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Should I pay a subscription fee to always have free shipping? No, you will enjoy unlimited free shipping whenever you meet the above order value threshold. Paperback Language of Text: And so I would like to make some grand gestures. We live in an age that has rightly given up on Unified Theory, an age when we realize that history like "individuality," "subjectivity," "gender," and "culture" is composed of a multitude of fragments, rather than of smooth epistemological wholes.
Some fragments will be collected here and bound temporarily together to form a loosely integrated net—or, better, an unassimilated hybrid, a monstrous body. Rather than argue a "theory of 3 4 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen teratology," I offer by way of introduction to the essays that follow a set of breakable postulates in search of specific cultural moments. I offer seven theses toward understanding cultures through the monsters they bear.
Drive a stake through its heart: Behead the corpse, so that, acephalic, it will not know itself as subject, only as pure body. The monster is born only at this metaphoric crossroads, as an embodiment of a certain cultural moment—of a time, a feeling, and a place. The monstrous body is pure culture. A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: Like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself: These epistemological spaces between the monster's bones are Derrida's familiar chasm of differance: The Monster Always Escapes We see the damage that the monster wreaks, the material remains the footprints of the yeti across Tibetan snow, the bones of the giant stranded on a rocky cliff , but the monster itself turns immaterial and vanishes, to reappear someplace else for who is the yeti if not the medieval wild man?
Who is the wild man if not the biblical and classical giant? No matter how many times King Arthur killed the ogre of Mount Saint Michael, the monster reappeared in another heroic chronicle, bequeathing the Middle Ages an abundance of morte d'Arthurs. Regardless of how many times Sigourney Weaver's beleaguered Ripley utterly destroys the Monster Culture Seven Theses 5 ambiguous Alien that stalks her, its monstrous progeny return, ready to stalk again in another bigger-than-ever sequel.
No monster tastes of death but once. The anxiety that condenses like green vapor into the form of the vampire can be dispersed temporarily, but the revenant by definition returns.
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And so the monster's body is both corporal and incorporeal; its threat is its propensity to shift. Monsters must be examined within the intricate matrix of relations social, cultural, and literary-historical that generate them. In speaking of the new kind of vampire invented by Bram Stoker, we might explore the foreign count's transgressive but compelling sexuality, as subtly alluring to Jonathan Harker as Henry Irving, Stoker's mentor, was to Stoker.
Anne Rice has given the myth a modern rewriting in which homosexuality and vampirism have been conjoined, apotheosized; that she has created a pop culture phenomenon in the process is not insignificant, especially at a time when gender as a construct has been scrutinized at almost every social register. In Francis Coppola's recent blockbuster, Bram Stoker's Dracula, the homosexual subtext present at least since the appearance of Sheridan Le Fanu's lesbian lamia Carmilla, has, like the red corpuscles that serve as the film's leitmotif, risen to the surface, primarily as an AIDS awareness that transforms the disease of vampirism into a sadistic and very medieval form of redemption through the torments of the body in pain.
No coincidence, then, that Coppola was putting together a documentary on AIDS at the same time he was working on Dracula. In each of these vampire stories, the undead returns in slightly different clothing, each time to be read against contemporary social movements or a specific, determining event: It is a Linnean nightmare, defying every natural law of evolution; by turns bivalve, crustacean, reptilian, and humanoid.
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It seems capable of lying dormant within its egg indefinitely. It sheds its skin like a snake, its carapace like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It responds according to Lamarckian and Darwinian principles. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions.
Because of its ontological liminality, the monster notoriously appears at times of crisis as a kind of third term that problematizes the clash of extremes—as "that which questions binary thinking and introduces a crisis. The tooprecise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in Monster Culture Seven Theses 7 the freakish compilation of the monster's body.
A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a "system" allowing polyphony, mixed response difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction , and resistance to integration—allowing what Hogle has called with a wonderful pun "a deeper play of differences, a nonbinary polymorphism at the 'base' of human nature. The monster is in this way the living embodiment of the phenomenon Derrida has famously labeled the "supplement" ce dangereux supplement: The Monster Dwells at the Gates of Difference The monster is difference made flesh, come to dwell among us.
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In its function as dialectical Other or third-term supplement, the monster is an incorporation of the Outside, the Beyond—of all those loci that are rhetorically placed as distant and distinct but originate Within. Any kind of alterity can be inscribed across constructed through the monstrous body, but for the most part monstrous difference tends to be cultural, political, racial, economic, sexual. The exaggeration of cultural difference into monstrous aberration is familiar enough.
The most famous distortion occurs in the Bible, where the aboriginal inhabitants of Canaan are envisioned as menacing giants to justify the Hebrew colonization of the Promised Land Numbers Representing an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement 8 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen or extermination by rendering the act heroic. In medieval France the chansons de geste celebrated the crusades by transforming Muslims into demonic caricatures whose menacing lack of humanity was readable from their bestial attributes; by culturally glossing "Saracens" as "monstra," propagandists rendered rhetorically admissible the annexation of the East by the West.
This representational project was part of a whole dictionary of strategic glosses in which "monstra" slipped into significations of the feminine and the hypermasculine. A recent newspaper article on Yugoslavia reminds us how persistent these divisive mythologies can be, and how they can endure divorced from any grounding in historical reality: A Bosnian Serb militiaman, hitchhiking to Sarajevo, tells a reporter in all earnestness that the Muslims are feeding Serbian children to the animals in the zoo.
The story is nonsense. There aren't any animals left alive in the Sarajevo zoo. But the militiaman is convinced and can recall all the wrongs that Muslims may or may not have perpetrated during their years of rule. Scattered throughout Europe by the Diaspora and steadfastly refusing assimilation into Christian society, Jews have been perennial favorites for xenophobic misrepresentation, for here was an alien culture living, working, and even at times prospering within vast communities dedicated to becoming homogeneous and monolithic.
The Middle Ages accused the Jews of crimes ranging from the bringing of the plague to bleeding Christian children to make their Passover meal. Nazi Germany simply brought these ancient traditions of hate to their conclusion, inventing a Final Solution that differed from earlier persecutions only in its technological efficiency. Political or ideological difference is as much a catalyst to monstrous representation on a micro level as cultural alterity in the macrocosm. A political figure suddenly out of favor is transformed like an unwilling participant in a science experiment by the appointed historians of the replacement regime: The most illustrious of these propaganda-bred demons is the English king Richard III, whom Thomas More famously described as "little of stature, ill fetured Monster Culture Seven Theses 9 of limmes, croke backed, his left shoulder much higher then his right, hard fauoured of visage.
The almost obsessive descanting on Richard from Polydor Vergil in the Renaissance to the Friends of Richard III Incorporated in our own era demonstrates the process of "monster theory" at its most active: At the same time Richard moves between Monster and Man, the disturbing suggestion arises that this incoherent body, denaturalized and always in peril of disaggregation, may well be our own. The difficult project of constructing and maintaining gender identities elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to teratogenesis.
The woman who oversteps the boundaries of her gender role risks becoming a Scylla, Weird Sister, Lilith "die erste Eva," "la mere obscure" ,17 Bertha Mason, or Gorgon. The great medieval encyclopedist Vincent of Beauvais describes the visit of a hermaphroditic cynocephalus to the French court in his Speculum naturale Bruno Roy writes of this fantastic hybrid: He came to bear witness to sexual norms He embodied the punishment earned by those who violate sexual taboos.
Africa early became the West's significant other, the sign of its ontological difference simply being skin color. According to the Greek myth of Phaeton, the denizens of mysterious and uncertain Ethiopia were black because they had been scorched by the too-close passing of the sun. The Roman naturalist Pliny assumed nonwhite skin to be symptomatic of a complete difference in temperament and attributed Africa's darkness to climate; the intense heat, he said, had burned the Africans' skin and malformed their bodies Natural History, 2. These differences were quickly moralized through a pervasive rhetoric of deviance.
Paulinus of Nola, a wealthy landowner turned early church homilist, explained that the Ethiopians had been scorched by sin and vice rather than by the sun, and the anonymous commentator to Theodulus's influential Ecloga tenth century succinctly glossed the meaning of the word Ethyopium: Indeed, sinners can rightly be compared to Ethiopians, who are black men presenting a terrifying appearance to those beholding them. The perverse and exaggerated sexual appetite of monsters generally was quickly affixed to the Ethiopian; this linking was only strengthened by a xenophobic backlash as dark-skinned people were forcibly imported into Europe early in the Renaissance.
Narratives of miscegenation arose and circulated to sanction official policies of exclusion; Queen Elizabeth is famous for her anxiety over "blackamoores" and their supposed threat to the "increase of people of our own nation. To complicate this category confusion further, one kind of alterity is often written as another, so that national difference for example is transformed into sexual difference.
Giraldus Cambrensis demonstrates just this slippage of the foreign in his Topography of Ireland; when he writes of the Irish ostensibly simply to provide information about them to a curious English court, but actually as a first step toward invading and colonizing the island , he observes: It is indeed a most filthy race, a race sunk in vice, a race more ignorant than all other nations of the first principles of faith These people who have customs so different from others, and so opposite to them, on making signs either with the hands or the head, beckon when they mean that Monster Culture Seven Theses 11 you should go away, and nod backwards as often as they wish to be rid of you.
Likewise, in this nation, the men pass their water sitting, the women like an arthropod. It deposits its young into other species like a wasp It legs stuck out on each side of the horse.
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Giraldus creates a vision of monstrous gender aberrant, demonstrative: A bloody war of subjugation followed immediately after the promulgation of this text, remained potent throughout the High Middle Ages, and in a way continues to this day. Through a similar discursive process the East becomes feminized Said and the soul of Africa grows dark Gates. A polysemy is granted so that a greater threat can be encoded; multiplicity of meanings, paradoxically, iterates the same restricting, agitprop representations that narrowed signification performs.
Yet a danger resides in this multiplication: Rene Girard has written at great length about the real violence these debasing representations enact, connecting monsterizing depiction with the phenomenon of the scapegoat. Monsters are never created ex nihilo, but through a process of fragmentation and recombination in which elements are extracted "from various forms" including—indeed, especially—marginalized social groups and then assembled as the monster, "which can then claim an independent identity.
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Despite what is said around us persecutors are never obsessed with difference but rather by its unutterable contrary, the lack of difference. Because it is a body across which difference has been repeatedly written, the monster like Frankenstein's creature, that combination of odd somatic pieces stitched together from a community of cadavers seeks out its author to demand its raison d'etre—and to bear witness to the fact that it could have been constructed Otherwise.
Godzilla trampled Tokyo; Girard frees him here to fragment the delicate matrix of relational systems that unite every private body to the public world. The Monster Polices the Borders of the Possible The monster resists capture in the epistemological nets of the erudite, but it is something more than a Bakhtinian ally of the popular.
From its position at the limits of knowing, the monster stands as a warning against exploration of its uncertain demesnes. The giants of Patagonia, the dragons of the Orient, and the dinosaurs of Jurassic Park together declare that curiosity is more often punished than rewarded, that one is better off safely contained within one's own domestic sphere than abroad, away from the watchful eyes of the state.
The monster prevents mobility intellectual, geographic, or sexual , delimiting the social spaces through which private bodies may move. To step outside this official geography is to risk attack by some monstrous border patrol or worse to become monstrous oneself. Lycaon, the first werewolf in Western literature, undergoes his lupine metamorphosis as the culmination of a fable of hospitality. From their scattered blood arose a race of men who continued their fathers' malignant ways. When Jupiter arrived as a guest at his house, Monster Culture Seven Theses 13 Lycaon tried to kill the ruler of the gods as he slept, and the next day served him pieces of a servant's body as a meal.
The enraged Jupiter punished this violation of the host-guest relationship by transforming Lycaon into a monstrous semblance of that lawless, godless state to which his actions would drag humanity back: The king himself flies in terror and, gaining the fields, howls aloud, attempting in vain to speak. His mouth of itself gathers foam, and with his accustomed greed for blood he turns against the sheep, delighting still in slaughter. His garments change to shaggy hair, his arms to legs. He turns into a wolf, and yet retains some traces of his former shape.
The power of the narrative prohibition peaks in the lingering description of the monstrously composite Lycaon, at that median where he is both man and beast, dual natures in a helpless tumult of assertion. The fable concludes when Lycaon can no longer speak, only signify. Whereas monsters born of political expedience and self-justifying nationalism function as living invitations to action, usually military invasions, usurpations, colonizations , the monster of prohibition polices the borders of the possible, interdicting through its grotesque body some behaviors and actions, envaluing others.
It is possible, for example, that medieval merchants intentionally disseminated maps depicting sea serpents like Leviathan at the edges of their trade routes in order to discourage further exploration and to establish monopolies. The monster of prohibition exists to demarcate the bonds that hold together that system of relations we call culture, to call horrid attention to the borders that cannot—must not— be crossed. Primarily these borders are in place to control the traffic in women, or more generally to establish strictly homosocial bonds, the ties between men that keep a patriarchal society functional.
A kind of herdsman, this monster delimits the social space through which cultural bodies may move, and in classical times for example validated a tight, hierarchical system of naturalized leadership and control where every man had a 14 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen functional place. The quintessential xenophobic rendition of the foreign the barbaric—that which is unintelligible within a given cultural-linguistic system ,33 the Cyclopes are represented as savages who have not "a law to bless them" and who lack the techne to produce Greek-style civilization.
Their archaism is conveyed through their lack of hierarchy and of a politics of precedent. This dissociation from community leads to a rugged individualism that in Homeric terms can only be horrifying. Because they live without a system of tradition and custom, the Cyclopes are a danger to the arriving Greeks, men whose identities are contingent upon a compartmentalized function within a deindividualizing system of subordination and control.
Polyphemos's victims are devoured, engulfed, made to vanish from the public gaze: The monster is a powerful ally of what Foucault calls "the society of the panopticon," in which "polymorphous conducts [are] actually extracted from people's bodies and from their pleasures The monster embodies those sexual practices that must not be committed, or that may be committed only through the body of the monster.
Anyone familiar with the low-budget science fiction movie craze of the will recognize in the preceding sentence two superb films of the genre, one about a radioactive virago from outer space who kills every man she touches, the other a social parable in which giant ants really, Communists burrow beneath Los Angeles that is, Hollywood and threaten world peace that is, American conservatism.
I connect these two seemingly unrelated titles here to call attention to the anxieties that monsterized their subjects in the first place, and to enact syntactically an even deeper fear: We have seen that the monster arises at the gap where difference is perceived as dividing a recording voice from its captured subject; the criterion of this division is arbitrary, and can range from anatomy or skin color to religious belief, custom, and political ideology.
The monster's destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: Given that the recorders of the history of the West have been mainly European and male, women She and nonwhites Them! As a vehicle of prohibition, the monster most often arises to enforce the laws of exogamy, both the incest taboo which establishes a traffic in women by mandating that they marry outside their families and the decrees against interracial sexual mingling which limit the parameters of that traffic by policing the boundaries of culture, usually in the service of some notion of group "purity". Miscegenation, that intersection of misogyny gender anxiety and racism no matter how naive , has received considerably less critical attention.
I will say a few words about it here. The Bible has long been the primary source for divine decrees against interracial mixing. One of these pronouncements is a straightforward command from God that comes through the mouth of the prophet Joshua Joshua The monsters are here, as elsewhere, expedient representations of other cultures, generalized and demonized to enforce a strict notion of group sameness.
The fears of contamination, impurity, and loss of identity that produce stories like the Genesis episode are strong, and they reappear incessantly. Shakespeare's Caliban, for example, is the product of such an illicit mingling, the "freckled whelp" of the Algerian witch Sycorax and the devil. Charlotte Bronte reversed the usual paradigm in Jane Eyre white Rochester and lunatic Jamaican Bertha Mason , but horror movies as seemingly innocent as King Kong demonstrate miscegenation anxiety in its brutal essence. Even a film as recent as 's immensely successful Alien may have a cognizance of the fear in its under workings: Among the flames we see the old women of Salem hanging, accused of sexual relations with the black devil; we suspect they died because they crossed a different border, one that prohibits women from managing property and living solitary, unmanaged lives.
The flames devour the Jews of thirteenth-century England, who stole children from proper families and baked seder matzo with their blood; as a menace to the survival of English race and culture, they were expelled from the country and their property confiscated. A competing narrative again implicates monstrous economics—the Jews were the money lenders, the state and its commerce were heavily indebted to them—but this second story is submerged in a horrifying fable of cultural purity and threat to Christian continuance.
As the American frontier expanded beneath the banner of Manifest Destiny in the nineteenth century, tales circulated about how "Indians" routinely kidnapped white women to furnish wives for themselves; the West was a place of danger waiting to be tamed into farms, its menacing native inhabitants fit only to be dispossessed. It matters little that the protagonist of Richard Wright's Native Son did not rape and butcher his employer's daughter; that narrative is supplied by the police, by an angry white society, indeed by Western history itself.
In the novel, as in life, the threat occurs when a nonwhite leaves the reserve abandoned to him; Wright envisions what happens when the horizon of narrative expectation is firmly set, and his conclusion born out in seventeenth-century Salem, medieval England, and nineteenth-century America is that the actual circumstances of history tend to vanish when a narrative of miscegenation can be supplied.
The monster is transgressive, too sexual, perversely erotic, a lawbreaker; and so the monster and all that it embodies must be exiled or destroyed. The repressed, however, like Freud himself, always seems to return. Fear of the Monster Is Really a Kind of Desire The monster is continually linked to forbidden practices, in order to normalize and to enforce.
The monster also attracts. The same creatures Monster Culture Seven Theses 17 who terrify and interdict can evoke potent escapist fantasies; the linking of monstrosity with the forbidden makes the monster all the more appealing as a temporary egress from constraint. This simultaneous repulsion and attraction at the core of the monster's composition accounts greatly for its continued cultural popularity, for the fact that the monster seldom can be contained in a simple, binary dialectic thesis, antithesis We distrust and loathe the monster at the same time we envy its freedom, and perhaps its sublime despair.
Through the body of the monster fantasies of aggression, domination, and inversion are allowed safe expression in a clearly delimited and permanently liminal space. Escapist delight gives way to horror only when the monster threatens to overstep these boundaries, to destroy or deconstruct the thin walls of category and culture. When contained by geographic, generic, or epistemic marginalization, the monster can function as an alter ego, as an alluring projection of an Other self.
The monster awakens one to the pleasures of the body, to the simple and fleeting joys of being frightened, or frightening—to the experience of mortality and corporality. We watch the monstrous spectacle of the horror film because we know that the cinema is a temporary place, that the jolting sensuousness of the celluloid images will be followed by reentry into the world of comfort and light. Aurally received narratives work no differently; no matter how unsettling the description of the giant, no matter how many unbaptized children and hapless knights he devours, King Arthur will ultimately destroy him.
The audience knows how the genre works. Times of carnival temporally marginalize the monstrous, but at the same time allow it a safe realm of expression and play: The same impulse to ataractic fantasy is behind much lavishly bizarre manuscript marginalia, from abstract scribblings at the edges of an ordered page to preposterous animals and vaguely humanoid creatures of strange anatomy that crowd a biblical text. Gargoyles and ornately sculpted grotesques, lurking at the crossbeams or upon the roof of the cathedral, likewise record the liberating fantasies of a bored or repressed hand suddenly freed to populate the 18 Jeffrey Jerome Cohen margins.
Maps and travel accounts inherited from antiquity invented whole geographies of the mind and peopled them with exotic and fantastic creatures; Ultima Thule, Ethiopia, and the Antipodes were the medieval equivalents of outer space and virtual reality, imaginary wholly verbal geographies accessible from anywhere, never meant to be discovered but always waiting to be explored.
Jacques Le Goff has written that the Indian Ocean a "mental horizon" imagined, in the Middle Ages, to be completely enclosed by land was a cultural space where taboos were eliminated or exchanged for others. The weirdness of this world produced an impression of liberation and freedom. The strict morality imposed by the Church was contrasted with the discomfiting attractiveness of a world of bizarre tastes, which practiced coprophagy and cannibalism; of bodily innocence, where man, freed of the modesty of clothing, rediscovered nudism and sexual freedom; and where, once rid of restrictive monogamy and family barriers, he could give himself over to polygamy, incest, and eroticism.
Their monsters serve as secondary bodies through which the possibilities of other genders, other sexual practices, and other social customs can be explored. Hermaphrodites, Amazons, and lascivious cannibals beckon from the edges of the world, the most distant planets of the galaxy. The co-optation of the monster into a symbol of the desirable is often accomplished through the neutralization of potentially threatening aspects with a liberal dose of comedy: What Bakhtin calls "official culture" can transfer all that is viewed as undesirable in itself into the body of the monster, performing a wish-fulfillment drama of its own; the scapegoated monster is perhaps ritually destroyed in the course of some official narrative, purging the community by eliminating its sins.
The monster's eradication functions as an exorcism and, when retold and promulgated, as a catechism. The monastically manufactured Queste del Saint Graal serves as an ecclesiastically sanctioned antidote to the looser morality of the secular romances; when Sir Bors comes across a castle where "ladies of high descent and rank" tempt him to sexual Monster Culture Seven Theses 19 indulgence, these ladies are, of course, demons in lascivious disguise.
When Bors refuses to sleep with one of these transcorporal devils described as "so lovely and so fair that it seemed all earthly beauty was embodied in her" , his steadfast assertion of control banishes them all shrieking back to hell. Seldom, however, are monsters as uncomplicated in their use and manufacture as the demons that haunt Sir Bors. Allegory may flatten a monster rather thin, as when the vivacious demon of the Anglo-Saxon hagiographic poem Juliana becomes the one-sided complainer of Cynewulf's Elene. More often, however, the monster retains a haunting complexity.
The dense symbolism that makes a thick description of the monsters in Spenser, Milton, and even Beowulf so challenging reminds us how permeable the monstrous body can be, how difficult to dissect. This corporal fluidity, this simultaneity of anxiety and desire, ensures that the monster will always dangerously entice. A certain intrigue is allowed even Vincent of Beauvais's well-endowed cynocephalus, for he occupies a textual space of allure before his necessary dismissal, during which he is granted an undeniable charm. The monstrous lurks somewhere in that ambiguous, primal space between fear and attraction, close to the heart of what Kristeva calls "abjection": There looms, within abjection, one of those violent, dark revolts of being, directed against a threat that seems to emanate from an exorbitant outside or inside, ejected beyond the scope of the possible, the tolerable, the thinkable.
It lies there, quite close, but it cannot be assimilated. It beseeches, worries, fascinates desire, which, nonetheless, does not let itself be seduced. Apprehensive, desire turns aside; sickened, it rejects— But simultaneously, just the same, that impetus, that spasm, that leap is drawn toward an elsewhere as tempting as it is condemned. Unflaggingly, like an inescapable boomerang, a vortex of summons and repulsion places the one haunted by it literally beside himself. The monster is the abjected fragment that e. A product of a multitude of morphogeneses ranging from somatic to ethnic that align themselves to imbue meaning to the Us and Them behind every cultural mode of seeing, the monster of abjection resides in that marginal geography of the Exterior, beyond the limits of the Thinkable, a place that is doubly dangerous: Perhaps it is time to ask the question that always arises when the monster is discussed seriously the inevitability of the question a symptom of the deep anxiety about what is and what should be thinkable, an anxiety that the process of monster theory is destined to raise: Do monsters really exist?
Surely they must, for if they did not, how could we? The Monster Stands at the Threshold.
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They can be pushed to the farthest margins of geography and discourse, hidden away at the edges of the world and in the forbidden recesses of our mind, but they always return. And when they come back, they bring not just a fuller knowledge of our place in history and the history of knowing our place, but they bear selfknowledge, human knowledge—and a discourse all the more sacred as it arises from the Outside. These monsters ask us how we perceive the world, and how we have misrepresented what we have attempted to place.
They ask us to reevaluate our cultural assumptions about race, gender, sexuality, our perception of difference, our tolerance toward its expression. They ask us why we have created them. Monster Culture Seven Theses 21 Notes 1. Literally, here, Zeitgeist Time Ghost, the bodiless spirit that uncannily incorporates a "place" that is a series of places, the crossroads that is a point in a movement toward an uncertain elsewhere. Bury the Zeitgeist by the crossroads: I realize that this is an interpretive biographical maneuver Barthes would surely have called "the living death of the author.
Folklore and Reality New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, Even in the ascription of the still landscape to the giant, it is the activities of the giant, his or her legendary actions, that have resulted in the observable trace. In contrast to the still and perfect universe of the miniature, the gigantic represents the order and disorder of historical forces.
Johns Hopkins University Press, Greenberg, "Reimaging the Gargoyle: Psychoanalytic Notes on Alien," in Close Encounters: Film, Feminism, and Science Fiction, ed. Marjorie Garber, Vested Interests: Routledge, , Garber writes at some length about "category crisis," which she defines as "a failure of definitional distinction, a borderline that becomes permeable, that permits of border crossings from one apparently distinct category to another: An analogy here might be the so-called 'tagged' gene that shows up in a genetic chain, indicating the presence of some otherwise hidden condition.
It is not the gene itself, but its presence, that marks the trouble spot, indicating the likelihood of a crisis somewhere, elsewhere" pp. Note, however, that whereas Garber insists that the transvestite must be read with rather than through, the monster can be read only through—for the monster, pure culture, is nothing of itself.
John Block Friedman has called these creatures the Plinian races, after the classical encyclopedist who bestowed them to the Middle Ages and early modern period. Harvard University Press, The discussion of the implication of the monstrous in the manufacture of heuristics is partially based upon my essay "The Limits of Knowing: Hogle, "The Struggle for a Dichotomy: Abjection in Jekyll and His Interpreters," in Dr.
Hyde after One Hundred Yean, ed. William Veeder and Gordon Hirsch Chicago: University of Chicago Press, , Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Baltimore: University of Chicago Press, , xiii. Sylvester New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, , 7. Marjorie Garber, Shakespeare's Ghost Writers: Literature as Uncanny Causality New York: My discussion of Richard is indebted to Marjorie Garber's provocative work. But a second portrait, possibly of earlier date, in the Royal Collection, seems to emblematize the whole controversy [over Richard 's supposed monstrosity], for in it, X-ray examination reveals an original straight shoulder line, which was subsequently painted over to present the raised right shoulder silhouette so often copied by later portraitists.
Payot, , and Siegmund Hurwitz's Lilith, die erste Eva: Eine Studie uber dunkle Aspekte des Weiblichen Zurich: Yale University Press, , The "dangerous" role of feminine will in the engendering of monsters is also explored by Marie-Helene Huet in Monstrous Imagination Cambridge: A cynocephalus is a dog-headed man, like the recently decanonized Saint Christopher. Wentworth Press 26 July Language: Be the first to review this item Would you like to tell us about a lower price?
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