Monsters and the Monstrous

As excited as we are for the launch of our conference registration, we know that the level of interest the event has generated since September far exceeds the number of people who will be travelling to Edinburgh in June. While we hope to see as many of you at the conference as can make it, we also want to continue providing resources support for those of you who can't.

Which is why we are also excited to announce the publication of The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous, edited by Asa Simon Mittman. This sensational book looks to be a landmark release in the field of monster studies, and features essays by conference keynote Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who brought the collection to our attention), as well as Patricia MacCormack, John Block Friedman, Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, Dana Oswald, Debra Higgs Strickland, Karl Steel, and Peter J. Dendle.

Sufficiently weighty, both in mass and in content, from the looks of the table of contents and available excerpts, to justify the list price, there seems little doubt that the Companion will become a stable of monster researchers' libraries everywhere. In an emerging field of study, we can't help but gleefully imagine the shock and awe it will inspire in newly inducted students as it works its way into core course syllabi.

On a lighter, and more literary, note, we would also like to point out that this week marks the "12 Days of Monsters" on the Weird Fiction Review website. Posts by Jeff VanderMeer and Nancy Hightower have already touched on China Miéville, and throughout the whole week Pretty Monsters, a novella by Kelly Link, is available, as is a free download of VanderMeer's own Monstrous Creatures collection. Well worth keeping an eye on as the week unfolds!

Of course, a reminder that registration, travel, and accommodation info can now be found on the "Fees and Information" page here.

The Monster in the Machine

Those of you focusing on the Early Modern period may already be familiar with Zakiya Hanafi's The Monster in the Machine: Magic, Medicine, and the Marvelous in the Time of the Scientific Revolution (Duke University Press, 2000), but for those of you who aren't, you may find it interesting. Hanafi explores the evolution of sacred monsters into monstrous automata in early modern Italy, but her discussion touches on a conceptualisation of monstrosity that spreads far beyond these regional and chronological specifics. Particularly interesting is her discussion of the relationship between the monstrous body and the monstrous automaton, in which both rely on an understanding of monstrosity not as, to use her own words, "any specific thing", but as "a category that becomes constituted in different ways according to different cultural and historical contexts".

Henri Maillardet's Automaton at
The Franklin Institute, Philadelphia

The discussion of a historical relationship between monstrum and automaton raises interesting questions regarding notions of the sensualised or de-sensualised monster, especially regarding Hanafi's description of mechanised monstrosity itself:

"What makes an automaton monstrous is not the arrangement of its parts (although the automaton is often formed to represent a monster, a highly significant convergence). That is to say, that disposition of its limbs is not what makes it rare and extraordinary; that is not what makes it a monstrum. Rather, it is the fact that matter formed by artificial means and moving of its own volition would seem to be endowed with spirit... The horror and fear provoked by appearances in nature of monstrous births moved over into the horror and fear provoked by our own artificial creations"

Such an idea of the monstrous automaton seems inherently disembodied and yet intrinsically tied to a kind of artificial embodiment. Interestingly, it also seems to cast out once again the role of the senses in not only the reaction to the monstrous, but also in the conceptualisation of monstrosity. Although it may not necessarily have been an intentional directive of the text, in exploring the bonds between the development of monsters and the scientific revolution in Italy Hanafi draws attention to a sterilisation of the monstrous which is characteristic of many categories of monstrosity across cultural and historical boundaries.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, "Giants"

Julius Koch, Le Geant Constantin
Image courtesy of TheTallestMan.com

As you can probably imagine, we are looking forward to the forthcoming Ashgate Encyclopedia of Literary and Cinematic Monsters, ed. Jeffrey Weinstock, with great anticipation (it's hardly a stretch of the imagination to say that if you're reading this blog, you are too, and if you weren't before, you most definitely are now. Or at least you should be). To be totally honest, we simply cannot wait for it to be published.

Time travel was attempted (and subsequently abandoned), things were learned that cannot be unlearned, and our respective psyches were threatened with total destruction. As a result, we had no choice but to resign ourselves to the doleful realisation that, like mere mortals, we would have to wait.

But that wait has been made less torturous by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen (who, just a small reminder, will be flying all the way from Washington D.C. to Edinburgh, Scotland to be a keynote at our conference along with Peter Hutchings and Margrit Shildrick). On the In the Middle blog, he was ever so kind last month to post a draft of his entry on giants, to which we now direct your attention:

The giant pervades every level of society, from popular culture and folklore to self-consciously artistic literature and scholarly discourse. With some notable exceptions, the giant is strongly gendered male. He often figures the masculine body out of control, demarcating a cultural boundary not to be traversed. The giant is foundational. The world may have been created from the body of a giant, as in Norse fable; or the body of the earth may spawn giants, as in classical tradition. He is so elemental that humanity cannot escape his abiding presence.

Keep an eye out for the encyclopaedia itself - definitely going to be a good book to have on the shelf. 

Cute & Creepy Exhibition in Florida

Sadly for us, all of the organisers of the Sensualising Deformity conference are based in Edinburgh, which means we cannot attend the absolutely fantastic and grotesque Cute and Creepy exhibition at the Museum of Fine Arts at Florida State University in Tallahassee. But we can help encourage others to attend in our stead, and hope that they will bring back tales of their creepy experiences. The exhibit will be held between 14 October and 20 November of this year, so there's plenty of time yet to plan your trip; perhaps your family or friends might enjoy a trip to Disney World while you nip off for some monstrous pop surrealism?

The site's home page offers different examples of the work, or the kind of work, that will be offered at the exhibit, and based on that alone there is no question that it would be of interest to this conference and anyone reading the blog, but as if to ensure no further doubt, curator Carrie Ann Baade writes,

To see beauty in the carnivalesque or macabre, in freaks and in monsters, is a matter of aesthetics. Most of us can agree on the artistic value of a Monet or Titian but this work is for a daring audience, an audience open to exploring the strange beauty and the ecstasy inherent in our culture's aversions.

Travis Louis, The Curse of the Goat, 2006.

There is something that makes us uneasy when confronted by the weird or the unusual. Those who can appreciate both have come to anticipate and enjoy unexpected sensations. Work of this nature is not going to be an underground movement any longer: the grotesque is going mainstream.

The website also offers a tantalising excerpt of Nancy E. Hightower's essay "Revelatory Monsters: Deconstructive Hybrids, the Grotesque, and Pop Surrealism" that is included in the exhibition catalogue, which is worth quoting in full:

We need monsters in our lives.

We like to fear them, to run hiding under the covers or clenching a lover's arm until the monster is destroyed or banished to far off lands. they are wonderful like that, refusing to ever completely disappear from our lives, affording us the opportunity for self-introspection if we take a moment to recognize that monsters don’t die because they are essentially us(Cohen 5). Once they are eradicated from our cultural memory, we go, too. And that monstrous, wondrous body is at the heart of the grotesque. From the playful grotteschiunearthed in the Domus Aurea to demons of the illuminated manuscripts that overflowed from the margins onto the actual text, the monstrous body has always threatened what our culture has desired to contain (or perhaps more accurately, trapped, vetted, and fixed to incorporate whatever impossible standards it has set up to differentiate us from them). But the monstrous body is also prophetic in nature.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen argues that as a “construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read: the monstrum is etymologically ‘that which reveals’ that which warns…like a letter on the page, the monster signifies something other than itself”. What sets up this kind of fulcrum is society itself: “The too-precise laws of nature as set forth by science are gleefully violated in the freakish compilation of the monster's body. A mixed category, the monster resists any classification built on hierarchy or a merely binary opposition, demanding instead a ‘system’ allowing polyphony, mixed response (difference in sameness, repulsion in attraction), and resistance to integration…”. These kinds of juxtapositions are what form the definition of the grotesque.

Greg Simpkins, Knightengale, 2008.

Of course, with such passages accompanying the examples of art included on the home page of the site, monsterphiles who, like us, don't live anywhere near the exhibition will be working out calculations in the vain hope that a trip to Florida this autumn might be within their budget (we feel your pain). But if you happen to be so lucky as to be in Florida, or close enough for a visit, we highly recommend visiting the exhibition.

If not, perhaps you will have to do as we are doing and wistfully pass on the information to any fortune-favoured friends you might have who could attend! In the meantime, console yourself, perhaps, with a closer look at the artists involved, whose work is engaging with monstrosity in such sensational ways.

British Medical Journal Teratological Memoranda

Images courtesy of the BMJ Publishing Group,
BMJ 1889, June 8; 1(1484): 1288–1289.

Those of you interested in teratology - 19th century especially - will probably already be quite familiar with the British Medical Journal's Teratological Memoranda, but if you haven't had a spare hour or two to browse through their older archives looking for reports of "human monsters", we would like to direct you to articles such as this, which describes the birth of three monstrous infants, a pair of conjoined twins and a limbless child whose birth is attributed to the mother having "seen a fish she never thought existed". Perhaps the most interesting thing featured in both reports is the woodcut included with each, that of the conjoined twins especially. 

In placing the figure of the twins against a black background, the gap between them and the band of flesh which binds them together are thrown into sharp relief; their faces seem closer, within kissing distance, because of the space between them. Their position seems transformed into a sensual one by the intense nearness, which is itself born of that crucial gap. Contrasted with the harshly tactile description given by the author of his involvement in their birth, focused on his probing hands and fingers, in this image it is the lack of contact which is the more sensuous.

The image of the limbless child, on the other hand, is memorable for the almost wistful expression depicted on the baby's face, its humanity over emphasised as if to counter the anomalous form below.