Monstrosity

The twelfth and thirteenth centuries witnessed an explosion of Christian interest in the meaning and workings of the natural world—a "discovery of nature" that profoundly reshaped the intellectual currents and spiritual contours of European society—yet to all appearances, the Jews of medieval northern Europe (Ashkenaz) were oblivious to the shifts reshaping their surrounding culture. Scholars have long assumed that rather than exploring or contemplating the natural world, the Jews of medieval Ashkenaz were preoccupied solely with the supernatural and otherworldly: magic and mysticism, demonology and divination, as well as the zombies, werewolves, dragons, flying camels, and other monstrous and wondrous creatures that destabilized any pretense of a consistent and encompassing natural order.

In _A Remembrance of His Wonders_, David I. Shyovitz disputes this long-standing and far-reaching consensus. Analyzing a wide array of neglected Ashkenazic writings on the natural world in general, and the human body in particular, Shyovitz shows how Jews in Ashkenaz integrated regnant scientific, magical, and mystical currents into a sophisticated exploration of the boundaries between nature and the supernatural. Ashkenazic beliefs and practices that have often been seen as signs of credulity and superstition in fact mirrored—and drew upon—contemporaneous Christian debates over the relationship between God and the natural world. In charting these parallels between Jewish and Christian thought, Shyovitz focuses especially upon the mediating role of polemical texts and encounters, which served as mechanisms for the transmission of religious doctrines, scientific facts, and cultural mores. Medieval Jews' preoccupation with the apparently "supernatural" reflected neither ignorance nor intellectual isolation, but rather a determined effort to understand nature's inner workings and outer limits, and to integrate and interrogate the theologies and ideologies of the broader European Christian society.

The idea of monstrosity is closely allied with the articulation of monsters in visual culture. In literature, especially in Gothic woks, it implies the spectacles of violence in which real monsters play a pivotal role in setting the events in motion. This paper investigates monstrosity as a metaphor for human acts of violence both physically and psychologically. It explores monstrosity in Martin McDonagh’s The Beauty Queen of Leenane. McDonagh raises the problem of monstrosity and monstrous identities in his country, Ireland. He focuses on domestic violence which is incarnated in the characters of two women: Mag and her daughter Maureen who mistakenly think of violence as a meditator of achieving self-realization. McDonagh emphasizes the fact that monstrosity is a distinctive hallmark of the Irish society because people lose the sense of humanity.

Escrito em meados do século XIV o livro Viagens de Jean de Mandeville foi um dos mais difundidos em fins da Idade Média. Existem mais 250 manuscritos diferentes em diversas línguas. Para o desenvolvimento da presente pesquisa utilizamos a edição traduzida por Susani Silveira Lemos França. A obra é dividida em duas partes e narra o deslocamento do suposto cavaleiro, Jean de Mandeville, por terras orientais, mesclando o real e o imaginário. Assim, nesta comunicação, buscamos compreender o maravilhoso presente no livro, possuindo como foco, em especial, os monstros com deformidades físicas. Tais seres possuíam diferentes imperfeições, como, por exemplo, orelhas que chegam até o joelho, cabeça de cachorro, pés de cavalo, pedra no lugar dos olhos, entre outros. Em sua grande maioria essas gentes são descritas como habitantes de ilhas, entretanto, também aparecem no deserto e no continente. Utilizaremos autores entre eles, por exemplo, Jacques Le Goff (1985), Claude Kappler (1986), Ana Teresa Pollo Mendonça(2007), Miguél Ángel Ladero Quesada (2007) e outros.

The monstrous portrayal of Grendel's mother in the Anglo-Saxon poem Beowulf reflects a cultural resentment held against unwed mothers prominent during, but not confined within, the European Medieval era. Sex and illegitimate births have been considered sins under the Christian church since its establishment. The biblical story in Anglo-Saxon Genesis depicting the Fall of Eve helped to construct a demonizing image of women, who were seen as descendants of Eve. This association with Eve not only suggests a spiritual "fallenness" inherent in women, but can also be looked at from a corporeal perspective when the maternal body becomes monstrous. I suggest that there is an anxiety surrounding the maternal body should it deviate from set social customs. The idea that a 'deviant maternal body' would lead to societal collapse in some way,  underpins a misogynistic stigma can be inferred from Anglo-Saxon literature and a glimpse into court records from the period. Three Anglo-Saxon poems that I will discuss: Beowulf, Genesis, and the "Old English Rune Poem". From these poems, I first look at how the natural world is presented as hostile realm of otherness that threatens civil and corporeal harmony. This is important, considering the ideology that underpins Grendel's monstrosity. Both women and nature are demonized for being outside the realm of patriarchal Christian virtue. Likewise, though Grendel's mother's identity is obscured, her monstrosity is projected onto the threatening natural word which she inhabits. The hostile representations of nature reflect the potential threat of a deviant maternal body, in its ability to procreate deviant others that threaten established communities. Much of the association between women and nature stems from the Fall of Eve. I articulate how Eve, in a sense, is also a deviant maternal body, as she is impregnated with Lucifer's sinful lies, and thus births a sinful deed.

Stesichorus’ Geryoneis helps make sense out of the violent, disorienting act of colonization and establishes a collective cultural memory that is both distinct from and loyal to Greek convention. The poet creates a civic literature and identity for Himera in song, while using references to Greek literary convention, namely, the Iliad, erotic motifs and violent marriage imagery.

Laurell Hamilton in her Anita Blake: Vampire Hunter Series portrays a large community of monstrous creatures that populate a violent near-future American landscape. A number of critics have already explored the forms in which Anita, the leading heroine, emerges in the 1990s literary scene as a strong figure who challenges traditional narratives of female subordination and alters predictable romantic entanglements with the male protagonists (Crawford 2014; Veldman-Genz 2011; Siegel 2007; Holland-Toll 2004). Moving beyond this approach that centres on Anita, this paper explores the forms in which the author designs her male companions and lovers. Her choice of lovers suggests that there are multiple desires at play in Hamilton's popular fiction in relation to masculinity in the context of a heterosexual erotica. Following a methodological approach of cultural studies (Saukko 2003), this study seeks to illustrate how conflicting desires, emblemized by her plurality of lovers, represent a literary effect of paradoxical yearnings at play in contemporary white, middle-class American women's lives.

Singapore’s public housing scheme is unique in that it is the only emergent case of success: apartment blocks provided by the Housing Development Board (HDB) house more than 80% of the nation, creating a landscape of uniform architectural entities. Initially conceived to affirm Singapore’s transition from colony to nation, the HDB block has become a symbol of nationhood, progress, social identity and domesticity. Each estate forms a community, the ‘heartland’ which rallies its residents around a system of civic values that organize it and echo the state’s tenets of family, cohesiveness and harmony. Inhabitation of a HDB flat and adherence to state ideology becomes an implied condition of citizenship. Uniformity becomes a crucial factor in the success of HDB housing and the nation.

This dissertation proposes that through its function to consolidate and spatialize the civic values of the nation, the HDB block becomes a heterotopia, a site for the definition and contestation of the Singaporean identity. Inseparable from state ideology, the HDB block forms a dialogue with Foucault’s discourse on structures of power and discipline, with its utilization of space to manage and organize inhabitants both physically and psychologically. The dwelling and occupation of the HDB block juxtaposes, within its confines, several overlapping and frictional sites, thereby producing a condition of monstrosity. Monsters, scientifically identified as a category of beings who are unaccommodated by and oppose systems of power, embody the resistant force to power and normalization.

This dissertation argues that the HDB’s unrelenting and specific requirements for inhabitation breed monsters unique to its architectural context. Monstrosity becomes the apparatus through which the heterotopic HDB block can be revealed and examined in its primary function as Singapore’s prescription of citizenry and domesticity. Through an understanding of monstrosity as contextually located and created within the state constructed monolith of the HDB, this dissertation presents the monster as evidence of a complex relationship between power, form and societal milieus in the constitution of architecture.

In this paper Foucault’s thought on monstrosity is explored. Monsters
appear whenever and wherever knowledge/power assemblages emerge. That which eludes the latter, and which threatens to subvert them, is the monstrous. Foucault distinguished the production, throughout history, of juridical-natural monsters, moral monsters, and political monsters. In this paper it is argued that Foucault must have sensed that monstrosity eludes all notions of identity and difference, and therefore also the notion that places it ‘outside’. It is the space of emergence itself, i.e. the location where sheer potentiality becomes the possible of and in the event. All monstrosity is therefore deeply, and inevitably, political. It is the promise of unsettling subversion.

Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, originally published in Arabic in 2013 and translated into English by Jonathan Wright in 2018, is set in the chaotic socio-political condition of post-invasion Iraq. The Nobel exacerbates the horror of sectarian violence by introducing a Frankensteinesque atmosphere of magical realism. However, this paper concentrates on the concept of monstrosity as presented in the novel. The paper shows how the concept of monstrosity, being a fluid one, problematizes the notion of identity. By carefully considering the multiple manifestations of 'monstrous identity', the paper demonstrates that 'monstrosity' is not an easily identifiable physical attribute found in conventional deformed-body 'monsters'; nor is it just a characteristic trait of an evil mind; rather, it is a highly nuanced term which complexly affects social identities.

A sensibilidade literária do século XIX, permeada pelo Romantismo, problematizou e tornou fluidas as fronteiras convencionais entre concepções antagônicas como belo e feio, bem e mal, real e fantástico. Redefiniu o que a tradição estética denominava de “grotesco”, dando a este uma importância inédita para a arte. Mas, mais do que ser simplesmente uma opção estética, a recorrência do tema da monstruosidade em obras ficcionais oitocentistas frequentemente desnudou as inquietações da época a respeito do devir histórico. Tomando como base essas premissas, iremos analisar o romance hugoano Notre-Dame de Paris, em seus possíveis entrelaçamentos com uma visão da História como monstruosidade.

Yôkaigaku, the "Japanese demonology", and the creatures which it deals with, constitute a scientific field of study in Japan since the Meiji period (1868-1912) -when in 1886 Inoue Enryô founded the Yôkai Kenkyûkai (Association for yôkai studies) -, but possesses deeper roots which spread in the Edo period (1603-1867). Nevertheless, it is only from the '80 that it started to be object of research in the West, and in more recent time landed also in Italy. This article aims to analyze in a critical view the historical path of yôkaigaku from origins to the recent western studies, putting emphasis on the main changes and new developments, in order to build a first step of dialogue with this field of anthropological studies in our country.

The authors deploy a critical cultural critique that extends the work of monstrosity scholars and other researchers who are interested in the application of zombie apocalypse analyses to critiques of contemporary nationalistic and social controversies. World War Z sets in motion a series of cinematic dynamics that invite audiences to consider how Israeli securitization of Jerusalem might serve as the world’s best hope for containing the zombie
apocalypse. By decoding the “monstering” features World
War Z, the authors note the heuristic value of understanding how the rhetoric of autoimmunity influences mediated perceptions of Israeli and Palestinian conflicts.

In the thesis "The Monstrous Other in Thomas Harris' Hannibal Lecter Novels and Their Film Adaptations", the author analyzes how the monstrosity of Dr. Hannibal Lecter manifests itself, juxtaposing his character with other foreground moral monsters depicted in Thomas Harris' works and films based on them.

The basis for the first chapter is Monstruarium by Anna Wieczorkiewicz. This work explains the term "monstrosity" throughout history and the direction of changes that took place in teratology including in its research area both the deformed human bodies, animals with duplicated limbs, fantastic monsters as well as the reactions they caused in human beings.

In the second chapter, Thomas Harris' novels and their film adaptations are analysed in order to determine what did Dr. Hannibal Lecter's monstrosity consist of, to describe its cause, symbolism and place that the character of the cannibalistic doctor takes in culture.

Next, the character of Vladis Grutas, the leader of a group of Hilfswillige who helped Nazi Forces during the Second World War is introduced. Grutas along with his companions commits an act of active starvation cannibalism by killing and eating Hannibal’s younger sister – Mischa and perpetrates other criminal acts.

In Chapter Four, the character of Francis Dolarhyde, also known as “The Tooth Fairy” or “Red Dragon” is discussed. Dolarhyde is a character in whom moral and physical monstrosity overlap. Born with cleft palate and flat nose, Francis, who throughout his entire life experiences abuse both at the hands of his peers and his grandmother falls into psychosis and desires to become the dragon from the painting by William Blake, by committing acts of murder on families, being his vengeance on and directed at the mother figure.

The character described in the fifth chapter is Jame Gumb, also known as “Buffalo Bill”. Gumb is a serial killer, killing women in order to bereave them of their skin and to use it to create his own quasi-transsexual suit, who, similarly to Dolarhyde, fell in the past victim to unhappy childhood and suffered due to the strict norms imposed by the society.

In the last – sixth chapter of the thesis, the character of the disfigured pedophile Mason Verger, who wants to take revenge on Lecter, guilty of his permanent physical disfiguration, is introduced. Verger is the character in whose case moral and physical monstrosity overlaps to the greatest extent from all the monsters described in the thesis.

Le monstre, cette figure mythique dont tous les artistes et les sociétés s’emparent pour raconter une histoire. Mais quel est-il ? Un cyclope dans L’Odyssée de Homère, une sorcière pour la société moyenâgeuse, la légende qui hante le Loch Ness en Ecosse.
Le monstre change d’aspect selon le média et l’espace qui l’abritent. Le monstre se lit, se regarde, mais jamais ne se rencontre. Le monstre est insaisissable parce qu’on ne sait jamais à quoi il ressemble. Son image s’est encore complexifiée et a évolué au fil des siècles, parce que les cultures ont commencé à donner au monstre une dimension psychologique: il n’est plus seulement beau ou laid, mais il est aussi bon ou mauvais.
L'intégralité du mémoire est disponible sur:  http://www.grin.com/e-book/310970/

Dogs have an enduring symbolism in images and texts that encompass both positive and negative meanings. During the German Renaissance, whole groups of people in remote regions of the world were portrayed with the heads of dogs in both literature and visual culture. This paper examines the monstrous race, the dog-headed cynocephali, within the social context of German Renaissance prints.

आतापर्यंत जगात अनेक महात्मे होऊन गेले. त्यांनी त्यांच्या त्यांच्या समाजासाठी उत्तुंग कार्य करून किर्ती संपादन केली. ते सर्वगुणसंपन्न नव्हते तरीसुध्दा त्यांच्या विषिश्ट लोकोत्तर कार्यामुळे व लोकसंग्रहामुळे ते अजरामर झाले. हे सर्व महात्मे एका विषिश्ट ध्येय्याने प्रेरीत झालेले होते. अविरत कश्ट करण्याची तयारी, अफाट लोकसंग्रह, आपल्या समाजाबद्दल प्रेम, सामान्य माणसाबद्दलची अपार करूणा, उदंड आत्मविष्वास, कर्तव्यकठोरता, षासन संस्था चालविण्यासाठी लागणार सत्वगुणयुक्त रजोगुण, दुरदर्षित्व, द्रश्टेपणा, समाजाची उन्नती करण्याची तीव्र इच्छा हे सर्व गुण थोडयाफार प्रमाणात या सर्व महात्म्यांमध्ये दिसून येतात. परंतु हे सर्वच महात्मे ‘युगपुरूश’ या संज्ञेत पात्र ठरत नाहीत. जगातील अषा अनेक व्यक्तिंमध्ये एक नाव अधिक उठून दिसते ते म्हणजे महाराश्ट्राचे लाडके दैवत ‘छत्रपती षिवाजी महाराज’ यांचे!

Beginning with Plato and Aristotle, Western philosophy grounded in the Greek tradition has elided the female body with deformity and dysfunction. Viewed a mutilated male, the female body is framed as an aberration too incapacitated by its reproductive qualities to pursue philosophical endeavors. Consequently, the female body is thus reduced to its functional process and becomes an object instrumental in pursuit of patriarchal goals. In honor of the bicentennial anniversary of Frankenstein (1818), these ideas are explored via the character Justine Moritz. Through her, and the treatment of her, the female body is revealed to be a source of anxiety from the male perspective – a monstrous imitation that complicates issues of subjectivity and objectivity. Using the work of George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in the tradition of embodiment philosophy, this paper suggests that disentangling the female body from monstrosity will require the male body to also be contextualized as a reproductive body. A characteristic that has primarily been forced upon its female counterpart leaving the male almost invisible.

The figure of the giant has a long history in literature, from the Bible to classical epic poetry to the chanson de geste tradition of the Middle Ages. This project looks at this manlike form of monster in two anonymous works of the medieval English Alliterative Revival. In my analysis of the Alliterative Morte Arthure, I analyze the rich physical description of the giant King Arthur encounters on Mont Saint-Michel, using the giant’s body to understand the poet’s ideas about monstrosity, and how the concept is employed to retell an existing Arthurian legend in a way that responds to the cultural and political anxieties of late-fourteenth-century England, events such as the Peasants’ Rebellion in 1381 and the deposition of King Richard II in 1399. In my analysis of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, I also analyze the Green Knight’s detailed physical description to explore the Gawain-Poet’s own conception of monstrosity, one that stands in compelling contrast to that of the Alliterative Morte Arthure poet. I explore how the Gawain-poet uses this alternate view of the monstrous to produce what I read as a possible critique of the political system of late-fourteenth-century England. I posit that in both these works, the monster serves as more than just an antagonist for the hero; both King Arthur and Sir Gawain are significantly transformed by their encounter with the monstrous, a transformation triggered by a confrontation not with the monstrous other but the monstrous self.

Attitudes towards women as measures of all deviation from societal norms, beginning with the female body in itself, are often situated into the social conscious that justifies their exclusion from political and economic life. For those whose womanhood intersects with other axes of oppression, such as race or queerness, capitalist society has further embedded traditions of abjection and exclusion for what threatens the purity of whiteness and maleness at the core of universal humanism. In examining these historically anchored conceptions of women’s bodies as monstrous and volatile, analyzing these categorizations in the flesh is much more potent, being forced to confront the traumas of their materiality. This paper investigates how many women in performance art have positioned themselves in such a way to showcase the material conditions of being racially, sexually, and/or ‘naturally’ other.


*This paper is published in a conference anthology and is based on the second chapter of my MA thesis.

To date, the majority of scholars have framed the creature in Frankenstein as a monster. By focusing on a single embodiment, scholars have neglected the monstrous aspects pervasive in the novel and ignored the fact that Shelley’s creature actually reflects nineteenth-century Britain. This thesis argues that there is no monster, and Shelley’s intention was to display the monstrosity of her own society –– not to write a monster novel. Through a textual and historical analysis, this thesis will elucidate the spiritual, physical, mental, and social monstrosities within Frankenstein.

Shelley addressed the monstrosities of her society through the creature, nine of  which have been selected for this study and assorted into three categories: three spiritual, three physical and mental, and three social. The first three monstrosities connect the creation of the creature, his soul, and the science used to create him with the theological debates of the period regarding Christian resurrection, the status of the slave’s soul, and the changing status of science in Shelley’s era. The three physical and mental monstrosities address the creature’s hybridity, strength, and mental acuity as a reflection of monstrous births, and Shelley’s own experience with human frailty and mental instability. The last three monstrosities examine the role of animals, women, and family in the novel, and how the creature reflects these various aspects in the context of how Shelley experienced them in the nineteenth-century. All nine monstrosities appear to reflect upon Victor’s creature to make him seem more monstrous, but the creature is actually the mirror of a monstrous society and not an embodiment of monstrosity himself.

Scholarship on monstrosity has often focused on those beings that produce fear, terror, anxiety, and other forms of unease. However, it is clear from the semantic range of the term “monster” that the category encompasses beings who evoke a wide range of emotions. I suggest that scholars have largely displaced first-person accounts of the monstrous and those accounts which do not rely upon horror oranxiety, and I propose a three-category system to correct this displacement. These categories draw from Derrida’s notion of the domestication of the monster and Žižek’s notion of a “fantasy screen” for the monstrous. These categories encourage further research, both between categories of the monstrous and categories that would not typically fit within this descriptor.

This paper seeks to explain Grendel's place in medieval society by comparing his rendition in Beowulf to his modern counterpart in "The 13th Warrior" - The Wendol. Both monsters help illuminate medieval social anxieties - allowing us to better understand medieval culture as a whole.

The paper analyzes the imagery of the Gigantomachy in Manilius' Astronomica, in two different functions: the first metaliterary and metascientific, the second in the form of mythical narration, identifying the intertextual relations with the Greek-Latin mythological subject and, inter alia, with the Augustan poetry and the Sublime poetic.

Platon dans sa République déclare: « Façonnons par la pensée une image de l’âme, pour que celui qui tient ces propos réalise ce qu’il dit. – Quelle image ? – Une image, comme celle de ces natures antiques dont les mythes rapportent la genèse : la Chimère, Scylla, Cerbère, et un certain nombre d’autres êtres constitués d’un ensemble de formes naturelles multiples réunies en un seul être». Force est donc de constater que cette volonté créatrice fait intrinsèquement partie de l’être humain.
Cette volonté créatrice est fruit de l’imagination, qui selon le Vocabulaire Européen des Philosophies de Barbara Cassin dérive d’imaginatio, terme découlant d’imago qui évoque l’effigie, le portrait. La racine grecque phantasia dont la traduction française est la lumière s’est, elle, développée dans le sens de fantaisie, fantasme. « La différence phantasia / imaginatio, dont témoignent les difficultés que les Latins ont éprouvées à traduire le grec, est celle entre la force créatrice des apparitions et la faculté reproductive des images, chacun des termes pouvant lui- même être travaillé du dedans par cette tension et les jugements de valeur qui s’y attachent.... Cette même tension détermine la place de l’imagination dans le jeu des facultés et des modalités d’être au monde. Est-ce une faculté nécessaire à l’exercice des autres facultés, entre passivité et activité, ou, comme dit Pascal, une maîtresse d’erreur et de fausseté?».
Créativité, imagination, fantaisie et fantasme, il y a un peu de tout ceci dans cette création humaine que sont les hybrides et dès lors s’intéresser à eux, à leur genèse, c’est s’intéresser aux tréfonds de l’âme humaine. D’où viennent donc les créatures hybrides ? Pourquoi les hommes ont-ils imaginé des individus nouveaux en agglomérant des parties de ceux qu’ils pouvaient voir autour d’eux? Comment leur est venue l’idée d’assembler des parties hétéroclites pour en faire un nouveau tout, une création inédite, créée non pas par la divinité mais par eux-mêmes ? Tant de questions qui vont bien plus loin que le simple motif décoratif qui ornera les palais de la Renaissance. Au-delà des Grottesches, des grotesques, dont le nom dérive précisément du fait que ces motifs sont des créations qui s’inspirent de ce que les artistes ont découvert en visitant les grottes romaines, des caves qui par effondrement des voûtes antiques donnaient un accès direct aux palais romains, dont la fameuse Domus Aurea, la Maison Dorée de Néron ornée de ces créatures monstrueuses, ces hybrides furent un des premiers indices des civilisations anciennes que virent les érudits du XVIe.