The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

Florida Atlantic UniversitySheri S. Tepper’s novel, Grass—named for the planet where the story unfolds—evokes images of verdant beauty, and implies a connection tonature – but on this secluded world, there’s not much “nurture” in Mother Nature. Grass subverts conventional human relationships withanimals, others, power, class, family, religion, and even knowledge: it is a nightmarish imagining of a planet full of Nature’s own worstecological psychopaths, while humanity’s overcrowded home planet is governed by a militant non-denominational religious regime calledSanctity – like Presbyterians hiding the Death Star behind their backs, with their fingers crossed. This ersatz telling of the mythological WildHunt—which inverts human and nonhuman roles—focuses on violent relations of power and communication, and privileges embodiedcommunication over mere words. Human words conceal and deceive; embodied communication, including the science of zoosemiotics, revealsthe truth within messages. In order for humanity to survive, let alone move forward, we must learn to accept and value feedback from interspecialcollaborations. The text balances pastiche and parody, but also contains elements of traditional sf, horror, and mystery within multiplestory lines.Of Zombies and Language; or, The Shambling SignifiedAndrew FergusonUniversity of VirginiaToday there is hardly a single academic field unmenaced by zombies. These ravenous corpses—in particular, the type created by GeorgeRomero in Night of the Living Dead—have escaped their original confines on the silver screen and infected nearly every medium and area ofinquiry. In the wake of this plague, a cottage industry has sprung up, providing innumerable less-than-convincing answers to the question, Whatdoes the zombie signify? My paper focuses instead on the zombie as an embodiment of failed signification, the "lack" at the heart of languagethat has been hunting Enlightenment rationality since Kant’s momentous critiques. Drawing on a range of zombie literature from SethGrahame-Smith’s Pride and Prejudice and Zombies all the way back to Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year (as well as a variety ofpopular media), and grounding my presentation theoretically in Bruno Latour's compositionism and N. Katharine Hayles's literary complexsystemsdynamics, I develop a model of the zombie as data degradation, as the ultimate victory of randomness over the chaotic patterning ofinformation. I conclude by considering the task of the critic in a mental topography where signifiers float and flicker, but the signifieds shambleever onward to oblivion.Dust and Guts: Matter and Affect in Mark Z. Danielewski's House of LeavesJesse StommelMarylhurst UniversityRebekah SheldonUniversity of Wisconsin-MilwaukeeRecent turns to queer theory and postcolonial theory, alongside longstanding feminist and Marxist approaches, have moved science fictionstudies beyond the taxonomic vocation of genre criticism. Yet while these culturally- and theoretically-inflected schools of thought have beenenormously productive, they have underplayed two important considerations: the form or body of the genre and the effect of that form on itsaudience. The same, however, cannot be said of horror studies. Whether through the lens of psychoanalysis or film theory, horror criticism hastaken the question of formal affect as its central critical exigency. At the same time, affect theory has become a pervasive school of thought inits own right informing philosophy, aesthetics, art criticism, and literary theory. As any reader or audience member already knows, horror andscience fiction are monsters of affect, producing experiences whose predictability suggests some non-arbitrary relationship between the formsof the genres and the feelings they produce. In this co-authored presentation, we contend that science fiction and horror not only produceemotional experiences, they are forms of affect theory avant-la-lettre. Our work is not about what these genres are, but rather what they do,their instrumental value both as texts and as theories of texts. Through a reading of Mark Z. Danielewski’s House of Leaves, an ambiguoushorror/sf hybrid, we attempt to generate a critical lexicon that might allow us to discuss how form elicits feeling. In short, this presentationtakes science fiction and horror as privileged instances in which to ask after the causalities of representation. Such a broad and fundamentalsubject in a paper dedicated to paraliterary genres may seem like overreaching, but we insist that it is exactly in formulaic genres that thequestion of form might be most profitably interrogated.127. (SF) Monstrous Imaginings in Early Science Fiction OakChair: Lisa SwanstromFlorida Atlantic UniversityFrankenstein, Sirius, and The Queer Family of ManJohn RiederUniversity of Hawaii at ManoaWhat is it about Frankenstein that has made it one of the most often adapted novels ever written? What inspires the even more abundantproliferation of versions of the scientist-creature dyad? Shelley’s plot speaks to the project of modernity by exploring the institutionalframework of reason in the laboratory and the university, its methodological framework in the experiment, and its narrative framework in theplot of education and the professional career. Yet the most profound and enduring power of Shelley’s plot more likely derives from itsengagement of gender ideology. The atmosphere of anxiety that reigns over the entire plot finds no more powerful motivation than in itselision or repression of natural sexual reproduction, its “circumvention of the maternal,” as Margaret Homans calls it. The crucial consideration,I will argue, is that Shelley did not invent Frankenstein’s circumvention of the maternal, but rather adapted it from the Judaeo-Christiancreation myth. Her revisionary plot replaces the myth’s divine agent with a human one, thereby rendering unto techno-scientific man whatonce was attributed to the mystical artisanship of Jehovah. Shelley’s revision of the creation story in Genesis does not so much revise its gender