The Monster Theory Reader

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 : 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 : 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 : Sarah Juliet Lauro
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452955522
Total Pages : 659 pages
Book Rating : 4.20/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Zombie Theory written by Sarah Juliet Lauro and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2017-10-15 with total page 659 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Zombies first shuffled across movie screens in 1932 in the low-budget Hollywood film White Zombie and were reimagined as undead flesh-eaters in George A. Romero’s The Night of the Living Dead almost four decades later. Today, zombies are omnipresent in global popular culture, from video games and top-rated cable shows in the United States to comic books and other visual art forms to low-budget films from Cuba and the Philippines. The zombie’s ability to embody a variety of cultural anxieties—ecological disaster, social and economic collapse, political extremism—has ensured its continued relevance and legibility, and has precipitated an unprecedented deluge of international scholarship. Zombie studies manifested across academic disciplines in the humanities but also beyond, spreading into sociology, economics, computer science, mathematics, and even epidemiology. Zombie Theory collects the best interdisciplinary zombie scholarship from around the world. Essays portray the zombie not as a singular cultural figure or myth but show how the undead represent larger issues: the belief in an afterlife, fears of contagion and technology, the effect of capitalism and commodification, racial exclusion and oppression, dehumanization. As presented here, zombies are not simple metaphors; rather, they emerge as a critical mode for theoretical work. With its diverse disciplinary and methodological approaches, Zombie Theory thinks through what the walking undead reveal about our relationships to the world and to each other. Contributors: Fred Botting, Kingston U; Samuel Byrnand, U of Canberra; Gerry Canavan, Marquette U; Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, George Washington U; Jean Comaroff, Harvard U; John Comaroff, Harvard U; Edward P. Comentale, Indiana U; Anna Mae Duane, U of Connecticut; Karen Embry, Portland Community College; Barry Keith Grant, Brock U; Edward Green, Roosevelt U; Lars Bang Larsen; Travis Linnemann, Eastern Kentucky U; Elizabeth McAlister, Wesleyan U; Shaka McGlotten, Purchase College-SUNY; David McNally, York U; Tayla Nyong’o, Yale U; Simon Orpana, U of Alberta; Steven Shaviro, Wayne State U; Ola Sigurdson, U of Gothenburg; Jon Stratton, U of South Australia; Eugene Thacker, The New School; Sherryl Vint, U of California Riverside; Priscilla Wald, Duke U; Tyler Wall, Eastern Kentucky U; Jen Webb, U of Canberra; Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Central Michigan U.

Author : Judith Halberstam
Publisher : Duke University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780822316633
Total Pages : 236 pages
Book Rating : 4.33/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Skin Shows written by Judith Halberstam and published by Duke University Press. This book was released on 1995 with total page 236 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Parasites and perverts: an introduction to gothic monstrosity -- Making monsters: Mary Shelley's Frankenstein -- Gothic surface, gothic depth: the subject of secrecy in Stevenson and Wilde -- Technologies of monstrosity: Bram Stoker's Dracula -- Reading counterclockwise: paranoid gothic or gothic paranoia? -- Bodies that splatter: queers and chain saws -- Skinflick: posthuman genderin Jonathan Demme's The silence of the lambs -- Conclusion: serial killing.

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 : Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
ISBN 13 : 1452944652
Total Pages : 284 pages
Book Rating : 4.54/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Stone written by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2015-05-06 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Stone maps the force, vivacity, and stories within our most mundane matter, stone. For too long stone has served as an unexamined metaphor for the “really real”: blunt factuality, nature’s curt rebuke. Yet, medieval writers knew that stones drop with fire from the sky, emerge through the subterranean lovemaking of the elements, tumble along riverbeds from Eden, partner with the masons who build worlds with them. Such motion suggests an ecological enmeshment and an almost creaturely mineral life. Although geological time can leave us reeling, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that stone’s endurance is also an invitation to apprehend the world in other than human terms. Never truly inert, stone poses a profound challenge to modernity’s disenchantments. Its agency undermines the human desire to be separate from the environment, a bifurcation that renders nature “out there,” a mere resource for recreation, consumption, and exploitation. Written with great verve and elegance, this pioneering work is notable not only for interweaving the medieval and the modern but also as a major contribution to ecotheory. Comprising chapters organized by concept —“Geophilia,” “Time,” “Force,” and “Soul”—Cohen seamlessly brings together a wide range of topics including stone’s potential to transport humans into nonanthropocentric scales of place and time, the “petrification” of certain cultures, the messages fossils bear, the architecture of Bordeaux and Montparnasse, Yucca Mountain and nuclear waste disposal, the ability of stone to communicate across millennia in structures like Stonehenge, and debates over whether stones reproduce and have souls. Showing that what is often assumed to be the most lifeless of substances is, in its own time, restless and forever in motion, Stone fittingly concludes by taking us to Iceland⎯a land that, writes the author, “reminds us that stone like water is alive, that stone like water is transient.”

Author : Ron Bates
Publisher : Zonderkidz
ISBN 13 : 0310735521
Total Pages : 224 pages
Book Rating : 4.26/5 ( download)

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Download or read book How to Make Friends and Monsters written by Ron Bates and published by Zonderkidz. This book was released on 2013-07-22 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Howard Boward, a 13-year-old boy-genius with a chip on his shoulder is too smart for his own good. He has troubles making friends—possibly because he complains so much. Until one day a science experiment goes haywire, and Howard creates a best friend for himself—Franklin—who also happens to be a monster. Creating Franklin was an accident, not like Howard was playing God or anything—or so Howard tells himself. Franklin and Howard are having so much fun, Howard decides to create more “friends,” using DNA from kids at school. Only, these friends aren’t quite as friendly. Soon there’s a major mess and Howard has to sort it all out before the monsters destroy their human counterparts. But terminating the monsters proves harder than he imagined. They didn’t choose to be monsters; they can’t go against their innate nature. Howard finds himself facing consequences for playing God. Getting rid of the monsters means learning to tame his own inner beast, and Howard begins to understand the meaning of free will and true friendship

Author : Leslie Ormandy
Publisher : McFarland
ISBN 13 : 1476664846
Total Pages : 255 pages
Book Rating : 4.42/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Morals of Monster Stories written by Leslie Ormandy and published by McFarland. This book was released on 2017-07-31 with total page 255 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The simplicity of children's picture books--stories told with illustrations and a few well chosen words or none at all--makes them powerful tools for teaching morals and personal integrity. Children follow the story and see the characters' behaviors on the page and interpret them in the context of their own lives. But unlike many picture books, most children's lives don't feature monsters. This collection of new essays explores the societally sanctioned behaviors imparted to children through the use of monsters and supernatural characters. Topics include monsters as instructors, the normalization of strangers or the "other," fostering gender norms, and therapeutic monsters, among others.

Author : John Block Friedman
Publisher : Syracuse University Press
ISBN 13 : 9780815628262
Total Pages : 332 pages
Book Rating : 4.69/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Monstrous Races in Medieval Art and Thought written by John Block Friedman and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2000-06-01 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Beyond the boundaries of the known Christian world during the Middle Ages, there were alien cultures that intrigued, puzzled, and sometimes frightened the people of Europe. The reports of travelers in Africa and Asia revealed that "monstrous" races of men lived there, whose appearance and customs were quite different from the European norm. This book examines the impact of these races upon Western art, literature, and philosophy, from their earliest mention until the age of exploration. Friedman furnishes a descriptive catalog of the races, most of which were real, geographically remote peoples, some of which were fabled creatures that served as symbols. He traces the evolution of European attitudes toward them, with particular emphasis on the high Middle Ages, when they seem most strongly to have captured the Western imagination. Ranging through literature, the arts, cartography, canon law, and theology, he considers the widely varying ways in which Christians viewed and depicted strange races of men. Finally, he examines transformations in European consciousness brought about by the discoveries of the exotic peoples of the Americas. Whatever their form—pygmy, giant, hirsute cave—dweller, cyclops, or Amazon-the monstrous races clearly challenged the traditional concept of man in the Christian world scheme. It is the medieval thinking about this challenge that Mr. Friedman addresses in this revealing account.