Abstract: Frankenstein began as the nightmare of an unwed teenage mother in Geneva, Switzerland, in 1816. At a time when the moral universe was shifting and advances in scientific knowledge promised humans dominion over that which had been God's alone, Mary Shelley envisioned a story of human presumption and its misbegotten consequences. Two centuries later, that story is still constantly retold and reinterpreted, from Halloween cartoons to ominous allusions in the public debate, capturing and conveying meaning central to our consciousness today and our concerns for tomorrow. From Victorian musical theater to Boris Karloff with neck bolts, to invocations at the President's Council on Bioethics, the monster and his myth have inspired everyone from cultural critics to comic book addicts. This is a lively and eclectic cultural history, illuminated with dozens of pictures and illustrations, and told with skill and humor. Susan Tyler Hitchcock uses film, literature, history, science, and even punk music to help us understand the meaning of this monster made by man.

Abstract: To what extent do political cartoonists use popular culture references to make sense of political culture? Seeing images in 2004, depicting Vice President Dick Cheney as Darth Vader from Star Wars, John Edwards as the Cheshire Cat from Alice in Wonderland, and John Kerry as Frankenstein's monster, it is clear that some editorial cartoonists make connections between our popular culture and our political culture. Why, and with what possible consequences?

Abstract: Just when you thought it was safe to go back in the water, 1 the monster that surfaced during the Terri Schiavo case again has been found lurking below, alive and hungry. And you are about to go fo...

Abstract: Social scientists who want their research to influence social policy would do well to work with executive branch agencies, especially at state and local levels. Agency administrators are ready to use social science theories and evidence if the social science is brought to them. The article offers six principles for work with administrative agencies: (1) individual leaders matter, (2) timing matters, (3) ideas matter, (4) costs, and who bears the costs matter, (5) government is not monolithic, and (6) one cannot control the uses to which data are put. Working with government, like waltzing with a monster, is not unproblematic, but attending to these principles can help avoid some bruised toes.

Abstract: Traditional critical paradigms have generally failed to come to grips with the character of Grendel's mother in Beowulf. As a monster in the heroic order, and as a female in a masculine world, she confounds simple definitions and crosses the boundaries that define the limits of agency. Grendel's mother functions as a nexus for the representation of the many dialectical tensions – male/female, human/monster, hall/wilderness, feud/peace, symbolic/semiotic – that both underwrite and critique the poem's symbolic order. As a result, the character offers insight into the symbolic process and the ways in which readers approach the distant world of the medieval text.

Abstract:  ) 441 – 452 © 2007 The Author. Journal Compilation © 2007 Blackwell Publishing Ltd,  Garsington Road, Oxford OX   DQ, UK and  Main Street, Malden, MA  , USA Blackwell Publishing Ltd Oxford, UK EMED arly Medieval Europe 0963-9462 © 2007 Th Aut o . Journal Compilation © Blackwell Publishing Ltd XXX riginal Article The monster and the critics P lippe Buc The monster and the critics: a ritual reply 1

Abstract: Leviathan, the Beast of Myth: Medusa, Dionysos, and the Riddle of Hobbes's Sovereign Monster

Abstract: Foreword by Richmond K. Greene. A Note on the Text. Introduction. 1. "If You Turned into a Monster" 2. Symbols and Symbolic Play. 3. From Symbol to Energy. 4. Energy. 5. The Power of No. 6. Falling and Leaping. 7. Interlude with Monsters. 8. Form and Formlessness. 9. Harnessing Chaos: Helping Children with Neurological Disorders. 10. Bacoming the Storm: Using the Energy of Symptoms. 11. Finding the Treasure. 12. Closing Scenes. 13. The Dragon. 14. Mothers and Fathers. Epilogue: In the Footsteps of Pan. References. Recommended Reading. Index.

Abstract: This essay explores the cross-promotion between Nick Broomfield's documentary Aileen: Life and Death of a Serial Killer (UK, 2003) and Patty Jenkins' independent feature film Monster (USA, 2003), both of which profess to offer the ‘real’ story of Aileen Wuornos, the woman called America's ‘first female serial killer’. The debate among critics about whether it is the documentary or the drama that has the most to offer is staged as a contest between reality and fiction. A close examination of this debate, however, reveals the extent to which the categories of reality and fiction are in fact interwoven, with interpretation of both films reliant not only on how they relate to actuality but how they relate to each other. This essay considers how the two films trade in images of Wuornos as monstrous other, and how that trade is revealing about the perceived status and relationship between documentary and dramatizations of real life and the kind of work these forms of fact-based representation are seen to perform in public culture. Of particular interest is the tension between reality and performance, as revealed through the media focus on the actress Charlize Theron's transformation into Wuornos in Monster.

Abstract: The world of Antiquity and Middle Ages was replete with monsters and satyrs. Modernity and civilisation is shadowed by monstrous figures that constitute ‘the abject’ and ‘discontent’. This paper examines the question of representation and the manner in which the figure of the monster reappears after the events of 9/11. It discusses the way production about the other has been disciplined and policed and offers some reflections on theory in order to consider how a post-colonial ethical stance might offer a better way to engage in the production of non-coercive knowledge.

Abstract: SYMMETRY AND THE MONSTER by Mark Ronan Oxford University Press, 2006, 255 pp. ISBN: 0-19-280722-6 Have you ever wondered how many grains of sand there are in all the beaches of the Atlantic Ocean? Or how many leaves there are on all the trees in the Amazon rain forest? As difficult as those quantities would be to imagine, it's even harder imagining a connection between those large quantities and the universe as a whole. In his book, Symmetry and the Monster, Mark Ronan details a path toward the discovery of a finite group having more elements than the Earth has atoms. At the same time he provides unexpected connections between this "monstrosity" and other areas of study, including number theory, quantum theory, and possibly even the space-time continuum. In many fields of study, it's common to break complex structures down into basic building blocks, such as studying molecules by looking at their atomic structures. No matter how a molecule is split, it always has the same atomic structure. Ronan uses this analogy in the language of groups. In group theory, the basic "atoms" are the simple groups and, given any finite group, the group can be decomposed into simple groups and the decomposition will be the same, no matter how the group is decomposed. In this exposition, Ronan focuses on what he calls the "atoms of symmetry," the finite simple groups that arise from looking at permutations that interchange some objects while leaving others fixed, not unlike the rotations of a Rubik's Cube. There are twenty-six of these atoms that do not fit into the four infinite classes of finite simple groups, and it is the classification of these twenty-six groups, called the sporadic simple groups, that motivates the discussion. Twenty-six groups may not seem like a large number, but the smallest of these groups has 7920 elements. The largest, the Monster, has 808,017,424,794,512,875,886,459,904,961,710,757,005,754, 368,000,000,000 elements and can be realized as a group of rotations in 196,883 dimensions. I enjoyed reading about the shear magnitude of these groups, and about how those working on the classification were able to garner meaningful information from seemingly intractable objects. Ronan's account of the quest for classifying these twenty-six groups and ultimately finding the famous Monster group begins with a discussion of the life and mathematical contributions of Evariste Galois, who used symmetry while discovering the insolvability of a fifth-degree polynomial equation. …

Abstract: When Victor Frankenstein’s creation emerged from his workshop in Ingolstadt to embark on his journey of knowledge and murder, the image of the Gothic monster was born. With his “black lips,” “yellow skin,” “watery eyes” and “shrivelled complexion,” Frankenstein’s hideous progeny was not only an aesthetic disappointment to his creator but also a reminder and embodiment of his unlawful and unnatural scientific pursuits (39). A deformed, physical “mess,” the Gothic monster has come to represent a figure marked for his strangeness and excess, his difference from the norm-ality of social, cultural, moral, physical, psychological and human mores. He is undoubtedly other, unable ever to “fit in” and doomed to be repudiated and end his life “lost in darkness and distance” (191). The monstrous other has become a staple device of many Gothic novels and films, taking the shape of, for example, Stevenson’s Mr Hyde, Wells’s Beast People and Count Orlok in Nosferatu (1922). His very being, appearance and behaviour establish him as a reverse image of how normal people should be, look and act, a negative that turns light into dark, good into bad, self into other. These binaries have come under attack in recent Gothic criticism and writing that highlight the link, rather than the division, within the monstrous dichotomy.

Abstract: Poet, painter, self-described funny guy, idiot, failure, pickpocket, and anti-artist par excellence, Francis Picabia was a defining figure in the Dada movement; indeed, Andre Breton called Picabia one of the only "true" Dadas. Yet very little of Picabia's poetry and prose has been translated into English, and his literary experiments have never been the subject of close critical study. I Am a Beautiful Monster is the first definitive edition in English of Picabia's writings, gathering a sizable array of Picabia's poetry and prose and, most importantly, providing a critical context for it with an extensive introduction and detailed notes by the translator. Picabia's poetry and prose is belligerent, abstract, polemical, radical, and sometimes simply baffling. For too long, Picabia's writings have been presented as raw events, rule-breaking manifestations of inspirational carpe diem. This book reveals them to be something entirely different: maddening in their resistance to meaning, full of outrageous posturing, and hiding a frail, confused, and fitful personality behind egoistic bravura. I Am a Beautiful Monster provides the texts of of Picabia's significant publications, all presented complete, many of them accompanied by their original illustrations.

Abstract: Carrillo Rowe provides an analysis of Monster's Ball as a cultural narrative of white masculinity's redemption from the atrocities of racism through an interracial love story that erases white masculinity's national history and implication in a racist past while it displaces the black female body from that history and identification with the struggle for reparation. The nexus of sex, race, and desire is used to produce a new whiteness consistent with the emerging national multicultural logics of color blindness by undermining the narrative, memory, identity, and racing of bodies grounding the logic of reparation.

Abstract: Just as we can never embrace [...] a single person, but embrace the whole of her or his family romance, so we can never read a poet without reading the whole of his or her family romance as a poet. (Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence 94) THE present essay began life as an attempt to explore the possible relationship between the fantasy writing of Philip Pullman and that of George MacDonald. However, that attempt rapidly encountered the force of Harold Bloom's warning against the error of treating poets as if they were self-contained individuals. In The Anxiety of Influence Bloom is admittedly making specific reference to the relations between lyric poets, whereas the work to be discussed in the present paper is fantasy writing in prose. Nevertheless I believe that Bloom's analysis of the "family romances" of "poets as poets" can be adapted to apply to writers in other literary genres, and to the so-to-speak "familial" relations that constitute a writer as a creative literary individual. Indeed, Bloom himself sought in his 1980 paper "Clinamen: Towards a Theory of Fantasy" to apply his "anxiety of influence" theory not only to the genealogy of the literary genre--or rather sub-genre (2)--of fantasy, but also to the relationships between particular instances of fantasy writing, for example the relation of his own The Flight to Lucifer to David Lindsay's A Voyage to Arcturus. Of course the gender bias of Bloom's famous theory of "the anxiety of influence" was long ago pointed out by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar in their The Madwoman in the Attic; this is an issue to which I shall return later in this essay. What I hope to show in the present paper is that however tenuous and complex the "family" connections that link Pullman and MacDonald may be, they tend to be dominated by another figure who is closely and inextricably associated with both of them: C.S. Lewis. Lewis figures, firstly, as a bad father to Pullman, a seemingly inevitable precursor whose writing seems to fascinate as well as repel Pullman. Secondly, Lewis appears as MacDonald's dutiful son, devoted to his spiritual (if not literary) master. Ultimately, however, there seems to me to be something hollow and unconvincing about both these versions of a filial relationship. In the first place, Lewis is arguably not the moral monster that Pullman makes him out to be; and secondly, MacDonald is more than just the spiritual director (important as that is) that Lewis presents us with. For one thing, MacDonald is, I will argue, a much better writer than Lewis would have us believe. While there is not necessarily any "taint of insincerity" in these misrepresentations, only perhaps something rather voulu (as Owen Barfield once said of C.S. Lewis [xi]), nevertheless Pullman and Lewis could also be seen as "framing" their precursors, in all the senses of Barbara Johnson's memorable usage of the term "frame" (Johnson). However, it is Harold Bloom's "map of misreading," in its own way as arcane as Johnson's poststructuralist subtleties, that seems more apt here, and more in tune with the Gnostic sympathies of both Pullman and MacDonald. Without venturing too far into the battery of explicitly Gnostic categories that Bloom elaborates in The Anxiety of Influence and A Map of Misreading, one might suggest that it is the first two of his six strategies for misreading--or "revisionary ratios," as Bloom calls them--that might seem to apply most readily to the relationships that are the subject of the present paper. Clinamen (or "swerving") might arguably apply to the relation of Philip Pullman and C.S. Lewis, with the former "swerving" away from his precursor in a corrective movement. Bloom's second "revisionary ratio" tessera (or "antithetical completion") might seem more appropriate to the way in which C.S. Lewis (as I hope to show below) "antithetically 'completes' his precursor, by so reading [MacDonald's work] as to retain its terms but to mean them in another sense, as though the precursor had failed to go far enough" (Anxiety 14). …

Abstract: This article will argue that the legal idea of the monster offers to inform contemporary thinking in relation to outsiders. Drawing on the work of Foucault it will be contended that the process, whereby at least some human beings are positioned as outsiders, is structured like a monster. That is to say, at least some constructions or representations of human difference, both legal and non-legal, are informed by the monster category. The article will think through and unpack Foucault’s the idea of the monster, and his sufficient and necessary conditions of monster production. In the process, the article will identify two contemporary figures that bear the legacy of this legal category. These are the figures of Foucault’s abnormal individual and the human/animal hybrid of genetic medicine, figures that can neither be reduced to products of law or disentangled from its domain. An emphasis on the importance of the template of the monster in understanding these contemporary figures points to its relevance to legal scholarship within fields such as gender, sexuality and race, and bioethics respectively.

Abstract: The book Symmetry and the Monster: One of the Greatest Quests of Mathematics describes historical events leading up to the discovery of the Monster sporadic group, the largest simple sporadic group. It also expounds the significance and deep relationships between this group and other areas of mathematics and theoretical physics. It begins, in the prologue, with a nice overview of some of the mathematical drama surrounding the discovery of the Monster and its subsequent relationship to number theory (the so-called Moonshine conjectures). From a historical perspective, the book traces back to the roots of group theory, Galois theory, and steadily runs through time through the many famous mathematicians who contributed to group theory, including Lie, Killing and Cartan. Throughout, the author has provided a very nice and deep insight into the sociological and scientific problems at the time, and gives the reader a very prominent inside view of the real people behind the mathematics. The book should be an enjoyable read to anyone with an interest in the history of mathematics. For the non-mathematician the book makes a good, and mostly successful, attempt at being non-technical. Technical mathematical jargon is replaced with more heuristic, intuitive terminology, making the mathematical descriptions in the book fairly easy going. A glossary\hspace{0.25pc} of\hspace{0.25pc} terminology for noindent the more scientifically inclined is included in various footnotes throughout the book and in a comprehensive listing at the end of the book. Some more technical material is also included in the form of appendices at the end of the book. Some aspects of physics are also explained in a simple, intuitive way. The author further attempts at various places to give the non-specialist a glimpse into what mathematical proof is all about, and explains the difficulties and technicalities involved in this very nicely (for instance, he mentions the various 100+ page articles that appeared in the hey-day of finite group theory, indicating the enormous technical nature of the subject). The book nicely paints a dramatic landscape leading up to the discovery of the Monster group, and the problems that remain to this day in trying to understand its significance. One can really take from this book a feel of the mathematics leading up to its appearance, and the importance of the classification problem which was responsible for this. One also really gets an appreciation of the efforts and commitments of the mathematicians who contributed to the subject. All in all, this book achieves a nice balance between providing a beautiful historical account of group theory, and explaining the classification problem for finite groups in a way that is accessible to non-scientists. This should prove to be a good read for both the layperson interested in mathematics or mathematical physics, and also both mathematicians and physicists alike.

Abstract: In Narrative and Dramatic Sources of Shakespeare, Geoffrey Bullough observes that The Tempest's "didactic nature," as well as Prospero's "masterful aloofness" and "use of the supernatural" have encouraged some critics to treat the play as an allegory. The whole piece, ... permeated with Christian feeling, ... has been interpreted as a Mystery play in which Prospero, if not the Deity, is "the hierophant or initiating priest" in a rite of purification which the Court party must willynilly undergo.... Caliban ... becomes the Monster to be overcome, and Miranda Wisdom, the Celestial Bride. Though wary of such allegorizing, Bullough has "no doubt that in The Tempest, more than in the other 'romances,' Shakespeare was thinking of human life in a cosmic way," eliciting "a moral perfection in which reason and the affections would be united with grace." (1) Grace Tiffany notes that in the romances "grace" appears more often and with deepening meaning as Shakespeare moves "away from a dramaturgy emphasizing tragic choice to one focusing on divine rescue." (2) Divine activity is, however, complexly portrayed in The Tempest. Certainly Pericles, Cymbeline, and The Winter's Tale show central characters rescued from tyrants or their own tyranny, and innocents resurrected from death, by an intervening deity (Diana, Jupiter, Apollo) as well as by wise counsel or medical-magical ministry (Helicanus and Cerimon in Pericles; Belarius, Pisanio, and Cornelius in Cymbeline; Camillo and Paulina in The Winter's Tale) and by the talismanic power of a chaste maid (Marina, Innogen, Perdita). In The Tempest, however, "divine rescue" occurs with a difference. Unlike previous protagonists (Pericles, Posthumus, Leontes) who steadily decline in moral agency, Prospero is a benevolent magus who uses supernatural power (or a theatrical simulacrum thereof) to redeem an entire ship of state. Though he too has engaged in a neglectful quest, received aid from a wise counselor, and been inspired by an angelic daughter, he now shows virtuoso control of "spirits" who can alter both settings and to some degree souls by means of magical/theatrical productions. The opening tempest, with Prospero's choric follow-up, displays the magus's power via the tour-de-force acting and nonillusionist staging at Blackfriars and the Globe. (3) An explicit theatricality will make the presentation of divinity (as well as the final resurrection/reunion) quite different from the previous romances--indeed, polar opposite to the miraculous ending of The Winter's Tale. Like Jupiter in Cymbeline (5.4), Juno in The Tempest (4.1) mechanically "descends," and her masque extensively displays the beneficent role of divinity (and implicitly, of royalty) in human life; but since Juno, Ceres, and Iris are emphatically "enacted" by Prospero's spirits, they are far less shrouded in mystery than Diana, Jupiter, and Apollo in the previous plays. (4) Spirits, which by mine Art I have from their confines called to enact My present fancies.... Thou and thy meaner fellows your last service Did worthily perform; and I must use you In such another trick. (5) As with the tempest and the vanishing banquet, Prospero explicitly creates and controls each spectacle. Implicitly, these ornately clad "Spirits" execute the monarch's power as a viceroy of God, yet in this play their masque-function fails. Instead of banishing vulgarity and evil, these artificial deities are themselves dispelled by the encroaching baseness of Caliban's conspiracy. These events acutely show the gods as artful projections of the magus's mind and "spirits." Accompanied by a "strange, hollow, and confused noise," they "heavily vanish" at Prospero's command: "Avoid; no more!" (4.1.139 s.d., 142). This dispersal of pagan deities (and of masque elements) in The Tempest makes us question the nature of its supernatural dimension. …

Abstract: Suzan-Lori Parks has created two Hesters. Hester La Negrita in In the Blood and Hester Smith in Fucking A draw on and reimagine Hester Prynne in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a character who cherishes her child. However, the plays also allude to Medea, who kills her own children as an act of vengeance against their father, and to mothers in slave narratives--exemplified by Sethe in Toni Morrison's Beloved--who kill their children to save them from a worse fate. The complex genealogy or matrilineage of Suzan-Lori Parks's two Hesters against which contemporary audiences are likely to interpret the women's behavior underscores but ultimately reconciles the contradictions in their characters and behavior as mothers. These contradictions--nurturing love and murderous rage--exist side by side in Medea and Sethe and perhaps in sublimated form in Hester Prynne as well. The rage of Parks's two Hesters and their literary foremothers is not directed at the child or children whom they kill but at what the child represents, what society has made of the child or will do to the child. In killing their children, the contemporary Hesters destroy not those who have harmed them but those whom they love, those who are in some sense a part of themselves, without effecting any change in the social conditions that produced their rage. For them there is no grudging respect from the community or rescue by flying chariot. The pessimism of In the Blood and Fucking A is moderated only by the love and courage of the two Hesters, which elicit the audience's sympathy for characters ostensibly unlike any probable theatergoer. By using dramaturgy derived from Brecht, Parks shocks her audiences into confronting their own prejudices, recognizing the two Hesters as individual human beings, and acknowledging the appalling social injustices that produce the murderous rage or despair that causes loving mothers to kill their own children. Hester La Negrita in In the Blood batters to death the eldest of her five children, Jabber, in a fit of rage for which the child's behavior is merely the catalyst. In Fucking A Hester Smith kills her adult son, Monster, in order to save him from certain and imminent death by torture; she also, unknowingly, destroys her grandchild by forcibly aborting Monster's baby as an act of revenge against the mother. In this essay I will describe the psychological and sociological causes of Jabber's murder in In the Blood in light of Hester's literary namesake and the findings of sociological studies of infanticide, to which the typology of Hester's act conforms in many respects. I will then examine Parks's more exclusively "literary" take on the nurturing, murderous mother in her presentation of Hester Smith in Fucking A. Finally, I will consider how Parks's two plays illuminate the reasons why inherently repellent stories of mothers who murder their children fascinate their audiences and suggest the kind of cultural work they do. Both In the Blood and Fucking A explicitly "riff" (to borrow Parks's own term) on The Scarlet Letter, but they reimagine Hawthorne's work quite differently. Though Parks describes In the Blood as her "alien baby" that burst out of the huge (originally 52-scene) Fucking A (Garrett 134), it is the new play that more directly incorporates and revises elements of The Scarlet Letter. The violent image Parks evokes to describe the relationship between her two plays is particularly appropriate given that both of them explore what Adrienne Rich in her groundbreaking book Of Woman Born refers to as "the heart of maternal darkness"--a mother's violence against her own children (256). In the years since Rich's book first appeared psychosociological studies have confirmed that devotion to their offspring and violent rage against them typically exist side by side in mothers who purposely kill their children (Meyer and Oberman 89). In fact, we may infer that most mothers at one time or another feel both intense love for and murderous rage against their children. …

Abstract: IN the essay, "Beowulf: The Monsters and the Critics," JRR Tolkien contends with early critics who debunk the poem's poetic and structural artistry: "[T]he monsters are not an inexplicable blunder of taste; they are essential, fundamentally allied to the underlying ideas of the poem" (19) Because of Tolkien's insistence on the significance of the monsters in Beowulf, the study of monsters in Tolkien's own work is without question an essential task for scholars seeking to discover meaning in his narratives The conception of many of his own monsters reveals an underlying classical Christian doctrine that declares that evil is not created as an autonomous force; rather, it is only the perversion of good Therefore, evil functions as a kind of parasite, corrupting the pure for its own dark purposes As Frodo reminds Sam, "the Shadow [] can only mock, it cannot make: not real new things of its own" (The Lord of the Rings [LotR] 893) Some monsters of Middle-earth seek to guard the passages that allow the progress of the good, some seek to feed on the good to satisfy their dark lusts, and some seek to possess the good in order to corrupt it to their own evil wills Interestingly, Tolkien empowers many of his monsters with the weapon of vision as they struggle to achieve these ends Through a close study of three of the monsters in The Lord of the Rings, The Watcher in the Water, Shelob, and Sauron, the reader can discern a distinct, objective characterization of evil as a 'watcher' which seeks to control its victims through the power of the visual gaze This concept can then be taken a step further to examine the relationship of audience to text in Peter Jackson's film adaptation Unlike the reader, the audience as viewer can be seen as inherently resembling this distinct, objective characterization of evil 'watcher' Middle-earth is perceived through the lens of the camera that characteristically behaves like an 'evil eye' Through an examination of the function of the camera in the adaptation of the text from a written to a visual medium, one can see how Jackson's audience is cast in a role like that of Tolkien's monsters, seeking to control and dominate through the means of the visual image The Gaze in the Book Though a minor monster in the narrative, a highly significant beast that embodies the theme of 'evil seer' is The Watcher in the Water (as it is named in the ancient book of Mazarbul) This creature is believed to have been a Kraken bred by Morgoth in Utumno ("Watcher") According to Joseph Campbell in his book, The Power of Myth, "metaphorically, water is the unconscious, and the creature in the water is the life or energy of the unconscious, which has overwhelmed the conscious personality and must be disempowered, overcome, and controlled" (180) As the Company stands at the edge of the water trying to figure out the password to open the doors of Moria, Boromir awakens the monster asleep in the lake by throwing a stone As many familiar with the nature of horror (such as Alfred Hitchcock) know, that which cannot be seen is often much more threatening than that which is visible To see a thing is, in a sense, to have a measure of control over it, to have some power to resist it Frodo expresses his sense of helplessness as he feels, rather than sees, the presence of the monster: "I am afraid I don't know of what: not of wolves, or the dark behind the doors, but of something else I am afraid of the pool Don't disturb it" (LotR 300) At the moment the password is discovered and the doors are opening, the Watcher in the Water emerges from the pool and seizes Frodo Campbell explains, "In the first stage of this kind of [unconscious] adventure, the hero leaves the realm of the familiar, over which he has some measure of control, and comes to a threshold, let us say the edge of a lake or sea, where a monster of the abyss comes to meet him" (180) The Watcher in the Water represents a kind of gatekeeper whose goal, in the context of the archetypal journey, is to guard the passage through 'watching,' to keep the good hero from entering into new territory, psychological or spiritual …

Abstract: Taking Barthes's discussion of Aesop's lion as a starting point, this essay examines two uses to which the animals of philosophy and critical theory have been put: as ciphers and as indices. The twin dangers to theory's beasts, of becoming either examples of a deadening, generic "animal" or stultifying stereotypes, are assessed and potential solutions proposed. ********** Leo the Lion, mightiest of beasts, will stand up to anybody. The word 'beasts' should properly be used about lions, leopards, tigers, wolves, foxes, dogs, monkeys and others which rage about with tooth and claw--with the exception of snakes. They are called Beasts because of the violence with which they rage, and are known as 'wild' (ferus) because they are accustomed to freedom by nature and are governed (ferantur) by their own wishes. They wander hither and thither, fancy free, and they go wherever they want to go.--The Book of Beasts, trans. T.H. White In his Inaugural Lecture at the College de France, Barthes suggested that it had been his semiological project, at least during the mid-1950s, to understand "how a society produces stereotypes, i.e., triumphs of artifice, which it then consumes as innate meanings, i.e. triumphs of Nature" (471). The stereotype is insistent and dangerous, Barthes says, a monster that sleeps within every sign (461). His analyses of this process of naturalization, this "mythical speech," are well known from his Mythologies. Perhaps the most famous of all, and certainly the most frequently quoted, is his discussion of the Paris-Match cover in "Myth Today" (109-59). There is another example in this essay, however, that immediately precedes that of the soldier and the tricolour, and which is usually passed over by commentators. Imagining himself a pupil in a French lycee once more, Barthes opens his Latin grammar and reads a single sentence: quia ego nominor leo ("because I am named Lion") (115). The sentence is borrowed, he says, from the fables of Aesop. At the level of the linguistic system, Barthes points out, it has "a fullness, a richness, a history" drawn from the fable and beyond: "I am an animal, a lion, I live in a certain country. I have just been hunting, they would have me share my prey with a heifer, a cow and a goat; but being the stronger, I award myself all the shares for various reasons, the last of which is quite simply that my name is lion" (118). As part of a mythical system, however, this rich set of values and meanings is put aside. When it is used as a grammatical example, concerning the agreement of the predicate, the sentence has a new function. The old values make way for a whole new set of ideas and assumptions, this time concerning the importance of Aesop, of Latin, of grammar itself. We focus no longer on the intriguing details of Aesop's tale, but are required instead to concentrate on the "grammatical exemplarity" of the sentence (118-19). The rich detail of the lion's story is not entirely suppressed, however. By keeping it close to hand, "an instantaneous reserve of history" on which it can draw, the myth lends itself an air of the natural (118). This is how the myth, the stereotype, works, by invoking a "natural history" that is not its own, but which shores up its legitimacy. The lion, so ferocious, so regal, so wild in Aesop, is tamed in the grammatical example, the better to naturalize the assumptions and values that accrue, at a particular time and place, around the student learning Latin in the second form of a French lycee. How obvious that one should learn Latin, that one should ensure that the predicate always agrees with the subject, that Aesop is a worthy pedagogical text for pursuing these worthy scholarly goals. In discussions of, and especially introductions to, Barthes's analysis of myth, Aesop's lion is often put aside in favour of the saluting soldier. The latter, with Barthes's brief but effective analysis of the implicit concepts (signifieds) of imperialism and colonialism, seems more immediate, more useful perhaps, than an example drawn from a dusty Latin grammar. …

Abstract: In "Her Body, Himself: Gender in the Slasher Films," Carol Clover argued that Laurie Strode, of Halloween, became empowered as the film's Final Girl by fighting off Michael's monstrous attacks long enough to be rescued. However, Laurie's need to be rescued by a male figure, Michael's psychiatrist, negates her characterization as a Final Girl. It is not until Halloween: H2O (1998) that Laurie becomes empowered as a Final Girl, by taking on Michael's own masculine weapons and lust for violence in finally defeating the monster.

Abstract: Four-leafed clovers are traditional emblems of good luck. Twoheaded sheep, five-legged frogs, or persons with six-fingered hands, by contrast, are more likely to be considered repugnant monsters, or "freaks of nature." Such alienation was not always the case. In sixteenth century Europe, such "monsters," like the four-leafed clover today, mostly elicited wonder and respect. People were fascinated with natural phenomena just beyond the edge of the familiar. Indeed, their emotional response--at that juncture in history--helped foster the emergence of modern science. Understanding that perspective, one might well probe another sacred bovine: That emotions can only contaminate science with values. Indeed, the potential of "monsters" to evoke wonder may, even today, help us motivate students. Wonder Consider the case of Petrus Gonsalus, born in 1556 (Figure 1)(Hertel, 2001). As one might guess from his portrait, Gonsalus (or Gonzales, or Gonsalvus) became renowned for his exceptional hairiness. He was a "monster": someone--like dwarves, giants, or conjoined twins--with a body form conspicuously outside the ordinary. But, as his courtly robe might equally indicate, Gonsalus was also special. [FIGURE 1 OMITTED] Gonsalus was born on Tenerife, a small island off the west coast of Africa. But he found a home in the court of King Henry II. Once there, he became educated. "Like a second mother France nourished me from boyhood to manhood," he recollected, "and taught me to give up my wild manners, and the liberal arts, and to speak Latin" (Hertel, 2001, p. 9). Gonsalus's journey from the periphery of civilization to a center of power occurred because he could evoke a sense of wonder. Eventually, he moved to other courts across Europe. Wonder was widely esteemed. For us, Gonsalus may be emblematic of an era when wonder flourished. In earlier centuries monsters were typically viewed as divine portents, or prodigies. Not that they were miracles. The course of nature seemed wide enough to include them. Still, why had the customs of nature been suspended at that particular time and place? What purpose or intent did monsters signify? Why would this child, here, now, have such an inflated (hydrocephalic) head? Monsters thus once evoked fear or awe. The emotion reflected their uncertain meaning more than their strangeness of form. By the 1500s, however, nature (still viewed as God's realm) seemed less capricious. Confidence in nature's consistency developed, although nature did not yet seem quite lawlike. The supernatural certainly still seemed possible: A divine power could suspend the natural order at any time. Monsters like Gonsalus were rare, and surely anomalous. Yet they seemed products of natural causes. That belief opened a new zone between the known and the unknowable. Historians Lorraine Daston and Katherine Park (2001) have dubbed such phenomena the preternatural, or "beyond the natural." The preternatural world, "suspended between the mundane and the miraculous" (p. 14), was emotionally charged. It was a domain of wonder and marvel. What did Europeans in the 1500s and 1600s marvel at? Magnetic attraction: How did it reach across empty space? The reputed power of the amethyst to repel hail and locusts. Invisible writing that magically reappeared when heated. Liquid phosphor in the sea near Cadiz. Gems emitting light. "Fool's paradises" of glass creating many colors from sunlight. Colored lights flickering in the northern sky. Healing a wound by bandaging the weapon (if one should believe that). Changing metals from one to another. An armor-plated cow-like beast with a huge horn on its nose. A sea-boar, with tusks. A brainless child born in Montpelier. A child with a tail of a mammal. A woman with four breasts. Here was wonder indeed (Della Porta, 1658; Daston & Park, 2001; Smith & Findlen, 2002). Monsters, in particular, reflected the intriguing tension at the edge of the natural: So close to human form, yet not. …

Abstract: Although much has been written about Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, the part played by Erasmus Darwin (1731-1802) has been almost entirely neglected. This is odd as, apart from some ghost stories, Dr Darwin is the one influence mentioned in both the 1816 and 1831 prefaces to the book. The present contribution aims to redress that omission. It aims to show that Darwin's ideas about spontaneous generation, his anti-establishment ideas, and his literary genius played a significant role in forming the 'dark and shapeless substance' surging in Mary Shelley's mind during the summer of 1816 and from which her tale of Gothic horror emerged. It is, however, ultimately ironic that Frankenstein, which warns against a too enthusiastic use of scientific knowledge, should have been partly inspired by one of the most optimistically forward-looking of all late eighteenth-century thinkers. © 2007 Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining.

Abstract: Once the vampire was seen as the villainous antagonist in literature and film, but over the last two centuries the character has evolved into the vigilante anti-hero. This paper analyzes the transformation of the vampire character asking, "How can it be that something that should provoke fear and repulsion is now an icon of popular culture?" Use of Joseph Campbell’s theories of mythology and culture alongside the psychological theories of Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung presents one explanation for the vampire’s shift from monster to dark hero. Uri https://digital.library.txstate.edu/handle/10877/3224 Collections Honors College Theses 