Monstrosity

Monstrosity PDF Author: Edward Lee
Publisher: Crossroad Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Blue skies, palm trees, and flawless white-sand beaches. Clare Prentiss thinks her new home is paradise, and her brand-new job as security chief at the clinic almost seems too good to be true. It is. But the truth is worse than she could ever imagine. Lurid dreams, erotic obsessions, and twisted fantasies aren't the only things that abruptly invade Clare's life. Is someone really peeping into her windows at night? Yes. Could those grotesque things in the woods possibly be real? Yes. Is Clare being stalked? Yes. But not by anything human. By a monstrosity.

Monstrosity

Monstrosity PDF Author: Edward Lee
Publisher: Crossroad Press
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 354

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Book Description
Blue skies, palm trees, and flawless white-sand beaches. Clare Prentiss thinks her new home is paradise, and her brand-new job as security chief at the clinic almost seems too good to be true. It is. But the truth is worse than she could ever imagine. Lurid dreams, erotic obsessions, and twisted fantasies aren't the only things that abruptly invade Clare's life. Is someone really peeping into her windows at night? Yes. Could those grotesque things in the woods possibly be real? Yes. Is Clare being stalked? Yes. But not by anything human. By a monstrosity.

Monstrosity

Monstrosity PDF Author: Alexa Wright
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 0857722409
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 224

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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.

Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry

Monsters and Monstrosity in Augustan Poetry PDF Author: Dunstan Lowe
Publisher: University of Michigan Press
ISBN: 0472119516
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 285

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Book Description
An important contribution to the growing interdisciplinary field of monster studies

The Monstrosity of Christ

The Monstrosity of Christ PDF Author: Slavoj Zizek
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262265818
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
A militant Marxist atheist and a “Radical Orthodox” Christian theologian square off on everything from the meaning of theology and Christ to the war machine of corporate mafia. “What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.”—John Milbank “To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.”—Slavoj Žižek In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, a militant atheist who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, “Radical Orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In The Monstrosity of Christ, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have not only proven themselves worthy adversaries, they have shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed. Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in The Monstrosity of Christ concerns the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event—God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, Universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others. Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with “paradox.” The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation. Slavoj Žižek is a philosopher and cultural critic. He has published over thirty books, including Looking Awry, The Puppet and the Dwarf, and The Parallax View (these three published by the MIT Press). John Milbank is an influential Christian theologian and the author of Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason and other books. Creston Davis, who conceived of this encounter, studied under both Žižek and Milbank.

Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture

Monstrosity, Performance, and Race in Contemporary Culture PDF Author: Bernadette Marie Calafell
Publisher: Peter Lang Incorporated, International Academic Publishers
ISBN: 9781433127373
Category : Civilization, Modern
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Through critical analyses of experiences of women of color in the academy, the media framing of alleged Aurora shooter James Holmes, the use of monstrosity in unpublished work from the Gloria Anzaldúa archives, post-feminist discourses and Kanye West's strategic employment of ideologies of monstrosity, this book offers new ways to think about Otherness in this contemporary moment.

American Monstrosity

American Monstrosity PDF Author: Nathan J. Robinson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781682194010
Category : Businessmen
Languages : en
Pages : 294

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Book Description


Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History

Monsters and Monstrosity in Jewish History PDF Author: Iris Idelson-Shein
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing
ISBN: 1350052167
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 347

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Book Description
This is the first study of monstrosity in Jewish history from the Middle Ages to modernity. Drawing on Jewish history, literary studies, folklore, art history and the history of science, it examines both the historical depiction of Jews as monsters and the creative use of monstrous beings in Jewish culture. Jews have occupied a liminal position within European society and culture, being deeply immersed yet outsiders to it. For this reason, they were perceived in terms of otherness and were often represented as monstrous beings. However, at the same time, European Jews invoked, with tantalizing ubiquity, images of magical, terrifying and hybrid beings in their texts, art and folktales. These images were used by Jewish authors and artists to push back against their own identification as monstrous or diabolical and to tackle concerns about religious persecution, assimilation and acculturation, gender and sexuality, science and technology and the rise of antisemitism. Bringing together an impressive cast of contributors from around the world, this fascinating volume is an invaluable resource for academics, postgraduates and advanced undergraduates interested in Jewish studies, as well as the history of monsters.

Landscapes of Monstrosity

Landscapes of Monstrosity PDF Author: László Munteán
Publisher: BRILL
ISBN: 1848883706
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 109

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Book Description
This volume was first published by Inter-Disciplinary Press in 2016. Monsters have been with us since time immemorial. They have been present in the earliest creation myths and today populate all media of fantasy, horror, action and adventure, as well as science fiction. Over the past years, scholars have attentively studied the prominent presence of vampires, zombies, and other monsters in films and TV series that breathed new life into long-forgotten stories and monstrous characters. Simultaneously, the past decades have witnessed an increase of public and scholarly interest in space and place, resulting in what is known in academia as the Spatial Turn, leaving its mark on fields ranging from geography through literature and cultural memory studies. This book bears witness to the diversity of approaches to studying the intersections of monstrosity and geography. The monstrous entails the affective registers of fear, anxiety, trauma, as well as forms of excess and transgression. Likewise, geographies are both physical and metaphorical, corporeal and psychological, rural and urban, real and imagined. The chapters of this book address each of these aspects.

Monsters and Monstrosity

Monsters and Monstrosity PDF Author: Daniela Carpi
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG
ISBN: 311065461X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 308

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Book Description
Every culture knows the phenomenon of monsters, terrifying creatures that represent complete alterity and challenge every basic notion of self and identity within a cultural paradigm. In Latin and Greek culture, the monster was created as a marvel, appearing as something which, like transgression itself, did not belong to the assumed natural order of things. Therefore, it could only be created by a divinity responsible for its creation, composition, goals and stability, but it was triggered by some in- or non-human action performed by humans. The identification of something as monstrous denotes its place outside and beyond social norms and values. The monster-evoking transgression is most often indistinguishable from reactions to the experience of otherness, merging the limits of humanity with the limits of a given culture. The topic entails a large intersection among the cultural domains of law, literature, philosophy, anthropology, and technology. Monstrosity has indeed become a necessary condition of our existence in the 21st century: it serves as a representation of change itself. In the process of analysis there are three theoretical approaches: psychoanalytical, representational, ontological. The volume therefore aims at examining the concept of monstrosity from three main perspectives: technophobic, xenophobic, superdiversity. Today’s globalized world is shaped in the unprecedented phenomenon of international migration. The resistance to this phenomenon causes the demonization of the Other, seen as the antagonist and the monster. The monster becomes therefore the ethnic Other, the alien. To reach this new perspective on monstrosity we must start by examining the many facets of monstrosity, also diachronically: from the philological origin of the term to the Roman and classical viewpoint, from the Renaissance medical perspective to the religious background, from the new filmic exploitations in the 20th and 21st centuries to the very recent ethnological and anthropological points of view, to the latest technological perspective , dealing with artificial intelligence.

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World

Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World PDF Author: Richard H. Godden
Publisher: Springer Nature
ISBN: 3030254585
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 364

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Book Description
This collection examines the intersection of the discourses of “disability” and “monstrosity” in a timely and necessary intervention in the scholarly fields of Disability Studies and Monster Studies. Analyzing Medieval and Early Modern art and literature replete with images of non-normative bodies, these essays consider the pernicious history of defining people with distinctly non-normative bodies or non-normative cognition as monsters. In many cases throughout Western history, a figure marked by what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has termed “the extraordinary body” is labeled a “monster.” This volume explores the origins of this conflation, examines the problems and possibilities inherent in it, and casts both disability and monstrosity in light of emergent, empowering discourses of posthumanism.