Media Monstering: From Tabloid Demons to Transnational Cyberbullies
by Jim Clarke
Won joint first prize.
“The dragon-green, the luminous, the dark, the serpent-haunted sea”: Monsters, landscape and gender in Clash of the Titans (1981 and 2010)
by Liz Gloyn
A paper given at Animating Antiquity - Harryhausen and the Classical Tradition, Bradford, November 2011.
Both the original Harryhausen Clash of the Titans and the 2010 remake create strong connections between monsters and... more
Both the original Harryhausen Clash of the Titans and the 2010 remake create strong connections between monsters and the landscapes in which they appear. The sea and the feminine are intricately connected through the goddess Thetis in the 1981 Clash, and thus linked to the monstrous, whereas the underworld and Hades appropriate that link in the 2010 Clash. The 2010 Clash also shifts the creative force of the monstrous from the sea to the underworld, thus placing evil at a safe distance from the ‘real world’.
In the 1981 Clash, the feminine, through Thetis, sea and water, provides the uniting theme for the film’s monsters. The Kraken plot is driven by Thetis’ desire for revenge on behalf of her son Kalibos, turned into a monster for his wickedness. The film foregrounds the ocean’s threat by opening with Danae being thrown into the sea. Poseidon functions as the Kraken’s keeper rather than as an active character, diminishing masculinity’s role in creating monsters. Monsters always appear geographically close to water. Calibos lives in a swamp and encounters Perseus next to a lake; Medusa’s island temple, complete with impluvium, echoes with dripping water. Danger becomes associated with an everyday yet dramatic landscape.
In the 2010 Clash, the monstrous becomes associated with the masculine underworld, removing the ambiguity of motivation that Thetis’ love for her son provided in the 1981 Clash. Hades himself creates flying monsters, and ‘gave birth’ to the Kraken; Medusa’s fiery lair is firmly located in the land of the dead. The loss of the link between the monstrous and feminine both shifts the proper place of evil to the underworld and contributes to the film’s marginalization of women. Moving danger to mythical spaces is more comforting for a blockbuster audience, but means sacrificing narrative complexity of the original film.
Flâneurs of the Fallout: Monstrous Gaming in Post-apocalyptic Cityscapes.
Forthcoming in Urban Monstrosities, eds. Joseph Lamperez and J. Alexandra McGhee (Cambridge Scholars Press).
Osservazioni a margine dei concetti di “ibrido” e “mostro” in Mesopotamia
in stampa negli atti del convegno Monstra. Costruzione e Percezione delle Entità Ibride e Mostruose nel Mediterraneo Antico, Velletri, 8-11 giugno 2011 (in stampa)
KEYWORDS: monster; mischwesen; hybrids; Mesopotamia; Sumerian; Akkadian KEYWORDS: monster; mischwesen; hybrids; Mesopotamia; Sumerian; Akkadian
“The Angels Men Complain Of”: Monstrous Masculinity in Chretien de Troyes' Li Contes del Graal
by Karma deGruy
under review
While traveling through the forest one day, Chretien de Troyes’ young hero, Perceval, encounters knights for the first... more
While traveling through the forest one day, Chretien de Troyes’ young hero, Perceval, encounters knights for the first time, and is nearly overwhelmed by the sight. He recounts the experience to his horrified mother, who exclaims, “Tu as veu, si com je croi, / Les enges don la gent se plaignent, / Qui ocient quan qu’il ataignent” [You have seen, I believe, the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon]. Through its reversal of monstrous and sacred bodies, Li Contes del Graal complicates the traditional hero/monster binary, diverging from the dominant chivalric narrative in which the hero affirms his identity by defeating a monstrous enemy and returning to court, triumphant. This chivalric body is typically built from the outside in; the armor really does make the man. Spurred on by a vision of the shining knights he at first takes to be angels, and filled with a burning desire to possess the armor of knighthood, Perceval at first conceives of knightly identity according to the traditional narrative; composed entirely of surfaces, the proper chivalric body is seamless, immune to affect, and impenetrable. But this melding of body and armor, of identity and accoutrement, removes the knight from the category of the recognizably human and renders him as beautiful, cold, and deadly as “the angels men complain of, who kill whatever they come upon.” In figuring the angel-knight as physically and morally monstrous, Le Conte du Graal articulates a new twelfth-century masculinity which must maintain its integrity and its capacity for violence while still acknowledging itself as subject to and constructed within a complex web of social relationships.
‘Monster studies’ has demonstrated how portrayals of monsters and marvels change over time in response to cultural pressures and preoccupations. The angelic body, like the monstrous body, is a cultural body, yet angels are rarely examined as literary figures, perhaps in part because the Renaissance cherub and the long-tressed guardian angel stand at the forefront of the modern imagination. Such airy beings of non-desiring grace stand in stark opposition to their appetitive and hyperbolically-embodied monstrous kin. They lack agency and are merely God’s verbs. But the medieval angel was more often figured as a warrior than an infant, and angels live an active literary life beyond the domesticating boundaries of the cleric and the canon. The armored warrior angels of medieval French manuscript illustrations, for instance, legitimized military activities by suggesting God-given military supremacy. The warrior angel is one culturally comprehensible way of sustaining the paradoxical identity of the twelfth-century knight; violence is still necessary for this performative masculinity, but the homosocial chivalric ideal gives way to a more complex construction in Chretien’s time. Impervious and immortal angels, figures of impassible violence, have no interiority and no fragility. The warrior-angel thus becomes the symbol for an inhuman masculinity. Perceval’s journey leads him to this realization, as he learns that angels, not monsters, guard the limits of the human.
Other Spaces: The Monstrous Sites of Suddenly Last Summer
by David Calder
from Monstrosity in Literature, Psychoanalysis, and Philosophy, ed. Gerhard Unterthurner and Erik Vogt (Vienna: Turia + Kant, 2012) 51-70.
In this essay I analyze the peculiar spatiality of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer (1958), examining in... more In this essay I analyze the peculiar spatiality of Tennessee Williams' Suddenly Last Summer (1958), examining in particular how the physically present space of the stage, discursive representations of space, and the spatiality of narrative itself lead to the confluence of sexual, racial, and religious others in a polysemic, slippery, monstrous form.
Media-Made Monsters: Tabloid Demonisation as Free Market Fear
by Jim Clarke
Delivered at 'The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity' conference, De Montfort University, Leicester on 19th November 2011.
by Jim Clarke, School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
As the press fights its war against privacy in... more
by Jim Clarke, School of English, Trinity College Dublin.
As the press fights its war against privacy in defence of the public's right to know, the casualties are those warped and damaged by media intrusion. In tabloid parlance, they are 'monstered', rendered grotesque and other than human through the distorting lens of redtop headlines. Tabloid newspapers
commodify the fear of the other and exaggerate elements of social transgression to populate our nightmares with the demons they choose.
Tabloids remain excoriated by the intelligentsia even as they outsell all other forms of printed media. Yet as their popularity agendises the monstering of individuals and groups, so their
sensationalism attracts more readers, causing a lucrative feedback loop at the expense of the humanity of those depicted.
From the Daily Mail's 1930s pogrom against Jewish immigrants to the demonisation of migrants and benefits recipients today, I will examine how tabloids have worked to marginalise groups as
well as individuals. In the case of youth, there is a lineage running from the Mods and Rockers riots, through the A Clockwork Orange debacle, to the demonisation of 'hoodies' today.
Yet when we think of how the media makes monsters, it is individual criminal cases that come first to mind. I intend to show that in the free market of fear, promoting phobia of crime far beyond its actual societal impact is a profitable industry.
Media dehumanisation is now entering a new era in the network society, where internet monstering can occur on bulletin boards and via social media without the mediation of journalistic ethics or editorial oversight.
Are we about to move beyond the 'feral beasts' that hunted Tony Blair in a pack? Without the profit motive, in a landscape of trolls and anonymity, can there be fewer monsters in the network society?
"I'm documenting“ – Aufzeichnungen eines kollektiven Albtraums: Matt Reeves‘ Cloverfield (2008) und die Traumatherapie nach 9/11
by Jana Toppe
In: Ed. Jörg van Bebber. Dawn of an Evil Millennium. Horror und Kultur im neuen Jahrtausend. Büchner: Marburg 2011.
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Download (.pdf) Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome
Chapter 4 in The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Mittman and Peter Dendle. Forthcoming, March 2012.
Book description available at:
http://www.ashgate.com/default.aspx?page=637&calcTitle=1&title_id=9912&edition_id=13227&lang=cy-GB
The Role of Lucha Libre in the Construction of Mexican Male Identity
Co-authored with Patricia Murrieta-Flores
Published in Networking Knowledge: Journal of the MeCCSA PGN
ISSN: 1755-9944
Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. The sport became famous mainly due... more
Lucha Libre has played an important role in Mexican culture since the late 1950s. The sport became famous mainly due to its masked wrestlers, who incorporated their own family traditions, beliefs and fears into the design of their masks, transforming an ordinary person into a fearless character.
After the introduction of the Monsters Cinema in the 1930s, Mexican audiences welcomed and adopted characters like Dracula, Nosferatu, Frankenstein and The Werewolf. The success of Monster Cinema in Mexican culture was based on the integration of national legends and beliefs, placing them in local and identifiable concepts in the Mexican popular imagination. Later, Lucha Libre Cinema mixed with Monster Cinema resulting in the birth of new heroes and myths. These emergent paladins of the Mexican metropolis set the cultural and moral standards of that time and how Mexicans wanted to be perceived.
Through an anthropological and historical analysis of Mexican Cinema and Lucha Libre, this paper investigates the main social interaction of male wrestlers who perform as heroes inside the celluloid world and outside of it. We explore how masculinity and the male figure evolves in Lucha Libre Cinema, and the processes that wrestlers have to undergo in order to be able to portray themselves as superheroes of an evolving and fast growing Mexico.
Review of The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution, by Zakiya Hanafi
by Andrea Jones
Published in Comitatus 32, 2001
Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine. (Durham: Duke University Press 2000). 272 pp.
A... more
Zakiya Hanafi, The Monster in the Machine. (Durham: Duke University Press 2000). 272 pp.
A study of monsters as conceptualized in early modern Italy, Monsters in the Machine seeks to discover what caused the decreased prominence of the sacred monster during this period and in what new forms monstrosity emerged as cosmologies became increasingly secularized during the Scientific Revolution. Zakiya Hanafi concludes that the monster became mechanized and that, as theories of the human body became increasingly technological during the advent of modern medicine, the monster simultaneously became internalized in a way that presaged postmodern sensibilities. Finally, she discusses the ways in which discourse itself during the period became monstrous through the use of complex literary conceits. Wonderfully dense and highly connective, it is a complex, provocative, and masterfully written piece of scholarship that rewards careful attention.
In laying the groundwork for Hanafi’s study, the first chapter, entitled “The Origins of Monsters,” begins by explaining the role of the sacred monster in the pre-modern world. “If the barbarian was distinguished by making no sense, or nonsense,” she writes, "the monster, on the other hand, was distinguished by making several senses: by providing an oppositional corporeal limit to human definition; by eroding the strong conceptual differentiation between man and beast, man and demon, or man and god, pointing to pollution, transgression, a breakdown in social order; and by bearing a sign of warning from the forces of the sacred" (3).
In this section, she also outlines the major foundational texts of teratology—Aristotle’s On the Generation of Animals, Cicero’s De divinatione, Pliny’s Naturalis Historia, and Augustine’s City of God—and asserts that they initiate the “scientific” tradition, the “prodigy” tradition, and the “wonders of nature (or God)” tradition, respectively. She concludes by commenting on the relativity of monstrosity, an important premise of her work, and therefore urges her readers to consider monsters as “not as a thematic topic or as a psychological manifestation of some primal fear but rather as an ‘ideological cluster,’ as an entity constructed and represented within a social group” (14).
In the two following chapters, “Monstrous Matter” and “Monstrous Machines,” Hanafi traces the shift from locating monsters in the natural world—God’s Creation—to the mechanical world—man’s creation. She begins this exploration by discussing the role of gardens in bringing the monster from the natural world into the scientific realm of the operating theater, in particular through the dissection of a double-bodied girl in the Orti Oricellai or Oricellari of the Rucellai family in 1536. This description is particularly interesting for its explication of how an attempt to clinically describe the deformed child results in chimerical prose combining scientific and poetic approaches, a point that leads Hanafi to a survey of the form and content of early modern Italian teratology. In that overview, Hanafi reviews the treatises of Fortunio Liceti, Giambattista della Porta’s Magia Naturalis, and (in a rather unfortunately cursory fashion) contemporary demonology texts.
Upon the basis of this investigation, Hanafi concludes that the sacred monster did not disappear in early modernity, but was instead relocated in machines and automatons, noting that “from the earliest written records to present day, a necessary condition for defining a sacred monster is that which is inanimate yet moves of its own accord” (54). In order to demonstrate this transition, she discusses the Renaissance idea that women could produce monstrous children by focusing on inappropriate objects during pregnancy or that, conversely, if appropriately taught by men of science to focus on beautiful statues or portraits, they might produce ideal children. She also investigates early modern Italian museums, where the monstrous and the technical were displayed together and slippages between those categories became visible, particularly in the cases of machines engineered to make onlookers appear monstrous, fantastic automatons, and microscopes, which revealed tiny monsters residing within such apparently quotidian matter as water and blood.
Hanafi argues that other vital slippages begin to emerge during this period—those between automatons and demons and automatons and their artificers. The collapsing of these boundaries, she notes, threatens the breakdown of both cosmic and social orders, particularly as “technology becomes more autonomous [and] humans assume a diminishing role in controlling and directing their operations. "Machines break free of our will; in return, we are liberated from supervising them. The machine gains autonomy as humans relinquish it, but, at the same time, we become more dependent on them. The terms of the reciprocity become clear (94)." That is, the machines become more like people and, as a result, the normal master-servant paradigm between human artificers and their creations becomes either less polarized or even possibly re-polarized in frightening ways.
This is particularly true, she asserts, because Renaissance medical philosophy in the wake of William Harvey’s discoveries concerning the circulation of blood and René Descartes’Discourse on Method further closed the gap between automatons and humans by analogizing bodily processes with technological ones. Thus, as machines became more humanized, humans also became more mechanized. In her chapter on “Medicine and the Mechanized Body,” Hanafi begins by discussing early modern physiognomy and its obsession with the fine line dividing humans and animals. While physiognomy dealt with the fear that humans might degenerate into beasts other anatomical sciences were leading the way to modern medicine, which posits that humans are “nothing more than complex machines mysteriously endowed with consciousness,” an outlook that exacerbates humanity’s fear of becoming indistinguishable from its mechanical creations (120). Hanafi traces the germination of this idea through the work of Harvey and Descartes, but argues that Giovanni Borelli was responsible for “the advent of the machine-body” during the latter half of the seventeenth century (129).
Chapter Five, focused on “Vico’s Monstrous Body,” is offered “both as a meditation on monstrosity during the birth of Enlightenment thinking and as a modest contribution to the vast and expert field of Vico scholarship” (140). While it does indeed achieve both goals admirably, this section of Hanafi’s book is unfortunately less concise than its predecessors, a fact that at times threatens to divorce it from those masterfully integrated discussions. She first discusses Giambattista Vico’s “transformation of conatus, a term used in the physical sciences to describe the principle of motion, into a metaphysical concept that serves as the intermediary between matter and spirit and likewise between human will and Divine Will” (137). This recasting allowed Vico to embrace the new mechanistic view of anatomy without committing the heresy of denying human imagination or free will. In an innovative move, Hanafi then investigates the issue of Vico’s own precarious health, his belief that his soul and body were incompatible in order to discover what light his self-concept as a monstrous hybrid had on his work. She focuses on Vico’s eulogy for Angiola Cimini, his theories of conatus in his Liber metaphysicus, and his explanation of the Biblical giants in his New Science as examples of how his ideas advocate the possibility for and necessity of “taming the beast within—adjusting the body so as to bring it in line with the soul through the exertion of will. Hanafi closes the chapter with a fascinating explication the myth of Hercules, whom Vico posits as the founder of civilized humanity, a liminal figure and “the slayer of monsters in two senses: he cultivated the land, and he cultivated his humanity” (183).
The final chapter, “Monstrous Metaphor,” brings together a number of strands from the preceding ones in its consideration of how contemporary ideas about monstrosity influenced early modern Italian literary composition, particularly as exhibited in the “preachable conceits” of such seventeenth-century Jesuit preachers as Emanuele Tesauro. Hanafi opens this topic by discussing the influential Aristotelian connection between wonder, desire, and learning, a linkage important both to Matteo Perigrini’s discussions of the dangers of metaphor in Della Acutezze and Tesauro’s theories of composition. Both writers explicitly connect metaphors and monsters—for example, Tesauro refers to monsters as “Nature’s witticisms” (203). However, Perigrini focuses on the threats he believes metaphors pose as figures of speech that can become mere entertainments with questionable social propriety, their ability to stupefy listeners, and their tendency to bring attention to the genius of their creator rather than to their own veracity. Tesauro, on the other hand, is more willing to embrace such literary monstrosities because he asserts that the wonder they produce leads to a virtuous desire for knowledge.
Hanafi uses one of Tesauro’s own sermons and the theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic of Enlightenment as a point of departure for a discussion of both metaphor and author as sirens who, like all monsters, threaten to erase distinctions between the self and the other. She concludes her work by observing that “the truth is, there never really is a clear demarcation between subject and object” and that "the secret desire to usurp that place of monstrosity, to become the admired object," is part of the game we play “of holding the I together” by imagining its disappearance. A sort of ‘fort-da’ game we play with our civilized selves (217). Indeed, in her “Afterword,” Hanafi underscores this point with the conviction of a missionary in noting that “these monsters are all of our own creation and fashioned very much in our own image” and urging that we “love our monsters as we love ourselves” (218).
Even the footnotes to this provocative study are frequently of high interest. For example, in an aside about her exploration of Renaissance treatises on monsters, Hanafi notes that “there is not a single treatise on monsters written by a woman, from any epoch, of which I am aware. This fact in itself would make an interesting topic of speculation” (223). Apart from providing a very suggestive observation, this comment is reflective of the fact that, though Monsters in the Machine is not primarily a feminist project, it does take into account in particularly fruitful ways the ancient and sustained associations between women and monstrosity.
In her acknowledgments, Hanafi notes that the creation of this study has “spanned a decade of [her] life,” a fact that is reflected both in the book’s depth and its breadth (xiii). Appropriately complex in its discussion of the connections between humanity, monstrosity, divinity, technology, and textual creation between the late sixteenth and early eighteenth centuries in Italy, Monsters in the Machine nevertheless also manages to maintain an admirable level of lucidity and flair that makes it a valuable volume for non-specialists as well as for experts. Thus, Hanafi herself, like Tesauro before her, becomes a kind of siren who induces wonder at her ingenuity. However, she also manages to avoid the dangers outlined by Peregrini and lead her readers toward a clearer understanding not only of how monstrosity was conceived in early modern Italy, but also of how such ideas continue to impact political, scientific, and artistic thought in postmodernity.
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"The Last of the Rephaim: Conquest and Cataclysm in the Heroic Ages of Ancient Israel"
PhD Dissertation. Harvard University, 2011. Full text available via ProQuest.
This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and... more
This dissertation explores the role of giants in the narrative and historiographic worlds of symbol, geography, and religion in ancient Israel. The Nephilim, Anaqim, Rephaim, Emim, Zamzumim/Zuzim, some Gibborim, and other individuals (e.g., Goliath) can all be classified as “giants”—not only with respect to their physical height, but also with respect to the negative moral qualities assigned to giants in antiquity. Previous interpreters have treated giants as merely a fantastical prop against which God’s agents emerge victorious. I argue that giants are a theologically and historiographically generative group, through which we gain insight into central aspects of ancient Israel’s symbolic world. All that is overgrown or physically monstrous represents a connection to the primeval chaos that stands as a barrier to creation and right rule. In this sense, giants represent chaos-fear, and their eradication is a form of chaos maintenance by both human and divine heroes.
Moreover, I demonstrate a series of affinities among the Bible’s presentation of its giants and aspects of Greek epic tradition (e.g., the Iliad, Catalogue, Works and Days, Cypria, and the Gigantomachy/Titanomachy). Both giants and heroes were thought to represent a discrete “race” of beings, both were thought to be larger than contemporary people, and both lived and flourished, in the historical imaginations of later authors, throughout the Bronze Age and largely ceased to exist at the end of this period. The size, strength, and physical excess of heroes and giants lead to cataclysmic judgment through the “flattening” effects of warfare and flood. After their death, these figures retain possibilities for an ongoing life in cult, and, in both Greek and Deuteronomistic historiography, the heroes and giants are positioned in a heroic age. This study argues that the Bible’s invocation of the giant constitutes a creative evaluation of Canaan’s heroic past, and stands as a forceful reminder of the place of Israel’s deity among the axes of power that giants represent. The biblical engagement with the category of the giant signifies a profound meditation on the category of epic in the ancient world—even a decisive, ultimate rejection of epic and heroism as controlling tropes of the biblical worldview.
And Say The Bakemono Responded: Animism, Derrida and the Question of the Animal in Hayao Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke
by Chris Crews
Published in the Journal For Critical Animal Studies. Vol 8:4 2010.
From the introduction:
Across diverse cultures and throughout the ages, the figure of the monster abounds... more
From the introduction:
Across diverse cultures and throughout the ages, the figure of the monster abounds and plays an important role in the social imaginary. From Leviathan and kappas to werewolves and the Wendigo, the world is full of monster stories. There is something about monsters that is both horrific and seductive, at once familiar yet always signifying some form of otherness. As Timothy Beal notes, monsters ―blur lines between inside and outside, this worldly and otherworldly, self and other‖ (2002: 196). Monsters tell powerful stories about transgressing boundaries, and our response provides a rich cultural site for exploring the meaning and significance of these transgressions. Looking at depictions of the border between human and nonhuman animals from the perspective of the monster provides the opportunity to open a posthumanist dialog about the construction of the human and the animal as subjects.
