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Author: Diego Compagna Publisher: Vernon Press ISBN: 1622738934 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 426
Book Description
Existing research on monsters acknowledges the deep impact monsters have especially on Politics, Gender, Life Sciences, Aesthetics and Philosophy. From Sigmund Freud’s essay ‘The Uncanny’ to Scott Poole’s ‘Monsters in America’, previous studies offer detailed insights about uncanny and immoral monsters. However, our anthology wants to overcome these restrictions by bringing together multidisciplinary authors with very different approaches to monsters and setting up variety and increasing diversification of thought as ‘guiding patterns’. Existing research hints that monsters are embedded in social and scientific exclusionary relationships but very seldom copes with them in detail. Erving Goffman’s doesn’t explicitly talk about monsters in his book ‘Stigma’, but his study is an exceptional case which shows that monsters are stigmatized by society because of their deviations from norms, but they can form groups with fellow monsters and develop techniques for handling their stigma. Our book is to be understood as a complement and a ‘further development’ of previous studies: The essays of our anthology pay attention to mechanisms of inequality and exclusion concerning specific historical and present monsters, based on their research materials within their specific frameworks, in order to ‘create’ engaging, constructive, critical and diverse approaches to monsters, even utopian visions of a future of societies shared by monsters. Our book proposes the usual view, that humans look in a horrified way at monsters, but adds that monsters can look in a critical and even likewise frightened way at the very societies which stigmatize them.
Author: Agnes Andeweg Publisher: Manchester University Press ISBN: 1526103044 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 298
Book Description
Although the preoccupation of Gothic storytelling with the family has often been observed, it invites a more systematic exploration. Gothic kinship brings together case studies of Gothic kinship ties in film and literature and offers a synthesis and theorisation of the different appearances of the Gothic family. Writers discussed include early British Gothic writers such as Eleanor Sleath and Louisa Sidney Stanhope as well as a range of later authors writing in English, including Elizabeth Gaskell, William March, Stephen King, Poppy Z. Brite, Patricia Duncker, J. K. Rowling and Audrey Niffenegger. There are also essays on Dutch authors (Louis Couperus and Renate Dorrestein) and on the film directors Wes Craven and Steven Sheil. Arranged chronologically, the various contributions show that both early and contemporary Gothic display very diverse kinship ties, ranging from metaphorical to triangular, from queer to nuclear-patriarchal. Gothic proves to be a rich source of expressing both subversive and conservative notions of the family. Gothic kinship will be of interest to academics and students of European and American Gothic in literature and film, gender studies and cultural studies.
Author: Berit Åström Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield ISBN: 1666910465 Category : Families in literature Languages : en Pages : 215
Book Description
This edited collection examines the central role that webs of kinship and families play in the fiction of N.K. Jemisin, arguing that they ca function as centers of resistance, means of oppression, or both. In doing so, Jemisin's work challenges readers to re-imagine the intimate relations of their present.
Author: Jillmarie Murphy Publisher: University of Delaware ISBN: 1611490510 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 208
Book Description
Monstrous Kinships: Realism and Attachment Theory in the Novels of Mary Shelley, Herman Melville, Thomas Hardy, Stephen Crane, Theodore Dreiser, and Vladimir Nabokov investigates the connection between realist fiction of the nineteenth and early twentieth century and the psychoanalytic approach of John Bowlby's Attachment Theory. While traditional Freudian psychology derives from the conventional romanticism of the nineteenth century, Attachment Theory arises from the guiding principles of realism and the veratist's devotion to long-term, direct observation of subject matter. Additionally, because Attachment Theory originated in the field of child psychoanalysis, this book highlights the detrimental effects of parental obsession on the child character in each novel. Chapter 1, a comparison between Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and Herman Melville's Pierre, contextualizes the realistic elements of each novel and, via Attachment Theory, highlights the similarities in each text among child trauma, parental abandonment, obsession, and loss, and the eventual hopelessness of the main characters. These two novels have never been jointly analyzed, yet they include several noteworthy comparative elements, particularly in relation to parental attachment and loss, lack of authorial distance, and several characteristic realist elements that encompass both typically defined Romantic works of fiction. In Chapter 2, Jude the Obscure reflects both conventional realism and Hardy's own place in history as a writer of realist fiction toward the end of the Victorian era. A cogent shift toward realism, Jude treats the catastrophic results of abandonment, industrialism, and poverty for children and adults alike. In Chapter 3, Stephen Crane's Maggie: A Girl of the Streets depicts an American Naturalist text that explores low-life fiction and its concentration on familial violence, sexual taboos, and parental alcoholism, showing that the effects of alcoholism on children in literature demonstrate some of the most destructive aspects of child trauma. Chapter 4 highlights parental religious fanaticism, poverty, and the tragic consequences of both in Theodore Dreiser's An American Tragedy. Although the main character, Clyde Griffiths, struggles against his fate, he is haunted by his ascetic upbringing which leads him to contemplate and set in motion the murder of an innocent young woman. The Epilogue considers Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, but in keeping with the concept of Attachment Theory, this section highlights the role of Charlotte Haze as the primary offender in Dolores Haze's exploitation. Poised between Modernism and Postmodernism, Lolita serves to reflect the transitional elements of Attachment Theory: the past set against the future, middle age versus youth, and the old world confronting the new. As literary critics and theorists as well as creative writers expand their range of inquiry to include the child as primary subject in various treatments of post-colonial and transnational culture, the subject of Monstrous Kinships is timely and rather ahead of the critical curve.
Author: Don Macnaughtan Publisher: McFarland ISBN: 0786487879 Category : Performing Arts Languages : en Pages : 964
Book Description
This bibliographic guide covers the “Buffyverse”—the fictional worlds of the acclaimed television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (1997–2003) and its spinoff Angel (1999–2004), as well as the original Buffy feature film of 1992. It is the largest and most inclusive work of its kind. The author organizes and describes both the original texts of the Buffyverse (episodes, DVDs, novels, comic books, games, and more) and the secondary materials created about the shows, including books, essays, articles, documentaries, dissertations, fan production and websites. This vast and diverse collection of information about these two seminal shows and their feature-film forebear provides an accessible, authoritative and comprehensive survey of the subject.
Author: Philip E. Wegner Publisher: Duke University Press ISBN: 0822390760 Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 296
Book Description
Through virtuoso readings of significant works of American film, television, and fiction, Phillip E. Wegner demonstrates that the period between the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989 and the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fostered a unique consciousness and represented a moment of immense historical possibilities now at risk of being forgotten in the midst of the “war on terror.” Wegner argues that 9/11 should be understood as a form of what Jacques Lacan called the “second death,” an event that repeats an earlier “fall,” in this instance the collapse of the Berlin Wall. By describing 9/11 as a repetition, Wegner does not deny its significance. Rather, he argues that it was only with the fall of the towers that the symbolic universe of the Cold War was finally destroyed and a true “new world order,” in which the United States assumed disturbing new powers, was put into place. Wegner shows how phenomena including the debate on globalization, neoliberal notions of the end of history, the explosive growth of the Internet, the efflorescence of new architectural and urban planning projects, developments in literary and cultural production, new turns in theory and philosophy, and the rapid growth of the antiglobalization movement came to characterize the long nineties. He offers readings of some of the most interesting cultural texts of the era: Don DeLillo’s White Noise; Joe Haldeman’s Forever trilogy; Octavia Butler’s Parable novels; the Terminator films; the movies Fight Club, Independence Day, Cape Fear, and Ghost Dog; and the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer. In so doing, he illuminates fundamental issues concerning narrative, such as how beginnings and endings are recognized and how relationships between events are constructed.
Author: Katherine Marie Olley Publisher: Boydell & Brewer ISBN: 1843846373 Category : Kinship Languages : en Pages : 259
Book Description
This wide-ranging study offers a new understanding of Old Norse kinship in which the individual self was expanded to encompass its kin.
Author: Gero Bauer Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA ISBN: Category : Literary Criticism Languages : en Pages : 410
Book Description
Explores the emphasis that contemporary novels, films and television series place on the present, arguing that hope emerges from the potentiality of the here and now, rather than the future, and as intimately entangled with negotiations of structures of belonging. Taking its cue from an understanding of hope as connoting an organizing temporality, one which is often presumed to be projecting into a future, Hope and Kinship in Contemporary Fiction challenges this understanding, arguing that hope emerges in practices of relationality in the present, disentangling hope from a necessary correlation with futurity. Through close readings of contemporary works, including The Road, The Walking Dead, Cloud Atlas, Sense8, The People in the Trees and A Little Life, Gero Bauer investigates how these texts explore structures of kinship as creative and affective practices of belonging and care that claim spaces beyond the heterosexual, reproductive nuclear family. In this context, fictional figurations of the child – often considered the bearer of the future – are of particular interest. Through these interventions into definitions of and reflections on fictional manifestations of hope and kinship, Bauer's analyses intersect with queer theory, new materialism and postcritical approaches to literature and cultural studies, moving towards counterintuitively hopeful readings of the present moment.
Author: Lin Song Publisher: Hong Kong University Press ISBN: 9888528734 Category : Social Science Languages : en Pages : 173
Book Description
What does it mean to be queer in a Confucian society in which kinship roles, ties, and ideologies are of such great importance? This book makes sense of queer cultures in China—a country with one of the largest queer populations in the world—and offers an alternative to Euro-American blueprints of queer individual identity. This book contends that kinship relations must be understood as central to any expression of queer selfhood and culture in contemporary cultural production in China. Using a critical approach—“queering Chinese kinship”—Lin Song scrutinizes the relationship between queerness and family relations, and questions Eurocentric queer culture’s frequent assumption of the separation of queerness from blood family. Offering five case studies of queer representations across a range of media genres, this book also challenges the tendency in current scholarship on Chinese and East Asian queerness to understand queer cultures as predominantly counter-mainstream, marginal, and underground. Shedding light on the representations of queerness and kinship in independent and subcultural as well as commercial and popular cultural products, the book presents a more comprehensive picture of queerness and kinship in flux and highlights queer politics as an integral part of contemporary Chinese public culture. “The book makes a strong contribution to Asian queer studies through an in-depth theorization of queer kinship in the Chinese context, a comprehensive coverage of different types of queer media and popular culture, and an innovative discussion of homonormativity in the context of contemporary China. In a fast-developing and very competitive academic field, this book stands out as an important contribution.” —Hongwei Bao, University of Nottingham “Queering Chinese Kinship represents the cutting edge of Chinese queer studies. Its sophisticated media analyses and provocative theoretical contentions reveal two central paradoxes: the interdependence of queerness and kinship despite China’s notoriously homophobic patriarchal familism, and the flourishing of queer public culture in spite of its infamously restrictive media environment. Brilliantly demonstrating how queer possibility emerges through a confluence of familial, media, state, and market forces, this book is a joy to read and a major contribution to the field.” —Fran Martin, University of Melbourne
Author: Camille Robcis Publisher: Cornell University Press ISBN: 0801468396 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 319
Book Description
In France as elsewhere in recent years, legislative debates over single-parent households, same-sex unions, new reproductive technologies, transsexuality, and other challenges to long-held assumptions about the structure of family and kinship relations have been deeply divisive. What strikes many as uniquely French, however, is the extent to which many of these discussions—whether in legislative chambers, courtrooms, or the mass media—have been conducted in the frequently abstract vocabularies of anthropology and psychoanalysis. In this highly original book, Camille Robcis seeks to explain why and how academic discourses on kinship have intersected and overlapped with political debates on the family—and on the nature of French republicanism itself. She focuses on the theories of Claude Lévi-Strauss and Jacques Lacan, both of whom highlighted the interdependence of the sexual and the social by positing a direct correlation between kinship and socialization. Robcis traces how their ideas gained recognition not only from French social scientists but also from legislators and politicians who relied on some of the most obscure and difficult concepts of structuralism to enact a series of laws concerning the family. Lévi-Strauss and Lacan constructed the heterosexual family as a universal trope for social and psychic integration, and this understanding of the family at the root of intersubjectivity coincided with the role that the family has played in modern French law and public policy. The Law of Kinship contributes to larger conversations about the particularities of French political culture, the nature of sexual difference, and the problem of reading and interpretation in intellectual history.
Author: Diego Compagna
Author: Agnes Andeweg
Author: Berit Åström
Author: Jillmarie Murphy
Author: Don Macnaughtan
Author: Philip E. Wegner
Author: Katherine Marie Olley
Author: Gero Bauer
Author: Anchit Sathi
Author: Lin Song
Author: Camille Robcis