Session 3: Wolves and Tigers and Bad Guys – Oh My!

10th Global Conference

Monday 16th March – Thursday 19th March 2009

Salzburg, Austria

Conference Programme, Abstracts and Papers

Is the Big Bad Wolf Really Bad or Just Misunderstood?
Cynthia Jones
Department of Romance Languages and Literatures, State University of New York at Buffalo, USA

The werewolf has long been believed to be the essence of evil or even the form of Satan himself.  However, the wolf or the werewolf in folklore is not necessarily the evil creature that society believes it to be.  Society turns the werewolf into an evil being because they refuse to see the natural wickedness that exists within man.  The werewolf becomes shunned because he has some mystical knowledge on how to change his form that the rest of humanity doesn’t have.  According to Freud in his book Civilization and its Discontents, humans have a natural aggression that society represses and it is through this repression that they become discontent.  The werewolf then becomes a being that is able to act out his natural aggression during its wolf phase and then is able to return to society after having turned back into its human form.  Also, Hobbes’ comment on man in the Leviathan states that “man is a wolf to man,” because man will aggressively pursue his own selfish needs at the peril of other men.  The wolf has become the symbol of the evil that lurks within men, that is kept under lock and key, just waiting to get out.
Looking specifically at the lais, Bisclavret, by Maire de France, the folktale Manawee collected by Clarissa Pinkola Estés, and also the Greek myth of Lycaon, the Arcadian king, it becomes evident that there is a natural wickedness inside man.  Society has cut the access to this evil nature off from man and as a result, that evilness that is trapped inside man is projected onto the werewolf.  The werewolf is the one subject that can move freely, albeit with brute force, from society to nature and back.  In this paper I will argue that the werewolf is actually the inverse mirror of man himself that he is unwilling to face and also examine how it may be possible to reconcile this dialectic within man.  Humanity wants to keep itself safe within the confines of society, ignoring the natural wicked tendencies that are a part of man.  Man is essentially the inverse of the werewolf, wearing its fur (wicked side) on the inside, hiding it from the daylight.  Whereas the werewolf wears his fur freely on the outside, giving into his wicked nature.  So, the real question then becomes, how does man face the wolf that is within?

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)

Snowflakes and Tigers: R.S. Thomas and the Problem of Evil
Darren Oldridge
University of Worcester, United Kingdom

The Welsh poet-priest R. S. Thomas spent much of his creative life searching for religious meaning in a world suffused with undeserved pain.  As a “nature poet”, he questioned the waste and rapaciousness of the animal world; and his religious verse is marked by bewilderment in the face of an absent and apparently uncaring God.  While some critics have noted Thomas’ preoccupation with the problem of evil, there has been no systematic attempt to evaluate his responses to this problem or to view his whole work in relation to this central theme.  This paper begins this task.  It examines the main threads of Thomas’ reaction to evil in the natural and human world, and argues that these help to explain the major feature of his religious poetry: his embrace of the via negativa, or “negative way” to God.

Particularly over the last thirty years, depictions of violence in media outlets have been denounced as harmful in their effect.  This sentiment is grounded in the results of psychological studies that report stark increases in aggression centered behaviors among their participants after exposure to violent images.  This negative effect has been demonstrated with population samples of children and adolescents as well as with population samples of adults.  Methodologically, studies dealing with children employ self-report measures and longitudinal examinations while studies dealing with adults utilize violent film clips and pre-film agitation to elicit aggression on a confederate.  Although these studies collectively have merit in their results, they are lacking both in literature and in methodology.  Consistently an issue of significance, there is a tendency for experimenters to remove violent depictions from their original context in order to simplify a research design.  In essence, experimenters rely upon their own artificially created narrative, which defines violent actions as either justified or unjustified in context.  This methodology has arguably produced results that are questionable when discussing an audience’s actual, and typical, interaction with depictions of violence.  Clearly misunderstood among psychological research in this area, the way in which an audience reads violence in film is dependent on a wide variety of factors, specifically cultural and subjective concepts of the role violence plays in shaping attitudes towards evil.  Our study focuses on the idea that narrative has a more subject effect on an audience’s perception, and that in adult audiences there is a clear understanding concerning the place violence plays within this construct.  Of course, this idea of narrative guidance in audience response is not a novel concept.  Film studies have established a large library of literature stating the importance of narrative and its stylistic components in defining acts cognitively for a viewer.  This can theoretically be understood through the psychoanalytic and cultural studies framework of Slavoj Zizek, who combines the psychoanalytic analyses of Jacques Lacan and Sigmund Freud to establish the connections between film and audience.  The current study employed this framework to counter the practice of merely using film clips to exact a response amongst an audience, and to also demonstrate the benefits of using a more methodologically integrative approach to explaining behavior.  Implications for this study are discussed in terms of media censorship, emphasizing the idea that this issue is not that one is simply viewing violence, but, rather, what kinds of violence one is viewing.  While this study does not dismiss the evidence that media violence, especially habitual viewing of media violence, has the potential to produce problematic effects among younger audiences in particular, it denies that violence is static in its effect. Fictional violence is more than just an act; it is a complex set of actions that is defined by situational factors, viewer identification and empathy, and desires for a specific outcome.  Violence is a tool used in film to transmit messages about occurrences in various cultures, as a reflection of ourselves, and, more importantly, our social systems.

Download Draft Conference Paper (pdf)