Monstrous Reflection

This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2014. By engaging and questioning existing definitions and ideas, all of the essays in this volume represent the idea of a ‘monstrous reflection'in one way or another. Monsters can serve as a means to explore the cultural anxieties they embody and the reasons for these anxieties. Thus monsters act as mirrors highlighting the causes for the creation of categories. A reflection can also be a comment or statement applicable in that the monstrous or the word ‘monster'becomes a label of otherness and exclusion. This label is sometimes a construction, a discursive and rhetorical trope, which only serves to other those deemed different or undesirable, suggesting that the monster might not always be monstrous. This volume is about the ones gazing into the mirror and the ‘things'staring back at humanity along with the uncomfortable truths that are revealed in the process. Table of Contents Introduction • Elsa Bouet and Petra Rehling Part I: Political Monstrosity Monstrosity in Italian Politics • Paola Attolino Fanatics and Absolutists: Communist Monsters in John le Carre’s Cold War Fiction • Toby Manning Removing the Blindfold: Power, Truth and Testimony • Adriana Spahr Monstrous Embodiments of Post-Modern Capitalism and Corporatism in the Cinema of the ‘New French Extremity’ • Sophie Walon Part II: Creating the Monster Beautiful Lepers, Monstrous Humans: The Impossibility of Utopia in the Strugatskys’ The Ugly Swans • Elsa Bouet The Name of the Beast: Monstrosity and the Subhuman in Michael Gira and Nietzsche • Michael T. Miller ‘I Can’t even Hate Bates’: Sufferance, Guilt and Strategies of Victimization in Psycho • Marcia Heloisa Language and Monstrosity in the Works of Tommaso Landolfi • Irene Bulla Part III: Locating the Monster The Evil City: Geographical Space in George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World • Niculae Gheran The Human and the Inhuman in Shohei Imamura’s The Ballad of Narayama • Carlo Comanducci Beyond the Crisis: Turn of the Tide for the Monstrous Duality of Hong Kong Cinema • Petra Rehling Monster as a Figure of Memory • Mateusz Chaberski Part IV: Bodily Monstrosity Jeepers Creepers: Queer Bogeyman • Sergio Fernando Juárez Caliban and Aaron: Monstrous Bodies and Monstrous Language • Kristen Wright Making Yellow Monstrous: Frankenstein to Fu Manchu • Viv Chadder Inherent Monstrosity in Narrative: The Witchy Writer and Liquid Identity • Brooke Maggs Part V: Gender Monstrosities Revenge as a Means to Preserve Individual Sovereignty: Monstrous Women in French Literature • Mateusz Orszulak ‘Ugly as a Foetus’: Female Bodies and Abject Sacredness in Patrick White’s Riders in the Chariot • Madeleine Bendixen Racial and Sexual Fantasies in the Allegoric Orgies of Venus Noir and Black Swan • Fjoralba Miraka ‘She’s No Hag’: New Visions and Narratives of Grendel’s Mother in Zemeckis’ Beowulf • Almudena Nido Cyclopes, Hundred-Handers, Typhon and the Mechanisms of Monstrosity in Hesiod’s Theogony • Camila Aline Zanon