The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

legs and feet; the “Dancing Faun” sculpture after which the 2 nd century B.C.E. house in Pompeii—the House of the Faun—is named shows thefaun with only horns and a short tail to distinguish him from other human males. The late-19 th -early 20 th century fascination with these mythicbeings from classical antiquity signal a fascination with humanity’s connection to what has often been thought of as the prehuman naturalfoundation of our species.132. (H) Modernism and Beyond DogwoodChair: Andrea KrafftUniversity of Florida“We have a cruel and dreadful task” – Dis/assembling Monsters as Narrative Strategy and Discursive PracticeAnya Heise-von der LippeFreie Universität BerlinAs ICFA 2012 guest scholar Jeffrey Jerome Cohen points out in Monster Theory: "The monster's body is a cultural body" (Cohen, 1996, p. 4). Itsadaptability reflects changing cultural fears and allows us to explore what we otherwise suppress. Like few other theoretical concepts, themonstrous body draws attention to the discursive boundaries which underlie distinctions of the human and its others, as well as the culturalmechanisms employed to reiterate and reinforce these boundaries. Moreover, in a quite literal, Frankensteinian way, the monster also makesvisible the stitches with which it has been patched together from various signifying body parts. This structural particularity of the monstrousbody can also be traced in the fragmented patchwork structure of the monster text. It is certainly no coincidence that the two most influentialGothic novels of the 19th century, and perhaps of all time, show significant structural similarities. Both Frankenstein (1818) and Dracula (1897)rely on letters or telegrams, as well as diary entries and other documents to tell the monster's story. In both texts essential information aboutthe monstrous body and its creation/destruction has to be put together from a number of sources and perspectives by readers inside andoutside the text to make sense of the narrative. Postmodern issues like multi-perspectivity, narrative as well as corporeal fragmentation andthe use of modern technology to assemble (and disassemble) monsters are already at work in the original texts and are only enhanced andunderlined by the further possibilities of new media. The monster's uncanny ability to adapt to and represent various cultural discourses iscertainly one of the secrets of its success. In contemporary culture, monstrosity has become an extremely influential concept, a patchwork ofcultural issues revolving around different questions of alterity, both within and beyond the Gothic genre. In order to make sense of themonstrous as a culturally significant discursive practice, monster theory and Gothic criticism need to accommodate the fragmented form of themonstrous body as well as the structural peculiarities of the monster text. My paper will attempt to contribute to the discussion of monstrouscorporeality and textuality by exploring aesthetic processes of monstrous creation, focusing on the parallels between monstrous body andmonstrous texts in a number of examples from Frankenstein and Dracula to the early 21st century.A Monstrous Moment: Temporality in Rider Haggard’s SheLeigha McReynoldsGeorge Washington UniversityIn She (1887), Holly, a British professor, and his adopted son Leo travel to Africa to unravel Leo’s family secret. Their adventure takes them backinto an archetypical land-that-time-forgot transporting them from the present time of England to an ancient time that exits simultaneously withthe contemporary moment. Ayesha, or She, beautiful, immortal, all-powerful, and undeniably monstrous, is the locus of and reason for thismonstrous geography and temporality hiding in the dark of Africa. According to Stephen Kern in his book The Culture of Time and Space: 1880-1914 the multiplicity of times, or the recognition of simultaneity, present in Haggard’s texts and embodied in Ayesha is a feature of the changedunderstanding of time in the late nineteenth century resulting from developments in theoretical science - relativity - and technologicaladvances like the wireless or the photograph, which allowed two presents to occur at the same time across large distances or allowed the pastto visually continue in the present. Beyond mirroring modern views on temporality, narratives which feature movement in time, as Darko Suvinargues, question the notion of immutable Truth by presenting alternative existential structures. Phrased in the terms of relativity, there can beno absolute truth about human experience in the world because that truth is always relational rather than objective. This paper explores themonstrous temporal moment of Ayesha’s kingdom and life in order to elaborate how her monstrosity stems, not only from her race andsexuality, but her relationship to time. Paradoxically, the strange simultaneity that Ayesha and her valley represent insist through monstrousopposition that human presence and human identity has changed, will change, and likely is changing at the reader’s contemporary momentallowing the text to challenge epistemological orthodoxies through a temporality which accommodates multiple realities.Monstrous Modernity: H.P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” as a Literary Interpretation of ModerismMelissa BianchiUniversity of FloridaWritten in 1926 at the height of the American Modernist movement, H.P. Lovecraft’s “Call of Cthulhu” offers an interpretation of modernismthat depicts the freedoms of exploratory thought—scientific, religious, and literary—brought about by modernity. At the same time, the textalso addresses how this freedom ultimately brings with it a fear of unknowable possibilities and uncertain futures that are represented, in part,by the monster, Cthulhu. Not coincidentally, Lovecraft’s writing incorporates themes from Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud’s works thatseek to understand the human mind and its place in modern civilization, an endeavor that also mirrors Lovecraft’s own problematic existence inmodernity. Given these characteristics of Lovecraft’s work, I will perform a close reading of “Call of Cthulhu” to broaden our perspective of themodern experience. This analysis will be modeled after Marshall Berman’s interpretation of Goethe’s Faust in his book All That Is Solid MeltsInto Air. With Faust, Berman aims to broaden our understanding of modernity and modernism by examining “distinctly modern” qualitiesexhibited by a wide-range of texts, subjects, and locations (13). Berman devotes much of his investigation to the socioeconomic implications ofprogress and development on our conceptions of modernity; however, in the preface of the Penguin Edition of his book (published six yearsafter the original) he laments that he did not fully explore the modern sentiment of “widespread and often desperate fear of the freedom that