Monster Theory

Author : Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452900558
Total Pages : 331 pages
Book Rating : 4.51/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monster theory [electronic resource] written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 1996-11-15 with total page 331 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.

Author : Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452960402
Total Pages : 801 pages
Book Rating : 4.01/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Monster Theory Reader written by Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2020-01-15 with total page 801 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of scholarship on monsters and their meaning—across genres, disciplines, methodologies, and time—from foundational texts to the most recent contributions Zombies and vampires, banshees and basilisks, demons and wendigos, goblins, gorgons, golems, and ghosts. From the mythical monstrous races of the ancient world to the murderous cyborgs of our day, monsters have haunted the human imagination, giving shape to the fears and desires of their time. And as long as there have been monsters, there have been attempts to make sense of them, to explain where they come from and what they mean. This book collects the best of what contemporary scholars have to say on the subject, in the process creating a map of the monstrous across the vast and complex terrain of the human psyche. Editor Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock prepares the way with a genealogy of monster theory, traveling from the earliest explanations of monsters through psychoanalysis, poststructuralism, and cultural studies, to the development of monster theory per se—and including Jeffrey Jerome Cohen’s foundational essay “Monster Theory (Seven Theses),” reproduced here in its entirety. There follow sections devoted to the terminology and concepts used in talking about monstrosity; the relevance of race, religion, gender, class, sexuality, and physical appearance; the application of monster theory to contemporary cultural concerns such as ecology, religion, and terrorism; and finally the possibilities monsters present for envisioning a different future. Including the most interesting and important proponents of monster theory and its progenitors, from Sigmund Freud to Julia Kristeva to J. Halberstam, Donna Haraway, Barbara Creed, and Stephen T. Asma—as well as harder-to-find contributions such as Robin Wood’s and Masahiro Mori’s—this is the most extensive and comprehensive collection of scholarship on monsters and monstrosity across disciplines and methods ever to be assembled and will serve as an invaluable resource for students of the uncanny in all its guises. Contributors: Stephen T. Asma, Columbia College Chicago; Timothy K. Beal, Case Western Reserve U; Harry Benshoff, U of North Texas; Bettina Bildhauer, U of St. Andrews; Noel Carroll, The Graduate Center, CUNY; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, Arizona State U; Barbara Creed, U of Melbourne; Michael Dylan Foster, UC Davis; Sigmund Freud; Elizabeth Grosz, Duke U; J. Halberstam, Columbia U; Donna Haraway, UC Santa Cruz; Julia Kristeva, Paris Diderot U; Anthony Lioi, The Julliard School; Patricia MacCormack, Anglia Ruskin U; Masahiro Mori; Annalee Newitz; Jasbir K. Puar, Rutgers U; Amit A. Rai, Queen Mary U of London; Margrit Shildrick, Stockholm U; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Erin Suzuki, UC San Diego; Robin Wood, York U; Alexa Wright, U of Westminster.

Author : Marina Levina
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN 13 : 1441185372
Total Pages : 202 pages
Book Rating : 4.72/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monster Culture in the 21st Century written by Marina Levina and published by Bloomsbury Publishing USA. This book was released on 2013-05-23 with total page 202 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

Author : Bruce Dain
Publisher : Harvard University Press
ISBN 13 : 0674030141
Total Pages : 334 pages
Book Rating : 4.45/5 ( download)

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Download or read book A Hideous Monster of the Mind written by Bruce Dain and published by Harvard University Press. This book was released on 2009-07-01 with total page 334 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The intellectual history of race, one of the most pernicious and enduring ideas in American history, has remained segregated into studies of black or white traditions. Bruce Dain breaks this separatist pattern with an integrated account of the emergence of modern racial consciousness in the United States from the Revolution to the Civil War. A Hideous Monster of the Mind reveals that ideas on race crossed racial boundaries in a process that produced not only well-known theories of biological racism but also countertheories that were early expressions of cultural relativism, cultural pluralism, and latter-day Afrocentrism. From 1800 to 1830 in particular, race took on a new reality as Americans, black and white, reacted to postrevolutionary disillusionment, the events of the Haitian Revolution, the rise of cotton culture, and the entrenchment of slavery. Dain examines not only major white figures like Thomas Jefferson and Samuel Stanhope Smith, but also the first self-consciously "black" African-American writers. These various thinkers transformed late-eighteenth-century European environmentalist "natural history" into race theories that combined culture and biology and set the terms for later controversies over slavery and abolition. In those debates, the ethnology of Samuel George Morton and Josiah Nott intertwined conceptually with important writing by black authors who have been largely forgotten, like Hosea Easton and James McCune Smith. Scientific racism and the idea of races as cultural constructions were thus interrelated aspects of the same effort to explain human differences. In retrieving neglected African-American thinkers, reestablishing the European intellectual background to American racial theory, and demonstrating the deep confusion "race" caused for thinkers black and white, A Hideous Monster of the Mind offers an engaging and enlightening new perspective on modern American racial thought.

Author : Asa Simon Mittman
Publisher : ARC Reference
ISBN 13 : 9781641894272
Total Pages : 136 pages
Book Rating : 4.7X/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Classic Readings on Monster Theory written by Asa Simon Mittman and published by ARC Reference. This book was released on 2020-04-30 with total page 136 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Companion volumes Classic Readings on Monster Theoryand Primary Sources on Monstersgather a wide range of readings and sources to enable us to see and understand what monsters can show us about what it means to be human. The first volume introduces important modern theorists of the monstrous and aims to provide interpretive tools and strategies for students to use to grapple with the primary sources in the second volume, which brings together some of the most influential and indicative monster narratives from the West.

Author : Margrit Shildrick
Publisher : SAGE
ISBN 13 : 1412933463
Total Pages : 154 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Embodying the Monster written by Margrit Shildrick and published by SAGE. This book was released on 2001-11-01 with total page 154 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Written by one of the most distinguished commentators in the field, this book asks why we see some bodies as 'monstrous' or 'vulnerable' and examines what this tells us about ideas of bodily 'normality' and bodily perfection. Drawing on feminist theories of the body, biomedical discourse and historical data, Margrit Shildrick argues that the response to the monstrous body has always been ambivalent. In trying to organize it out of the discourses of normality, we point to the impossibility of realizing a fully developed, invulnerable self. She calls upon us to rethink the monstrous, not as an abnormal category, but as a condition of attractivenes, and demonstrates how this involves an exploration of relationships between bodies and embodied selves, and a revising of the phenomenology of the body.

Author : Liz Gloyn
Publisher : Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN 13 : 1350114340
Total Pages : 324 pages
Book Rating : 4.40/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture written by Liz Gloyn and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2019-10-31 with total page 324 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What is it about ancient monsters that popular culture still finds so enthralling? Why do the monsters of antiquity continue to stride across the modern world? In this book, the first in-depth study of how post-classical societies use the creatures from ancient myth, Liz Gloyn reveals the trends behind how we have used monsters since the 1950s to the present day, and considers why they have remained such a powerful presence in our shared cultural imagination. She presents a new model for interpreting the extraordinary vitality that classical monsters have shown, and their enormous adaptability in finding places to dwell in popular culture without sacrificing their connection to the ancient world. Her argument takes her readers through a comprehensive tour of monsters on film and television, from the much-loved creations of Ray Harryhausen in Clash of the Titans to the monster of the week in Hercules: The Legendary Journeys, before looking in detail at the afterlives of the Medusa and the Minotaur. She develops a broad theory of the ancient monster and its life after antiquity, investigating its relation to gender, genre and space to offer a bold and novel exploration of what keeps drawing us back to these mythical beasts. From the siren to the centaur, all monster lovers will find something to enjoy in this stimulating and accessible book.

Author : Daniela Carpi
Publisher : Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN 13 : 3110653583
Total Pages : 641 pages
Book Rating : 4.88/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monsters and Monstrosity written by Daniela Carpi and published by Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG. This book was released on 2019-06-17 with total page 641 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.

Author : Alex Neville Sharpe
Publisher : Routledge
ISBN 13 : 1135182647
Total Pages : 200 pages
Book Rating : 4.49/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Foucault's Monsters and the Challenge of Law written by Alex Neville Sharpe and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2009-12-16 with total page 200 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In contrast to other figures generated within social theory for thinking about outsiders, such as Rene Girard’s ‘scapegoat’ and Zygmunt Bauman’s ‘stranger’, Foucault’s Monsters and the Challenge of Law suggests that the figure of ‘the monster’ offers greater analytical precision and explanatory power in relation to understanding the processes whereby outsiders are constituted. The book draws on Michel Foucault’s theoretical and historical treatment of the category of the monster, in which the monster is regarded as the effect of a double breach: of law and nature. For Foucault, the monster does not simply refer to a particular kind of morphological or psychological irregularity; for the body or psyche in question must also pose a threat to the categorical structure of law. In chronological terms, Foucault moves from a preoccupation with the bestial human in the Middle Ages to a concern over Siamese or conjoined twins in the Renaissance period, and ultimately to a focus on the hermaphrodite in the Classical Age. But, although Foucault’s theoretical framework for understanding the monster is affirmed here, this book's study of an English legal history of the category ‘monster’ challenges some of Foucault’s historical claims. In addition to considering this legal history, the book also addresses the contemporary relevance of Foucault’s theoretical framework. Structured around Foucault’s archetypes and the category crises they represent – admixed embryos, conjoined twins and transsexuals – the book analyses their challenge to current distinctions between human and animal, male and female, and the idea of the ‘proper’ legal subject as a single embodied mind. These contemporary figures, like the monsters of old, are shown to threaten the rigidity and binary structure of a law that still struggles to accommodate them.

Author : Marco Frascari
Publisher : Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN 13 : 9780847676583
Total Pages : 212 pages
Book Rating : 4.87/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Monsters of Architecture written by Marco Frascari and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 1991 with total page 212 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A collection of articles from the publication Medievalia et Humanistica which devotes itself specifically to medieval and Renaissance culture. Topics considered include The Knight's Tale, the Florentine Renaissance and the nobility of later medieval England.