The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

In the Wake of the Sea-Serpent: Verne's Textual Monster, Les Histoires de Jean-Marie CabidoulinTerry HarpoldUniversity of FloridaLes Histoires de Jean-Marie Cabidoulin (The Sea-Serpent, 1901), is a textual monster. Like all of the Voyages extraordinaires, it is backed by anexacting documentary base, in this case of 19th century accounts of whaling and ocean voyages. Verne’s sources for discussions among thenovel’s characters concerning the existence of sea-serpents are drawn from historic and folkloric records. There are obvious nods in the text to,among others writers, Herman Melville and Heinrich Heine. Closer to home, many of the names of the characters are those of real individualsfrom Verne’s childhood home of Nantes. And Cabidoulin extends Verne’s intertextual methods more radically, via repeated allusions to andcitations from other Verne novels: Vingt Mille lieues sous les mers (Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Seas, 1870), Voyage au Centre de laTerre (Journey to the Centre of the Earth, 1864), and Maître du Monde (Master of the World, 1904). The documentary apparatus of Verne’smost technically-precise account of ocean travel is thus supported by the general textual imaginary of the Voyages extraordinaires. Cabidoulin’smonster, I propose, is typical of the Voyages’ canny, reflexive entanglements of representation and textuality.80. (CYA) Monstrous Language Games MapleChair: Dorothy KarlinSimmons CollegeMonstrous Myths: Manipulation of Text and Suspension of Disbelief in Octavian Nothing and The Knife of Never Letting GoRebekah FitzsimmonsUniversity of FloridaContemporary young adult literature regularly addresses the monstrous. This paper compares the ways in which The Astonishing Life ofOctavian Nothing: Traitor to the Nation by M.T. Anderson and The Knife of Never Letting Go by Patrick Ness similarly represent the monstrosityof human behavior through the novel use of typography, formatting and other textually based visual techniques. This paper will assert thateven though these two texts are diverse in terms of genre, setting, and plot, the effect of these visual disruptions is the same: a shocking andmemorable depiction of monstrous emotions in the face of horrific conditions. In each book, the text explodes from the pages, breachingmargins and expectations. These moments of textual monstrosity, of unexpected deviation from standard text, are designed to allow thereader to suspend disbelief and break out of standard ways of thinking. These visual markers shatter what the reader has come to accept asthe truth when it comes to the text on the page. This process opens the young reader’s mind and allows them to question the myths andauthority that the texts lay out as fact: if the font in the book is unreliable, perhaps the “facts” are as well. Through the lens of speculativefiction and visual rhetoric, it is thus possible to argue that while Octavian Nothing depicts more realistic and historical events than the Ness’sscience-fiction novel, it takes a more radical leap of faith for American YA readers to accept the monstrous concept that the American FoundingFathers and Revolutionary War Patriots hypocritically condoned the subjugation and torture of slaves, even as they fought for “freedom fromtyranny and equality for all.”Ethics of Nonsense in Lewis Carroll's Monstrous LanguageYu-Chi ChiangNational Taiwan Normal UniversityCarroll’s literary nonsense is Hatter’s mad language that “seemed to [Alice] to have no sort of meaning in it, and yet it was certainly English”(AW 56). It is the little crocodile in the nonsense poem that Alice recites with hoarse and strange voice. Never ask what it signifies because rightafter its cheerful grinning “welcomes little fishes in” (AW 16), its smiling jaws surprisingly snap shut to crush our cognitive souls from us. Thestudy we present in this essay attempts to attest to the fact that the complex workings of Carroll’s intuitive délire, instead of giving meaninglessgibberish, produce an abundant excess of meaning. In this paper, I will examine the inexhaustible mythical power of nonsense in Carroll’s twoAlice books. In contrast with Nonsense School’s self-referential nonsense, Jean-Jacques Lecercle applies a detour reading through madness tobeckon the demented linguistic monster lurking in the darkness of language to locate the source of intuitions embedded in the literary text ofnonsense and their power of anticipating serious social institutions. From his synchronic account (resistance of intuition against urge ofinstitution) to diachronic account (literature preceding theory), Lecercle’s anticipatory prophecy of nonsense intuitions has gained amomentum to break through the language barriers and embrace life fully with its politics of monstrous resistance. My argument here is thatlanguage and life have the same self-dissolving tendency that a centrifugal resistance of intuition always dissolves the centripetal urge ofinstitution by an excess of errors that not only fills to the brim but also tips over; therefore, the mythic power of Carroll’s literary nonsenserefers beyond language to an ethics of life.