The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts - International ...

ultimately make peace with her monstrous progeny, if she wishes to save the fictional world of the novels. The abject here, cannot be purified,but rather must be accepted, as death and a loss of self will be an inevitable part of Daenerys’s prophesied return to power.143. (IF) From Creation to Apocalypse: International Monstrous Fantastic MagnoliaChair: Rachel Haywood-FerreiraIowa State UniversityFrom Amazons to Zombies: Latin America's Monstrous FantasticPersephone BrahamUniversity of DelawareThe discovery of the Americas challenged long-standing hypotheses about the nature of the world and man’s place in it, and the New Worldbecame the arena for an exceptionally transformative encounter with monsters, real and imagined. Faced with a perilous, awesome, and yetfantastically familiar landscape, Spanish explorers of the New World showed an extraordinary penchant for organizing their pursuits andperceptions according to popular images captured in millennial, fabulous and mythical narratives. Armed with the knowledge of the bestiariesand the certainty of locating an Earthly Paradise, they described their experience in terms of the fantastic and the monstrous. Embodyingexoticism, hybridity, and sexual and other excesses, the monsters of the New World sustained the ongoing conceptualization of the unknownthat was a prerequisite to conquest and control. Columbus's mermaids and cannibals, the anthropophagous landscape of Amazonia; Haiti'sliving dead; all loom in Latin America's literatures as incarnations of desire and dread, but also as avatars of autochthonous culture. Aconsciousness of ex-centricity with respect to Anglo-European culture is constitutive of Latin American intellectual subjectivity, and has ledmany of its best-known writers, such as Carlos Fuentes, Gabriel García Márquez, Julio Cortázar, and Alejo Carpentier, to confront Europeanconcepts of the magical, the surreal, the uncanny, and the fantastic with alternative formulations such as the real marvelous and magicalrealism. This paper examines the mechanisms whereby Latin Americans transfigured and invoked the monstrous fantastic to reinforce LatinAmerican ex-centricity while at the same time inserting Latin American letters into mainstream markets. Construed in terms of the realmarvelous and magical realism , the monstrous fantastic is very much debated within Latin-Americanist criticism, as it exposes the problems ofautochthony and cultural production in a highly syncretic postcolonial setting. The changing shape of this discussion over the years allows us toexamine the development of the Latin American response to an ongoing epistemological crisis caused, ironically, by the drive towards selfrecognition.Sense and Nonsense-Ability: Federico Schaffler González’s Brief EternityDale KnickerbockerEast Carolina UniversityFrank Kermode has famously asserted that apocalyptic narratives, like their biblical model “Revelations,” make sense of human history bylooking at it from beyond its end. This essay attempts to demonstrate that Brief Eternity invokes and rewrites the biblical story in order todemonstrate that two of Western civilization’s primary explanatory narratives, Christianity and humanistic, post-Enlightenment reason, areabsurd. Brief Eternity consists of four short stories revolving around the destruction of Mexico City by twelve atomic bombs. The first explainsthe event by creating a mythology: Earth is created by a young divinity (hinted to be the Judeo-Christian God)tradition win a contest to see whoin the pantheon can offer the most absurd). The second is a story of political intrigue describing the aftermath of the destruction, satirizingMexico’s history and its contemporary politics. The third offers a Clancy-esque thriller as an agent attempts to find three cylinders left by theoutgoing President of Mexico that would explain the disaster. The final story offers an explanation that creates a historical narrative around theevent, explaining in the rational, cause-and-effect logic employed by historians. The “rational” explanation turns out to be every bit asnonsensical as its religious counterpart: the President, bitter at being voted out of power and dying with AIDS, stole and detonated theweapons out of spite. Brief Eternity thus constitutes a critique of the metanarratives we use to understand reality, adopting the existentialistview that human existence is absurd.Monstrous Insinuations in José Saramago's CainRonald MeyersEast Stroudsburg UniversityThe late, great Portuguese author José Saramago (1922-2010), awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1998, has been recognized and cited as amoralist with a wry, if not ironical and opaque style. Though noted for his historical depictions of his homeland, Portugal, he was perhaps thequintessential cosmopolitan author, incorporating major themes from Dostoyevsky to Kafka, to Orwell, to Sartre, to Ionesco, to Gabriel Marquez intohis considerable body of work. His final novel, Cain, published a year before his death and brought out in translation in 2011, continues todemonstrate Saramago's intellectual curiosity and flair for the fantastic. Harold Bloom has noted his "Swiftian irony," all to clear in this novel, and therecent The New York Times Book Review cited its connection to the sensibility of Mark Twain. I shall seek further to show in my presentation, both theexuberant comic exaggeration of Rabelais, and Samuel Beckett's mordant irony and absurdist (atheistic, if not nihilistic) world view. In the veryopening page of the novel, Saramago represents his peculiar sensibility in depicting the Lord's frustration with his newly created couple and his "graveoversight" over the inability of "his" human progenitors to express themselves--"be it a bellow, a roar, a croak, a chirp, a whistle, a cackle." In aRabelaisian tour de force of heretical energy of language: "In an excess of rage, surprising in someone who could have solved any problem simply byissuing another quick fiat, he rushed over to adam and eve and unceremoniously, no half measures, stuck his tongue down the throats of first one andthen the other. From the texts which, over the centuries, have provided a somewhat random record of those remote times, be it of events that might,at some future date, be awarded canonical status and others deemed to be the fruit of apocryphal and irredeemably heretical imaginations, it is not atall clear what kind of tongue was being referred to here. . . " Cain, the fratricide and first murderer in the Hebrew Bible is the prototype of greatmonster villains in history and literature, which have included Medea, Oedipus, Clytemnestra, Joseph's brothers, Judah, Jephthah, Macbeth, Richard