Author: Margrit Shildrick
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761970149
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 170

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Book Description
Exploring the ideas of bodily monstrosity; vulnerablity; normality; and perfection, this book examines the ideologies surrounding these perceptions and considers what this tells us about ourselves.

Author: Alexa Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857733354
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 124

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Book Description
From the 'Monster of Ravenna' to the 'Elephant Man', Myra Hindley and Ted Bundy, the visualisation of 'real', human monsters has always played a part in how society sees itself. But what is the function of a monster? Why do we need to embody and represent what is monstrous? This book investigates the appearance of the human monster in Western culture, both historically and in our contemporary society. It argues that images of real (rather than fictional) human monsters help us both to identify and to interrogate what constitutes normality; we construct what is acceptable in humanity by depicting what is not quite acceptable. By exploring theories and examples of abnormality, freakishness, madness, otherness and identification, Alexa Wright demonstrates how monstrosity and the monster are social and cultural constructs. However, it soon becomes clear that the social function of the monster – however altered a form it takes – remains constant; it is societal self-defence allowing us to keep perceived monstrosity at a distance. Through engaging with the work of Michel Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Canguilhem (to name but a few) Wright scrutinises and critiques the history of a mode of thinking. She reassesses and explodes conventional concepts of identity, obscuring the boundaries between what is 'normal' and what is not.

Author: Safwat Marzouk
Publisher: Mohr Siebeck
ISBN: 9783161532450
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 316

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Book Description
Appealing to Monster Theory and the ancient Near Eastern motif of "Chaoskampf," Safwat Marzouk argues that the paradoxical character of the category of the monster is what prompts the portrayal of Egypt as a monster in the book of Ezekiel. While on the surface the monster seems to embody utter difference, underlying its otherness there is a disturbing sameness. Though the monster may be defeated and its body dismembered, it is never completely annihilated. Egypt is portrayed as a monster in the book of Ezekiel because Egypt represents the threat of religious assimilation. Although initially the monstrosity of Egypt is constructed because of the shared elements of identity between Egypt and Israel, the prophet flips this imagery of monster in order to embody Egypt as a monstrous Other. In a combat myth, YHWH defeats the monster and dismembers its body. Despite its near annihilation, Egypt, in Ezekiel's rhetoric, is not entirely obliterated. Rather, it is kept at bay, hovering at the periphery, questioning Israel's identity.

Author: Simon Williams
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 9780761956297
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 180

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Book Description
The emotions have traditionally been marginalized in mainstream social theory. This book demonstrates the problems that this has caused and charts the resurgence of emotions in social theory today. Drawing on a wide variety of sources, both classical and contemporary, Simon Williams treats the emotions as a universal feature of human life and our embodied relationship to the world. He reflects and comments upon the turn towards the body and intimacy in social theory, and explains what is important in current thinking about emotions. In his doing so, readers are provided with a critical assessment of various positions within the field, including the strengths and weaknesses of poststructuralism and postmodernism for examinin

Author: Maria Beville
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135052301
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 218

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Book Description
This book visits the 'Thing' in its various manifestations as an unnameable monster in literature and film, reinforcing the idea that the very essence of the monster is its excess and its indeterminacy. Tied primarily to the artistic modes of the gothic, science fiction, and horror, the unnameable monster retains a persistent presence in literary forms as a reminder of the sublime object that exceeds our worst fears. Beville examines various representations of this elusive monster and argues that we must looks at the monster, rather than through it, at ourselves. As such, this book responds to the obsessive manner in which the monsters of literature and culture are ‘managed’ in processes of classification and in claims that they serve a social function by embodying all that is horrible in the human imagination. The book primarily considers literature from the Romantic period to the present, and film that leans toward postmodernism. Incorporating disciplines such as cultural theory, film theory, literary criticism, and continental philosophy, it focuses on that most difficult but interesting quality of the monster, its unnameability, in order to transform and accelerate current readings of not only the monsters of literature and film, but also those that are the focus of contemporary theoretical discussion.

Author: Andrew J. Hoffman
Publisher: Bedford/St. Martin's
ISBN: 9781457690303
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
"The Bedford Spotlight Reader Series brings critical topics to life in a portable, cost-effective reader. In this volume, you'll explore these questions: why do we create monsters -- and why are we attracted to them? How do monsters adapt to reflect the values, beliefs, and culture of the times? Is the monster within us? Readings by a range of classic poets, contemporary fiction writers, pop-culture critics, philosophers, psychologists, occultists, ethicists, historians, and others take up these questions and more. The book helps you form your own questions and responses as you investigate and write about this popular and intellectually rich topic." -- From back cover.

Author: Jeffrey Jerome Cohen
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452900558
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 331

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Book Description
The contributors to Monster Theory consider beasts, demons, freaks and fiends as symbolic expressions of cultural unease that pervade a society and shape its collective behavior. Through a historical sampling of monsters, these essays argue that our fascination for the monstrous testifies to our continued desire to explore difference and prohibition.

Author: Charlie Fox
Publisher: Brow Books
ISBN: 9781925704143
Category : Art, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
'Good God, where did this wise-beyond-his-years 25-year-old critic's voice come from? His breath of proudly putrefied air is something to behold. Finally, a new Parker Tyler is on the scene. Yep. Mr. Fox is the real thing.' -- John Waters, New York Times This Young Monster is a hallucinatory celebration of artists who raise hell, transform their bodies, anger their elders and show their audience dark, disturbing things. What does it mean to be a freak? Why might we be wise to think of the present as a time of monstrosity? And how does the concept of the monster irradiate our thinking about queerness, disability, children and adolescents? From Twin Peaks to Leigh Bowery, Harmony Korine to Alice in Wonderland, This Young Monster gets high on a whole range of riotous art as its voice and form shape-shift, all in the name of dealing with the strange wonders of what Nabokov once called 'monsterhood'. Ready or not, here they come...

Author: Ken Dahl
Publisher: Secret Acres
ISBN: 0979960940
Category : Cartoonists
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
"Part fiction and part deranged educational film strip, Monsters focuses both on the physical symptoms and the traumatic emotional damage of an STD that rarely affects two people the same way. Following his acclaimed collection of short comics, Welcome to the Dahlhouse, Ken Dahl cements his status as one of the best cartoonists of his generation with this brutally honest account of disease and self-acceptance."--Amazon.com

Author: Jean Baudrillard
Publisher: SAGE
ISBN: 1473998409
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 281

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Book Description
Jean Baudrillard is one of the most celebrated and most controversial of contemporary social theorists. This major work occupies a central place in the rethinking of the humanities and social sciences around the idea of postmodernism. It leads the reader on an exhilarating tour encompassing the end of Marxism, the enchantment of fashion, symbolism about sex and the body, and the relations between economic exchange and death. Most significantly, the book represents Baudrillard′s fullest elaboration of the concept of the three orders of the simulacra, defining the historical passage from production to reproduction to simulation. A classic in its field, Symbolic Exchange and Death is a key source for the redefinition of contemporary social thought. Baudrillard′s critical gaze appraises social theories as diverse as cybernetics, ethnography, psychoanalysis, feminism, Marxism, communications theory and semiotics. This English translation begins with a new introductory essay.