole, no longer can. Alison Mandaville California State University, Fresno Daniel Alarcón. City of Clowns. Illus. Sheila Alvarado. New York. Riverhead Books. 2015. 138 pages. Spotlighted already in 2010 as one of the New Yorker’s “20 under 40,” Peru-born and Alabama-raised Daniel Alarcón pounds out fiction with the laser-like acuity of an investigative journalist and with an eye and ear for capturing the kinesis of consciousness of all walks of life in the Latin Americas. We get this and more with the publication of his short story “City of Clowns” as a graphic novel. (The story first appeared in the New Yorker in 2003 and later appeared in his collection War By Candelight in 2005.) Alarcón’s subtle yet penetrating prose coupled with the exquisite artistic talent of Peruvian Sheila Alvarado immerse us in the dangerous deep end of a contemporary Lima, Peru, laden with economic and political misery. As is characteristic of Alarcón’s southof -the-border set fiction, he, along with Alvarado’s black-and-white renderings, firmly plants us in the thoughts, feelings, and actions of an ordinary protagonist, Oscar “Chico” Uribe. His father, Don Hugo, is a handyman—and womanizer: Lima was “the place where he could become the person he’d always imagined himself to be. . . . To drink and smoke, to fight, fuck, and steal.” His mother’s nostalgia for a life lived in the countryside and nonstop work as a maid to los ricos blind her to the father’s ways. As the story unfolds, we learn that it’s not so much superheroic accomplishments that Alarcón and Alvarado are interested in conveying but rather Chico’s constant struggle to not slip into his father’s ways as thief and womanizer; in a remarkable turn of events, one of the mother’s rich clients, the Azcárte family, offers Chico a scholarship that opens doors for him to earn a living with his brain and words as a journalist. But this is not what interests Alvarado and Alarcón. Rather, the visual and verbal narrative combine to show his slide into patterns of behavior he so abhors in his father. Indeed, even though he earns a good living as a journalist, he teams up with a band of marauding clowns to plunder purses and wallets of workers riding city buses. As a clown, Chico enjoys his anonymity—as one of the “ghosts in the multitude.” He quickly finds solace among those who seek out dangerous thrills. Alvarado’s detailed illustrations intensify Chico’s rapid swirl toward the vortex of the inevitable: the repetition of his largely absent and now-deceased father’s rapscallion ways. Her fine art, detailed black-andwhite visuals, move us seamlessly between Chico’s experiences in the present and past. The fluid artistic layout (as opposed to a rigid comic-book panel grid) beautifully allows for an ebb-and-flow narrative movement that slows, pauses, and speeds our experience of Chico in a bustling Lima. Her precise use of light, dark, and shadows makes the representation of the city of Lima so strong that the megalopolis itself becomes a kind of monstrous character. The art illuminates the text, creating an artprose chiasmatic interchange that ultimately conveys Chico’s deep loneliness, within a space filled to the brim with life that teeters at the edge of a precipice threatening a vertiginous drop into nothingness. Frederick Aldama Ohio State University Antonio Altarriba. The Art of Flying. Illus. Kim. Trans. Adrian West. London. Jonathan Cape. 2015. 207 pages. Antonio Altarriba’s The Art of Flying splays open the Spanish civil war, and subsequent World War II, through the experience of the author’s father, Antonio. This graphic biography hails from the generation defined by war heroics, and one reads with the expectation of redemption. However, with the father’s suicide framing the narrative, and each chapter of his life noted with a passing floor as he falls, the reader is left to navigate a life of despair. Altarriba says, “It took my father ninety years to fall from the fifth floor.” The Art of Flying is...

Between play and the quotidian: inscriptions of monstrous characters on the racialised bodies of children

Despite critiques pointing out that racism has become normalised in early childhood settings, relatively little attention has been paid in such contexts to the everyday practices in which racial inequities are made. In seeking to interrogate the ways in which racism roosts in the routine, this article interrogates quotidian responses to children’s playful activity, drawing on data generated in an ethnographic study in a London-based nursery. The article argues that the imaginative characters players embody become ‘fixed’ on particular children – when these characters coincide with reified assumptions about the raced, classed, and gendered body – whilst serving as mobile resources for others. Such reification, which is a concentration of complex historic and contemporary social relations in the political economy, is not only harmful and unjust but limits understandings of racialisation and inequity.

Problems of Presentation and Typology of Demonic and Monstrous Characters in Animation (for the beginning see Issue #19)

The paper (for the beginning see Issue # 19) treats problems of demonic and monstrous as exemplified by animation works. The forms of their demonstration in animation are defined and the reasons, contributing to change of attitude towards demonic and monstrous characters, are emphasized. The classification of animated demonic and monstrous characters, based on their functions, origin, localization and type of hybridity, is provided.

On representation and typology of the demoniac and monstrous characters

Currently discourse of the monstrous and demonological has been intensified. These phenomena are gaining new understanding due to the processes occurring in the post-secularitanian society undergoing a succession of critical shocks. The interest in the demonic and monstrous as the manifestation of the desire tends to form a new point of view on the anthropology and man's place in the new reference frame. The judgments about the demonic and monstrous allowed creating representation of the correct, normative, standard, and normal. Hereafter the definition of the demonic and monstrous characters is presented as well as differentiation between the concepts of the demonic and monstrous is drawn through analysis of etymology of the words "demon" and "monster" and their connotations in different languages. Particular attention is drawn to the changes in the concepts of demonological and monstrous in cultural traditions and historical perspective on the basis of analysis of the ancient Greek literature, pre-Christian mythological and biblical texts, philosophical treatises and works by Plato, Thales, Socrates, Hesiod, Homer, Aristotle, Cicero, Pliny, Ctesias of Cnidus, St. Augustine, Vl. Solovyov, Av. Fr. Pott, A.F. Losev, G. Umberto Eco, Derrida, Sl. Zizek. The analysis revealed the differences in relation to the monstrous and demonic. If the idea of the demonic has evolved from the divine to the sinister, and has completely lost the binary of the semantic opposition up to now, the monstrous continues to show the duality of its nature. As a result the monstrosity is associated with limitary existence between the normal and abnormal, possible and admissible, esthetic and ugly, ethical and immoral, represented and unimaginable. If the demonic is the manifestation of the supernatural and demonstration of the Other, the monstrous as exiting outside the scope of the ordinary and habitual, represents the image of the Other. Both the supernatural of the demonic and the marginality of the monstrous ground concatenation, furnishing the images with the phantasmic. If the demonic appears as the distortion of the divine, the monstrous is the distortion of the human. The hybridous or synthetic character of the forms and qualities is the feature common to both the demoniac and monstrous images.

La violencia en los libros de pastores

It is generally believed that the entire body of pastoral novels is characterized by idyllic scenery of harmony and peace. However, this is not always the case. Some of the texts that have reached the modern reader bear various manifestations of violence, which can take the form of self-aggression (i.e. suicide), aggression towards others (i.e. murder) or of descriptions of aggressive nature depicting monstrous characters and wild beasts. It is the analysis of such episodes that is the purpose of this article.

Tragedy: A Lesson in Survival

ion and obscurity. To many, Hegel relied too heavily on Antigone as the foundation of his idea of tragedy. Although I cannot present here sufficient argument and evidence for either position, for my purposes it is sufficient to note that for Hegel tragedy in some essential sense emanates from the family. As far as I know, there is no disputing this. And, as I shall argue, in spite of Hegel’s shortcomings, the centrality of the family to tragedy is of great importance. If Hegel is an idealist and optimist with respect to tragedy and life itself, surely Schopenhauer is the very opposite. Schopenhauer’s pessimism is well known in the history of philosophy. It is also relatively well known that Schopenhauer places music at the very peak of the hierarchy of artistic expression. He says that music stands apart from all the other arts. It is “entirely a universal language,” and it speaks immediately “to the innermost being of the world and of our self.”9 Directly below music in the hierarchy of the arts is tragedy. It is the highest expression of the poetic arts, as Schopenhauer says, with respect to both “effect and the difficulty of achievement.”10 However, most important to understanding tragedy is the fact it is “the description of the terrible side of life. The unspeakable pain, the wretchedness and misery of mankind, the triumph of wickedness, the scornful mastery of chance, and the irretrievable fall of the just and the innocent are all here presented to us; and here is to be found a significant hint as to the nature of the world and of existence.”11 Like Hegel, Schopenhauer’s discussion of tragedy is steeped in metaphysics and in a morality of cosmic proportions. Schopenhauer says that the tragic hero doesn’t merely atone for his own sins—he atones for original sin, “for the guilt of existence itself.”12 Furthermore, Schopenhauer emphasizes, “great misfortune is alone essential to tragedy.”13 And that tragedy reveals that “the greatest misfortune (is not) an exception, not . . . something brought about by rare circumstances or by monstrous characters, but (is) something that arises easily and spontaneously out of the actions and characters of men, as something almost essential to them, and in this way it is brought terribly near to us.”14 Finally, for Nietzsche, tragedy is the marriage of Apollo and Dionysos, the marriage of the visual, plastic arts and the nonvisual art of music. Apollo represents the dream side of the marriage, the side of “fair illusion.” Through Apollo “we enjoy an immediate apprehension of form, all shapes speak to us directly, nothing seems indifferent or redundant.”15 Apollo is also the “lucent one,” the “soothsayer.” He makes life possible and worth living: “Apollo may be regarded as the marvelous divine image of the principium individuationis whose looks and gestures radiate the full delight, This content downloaded from 157.55.39.59 on Mon, 17 Oct 2016 04:37:19 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

“A pattern, precedent, and lively warrant”: Emulation, Rhetoric, and Cruel Propriety inTitus Andronicus

Shakespeare's "Titus Andronicus" critically engages and enacts teachings and patterns of emulation, including those of Quintilian, Roger Ascham, and other contemporary humanists and playwrights, pressing emulation's uses to extremes that suggest that imitative self-fashioning potentially results in monstrous or fragmented characters, decisions, and texts. The professed aim of the grammer-school education, the ability to judge well, is conflicted by "Titus's" exposure of judgment as itself a contested concept, locked within a circularity of intertextual precedents. "Titus's" excessive, even parodic, repetition of emulative strategies acts as a rebuttal of seemingly straightforward humanist models of character, judgment, self, and decorum.

Wittgenstein, Lao Tzu and Chuang Tzu: The Art of Circumlocution

Where Western philosophy ends, with the limits of language, marks the beginning of Eastern philosophy. The Tao de jing of Laozi begins with the limitations of language and then proceeds from that as a starting point. On the other hand, the limitation of language marks the end of Wittgenstein's cogitations. In contrast to Wittgenstein, who thought that one should remain silent about that which cannot be put into words, the message of the Zhuangzi is that one can speak about that which cannot put into words but the speech will be strange and indirect. Through the focus on the monstrous character, No-Lips in the Zhuangzi, this paper argues that a key message of the Zhuangzi is that the art of transcending language in the Zhuangzi is through the use of crippled speech. The metaphor of crippled speech, speech which is actually unheard, illustrates that philosophical truths cannot be put into words but can be indirectly signified through the art of stretching language beyond its normal contours. This allows Eastern philosophy, through the philosophy of the Zhuangzi to transcend the limits of language.

The third shadow and hybrid genres: horror, humor, gender, and race in Alien Resurrection

Alien Resurrection (1997) heightens the movements across dark humor and horror, and enables more pronounced and complex conjunctions across the three types of shadows put forward by Rushing/Frentz and Picart, particularly in the case of the monstrous female characters like Ripley and Call. These characters bisociate the realms of first shadow (female bodies), second shadow (products of technology), and third shadow (fearsome female freedom fighters). Nevertheless, both live—a rarity among Frankensteinian cinemyths. Alien Resurrection enables us to glimpse, through a glass darkly, other ways in which the gendered and raced complexities of the Frankenstein cinematic myth may be traced.

The Total Synthesis of Brevetoxin B: A Twelve‐Year Odyssey in Organic Synthesis

AbstractThe total synthesis of brevetoxin B has been achieved recently after a long search for a suitable pathway. This twelve‐year odysseyThe Odyssey of Homer, translated by R. Lattimore, Harper Perenial, New York, 1975. Homer's Odyssey, one of the western world's first two poems (the Iliad is the other), is the tale of the adventures, wanderings, and exploits of Odysseus, a Greek hero of the Trojan war, as he attempts to reach Ithaca, his home island where his wife Penelope awaits him. During his journey Odysseus has an incredible series of adventures and setbacks caused by the anger of the god Poseidon, whose son Odysseus had blinded. Finally, assisted by his patroness, the goddess Athene, Odysseus returns home to Ithaca to find and punish the suitors, evil men who tried to win his wife's hand and who squandered his wealth and corrupted his servants while he was away. Telemachus, Odysseus' son, who had his own share of adventures while growing up, facing the suitors and, looking for his father, joins him in glory and wisdom as they reestablish their throne on Ithaca. Besides Odysseus, other main characters of Odyssey are as follows:Telemachus: The son of Odysseus, who is just entering manhood, is highly conscious of his duties as a prince successor to the throne and protector of his mother as well as the need to live up to his father's reputation as a hero. His actions waver between the immature and the well‐thought over as he searches for the truth about his father and desperately appeals to others for help. It is not until towards the end of the story that he exhibits great courage, skills, and confidence and one feels that he is, indeed, the son of Odysseus.Athene: She is the daughter of Zeus, goddess of wisdom, and patroness of arts and crafts. Odysseus is her favorite and protegé and she is his heroine, even though she is a goddess. She plays a leading role in all important events in the narrative, and her spirit and power always influence and assist Odysseus and Telemachus in their difficult moments. A friend and a confidant to Odysseus, she enjoys winning him over and her relationship with him, while the hero adores her and finds special comfort, companionship, and understanding in her.Poseidon: Younger brother to Zeus, god of the sea and of earthquakes, father of Polyphenus the one‐eyed Cyclops whom Odysseus blinds. As a ruler of the sea and natural phenomena, Poseidon is able to place many obstacles in front of Odysseus, whom he despises. Poseidon, however, is unable to hold out against the combined pressure of the other gods, particularly Athene, of whom Odysseus is a favorite, and so eventually relents, but not before he repeatedly unleashes his anger.The Cyclops, Scylla, and The Sirens: Some of the superhuman and monstrous characters of the tale who inflicted tremendous tortures and blows at Odysseus and his men, before he finally overcame them.The Suitors: The evil noblemen of Ithaca who attempt to undermine Odysseus, win the hand of his queen, Penelope, and corrupt his palace servants. They succeed partly, wasting away a great deal of Odysseus fortune, but he eventually prevails and punishes them.Ithaca: The island kingdom of Odysseus, most likely located somewhere off the western coast of Greece and the destination of the hero in this adventure. It is interesting to compare places, events, and characters from the Odyssey to those of modern‐day total synthesis, an excercise left to the imagination of the reader! in synthetic organic chemistry was marked by several strategic and tactical routes, and resulted in numerous new synthetic methods. This article is a behind‐thescenes account of the total synthesis of brevetoxin B, from its origins at the University of Pennsylvania to its completion at the University of California, San Diego, and The Scripps Research Institute, La Jolla, California.

Death of Love/Love of Death: Leslie Marmon Silko's Almanac of the Dead

Leslie Marmon Silko's second novel, Almanac of the Dead, portrays a nightmarish wasteland of violence, bestiality, cruelty, and crime. Deformed by grotesque familial relationships and debauched by sexual perversion, its characters are incapable of love. Even more chillingly, they seem-except for a few enraged revolutionaries-incapable even of hatred. Almanac reveals an utterly amoral and atomized society in which each isolated member is indifferent to everything but the gratifications of his own enervated passions. He is connected to nothing: all existence outside himself is reduced to a stock of commodities for which he must compete. There is cause to use the masculine pronoun here: Silko's focus of attack is explicitly the misogynistic, arrogantly hierarchical, and egocentric traditions of Western liberal individualism. The rejection and subsequent disintegration of communal tradition and ethical discipline have left a rutting ground for witchery. Silko's monstrous characters demonstrate that the philosophy of the primacy of the individual has in fact stripped individuals of the social and spiritual structures that define their humanity. Redemption depends upon reclamation of what seems irretrievably lost: a credible telos for ordered conduct and the essential interconnections that lend substance and coherence to such conduct.