2nd Global Conference

Monsters and the Monstrous:
Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil

Monday 10th May - Wednesday 12th May 2004
Budapest, Hungary

Conference Programme, Abstracts & Papers

Session 11: Monsters of Childhood
Chair: Kate Hebblethwaite

Where the Wild Things Are: Sendak’s Picture Book and the Monsters Personified, Sanctified, and Glorified
Phil Fitzsimmons
Centre of Language Education, University of Wollongong, North Wollongong, Australia

This paper focuses on Maurice Sendak's picture book, Where the Wild Things Are, and discusses the dream creation of monsters in the text not by the words that are used, but through the subtext created by use of unconscious visual literacy elements. The authors of this paper take the view that as discussed by Harris, McKenzie, Fitzsimmons and Turbill, an author draws on their social capital, their cultural capital and their funds of knowledge in creating text but in this instance an example of ‘sublimation' or the “redirection of energy arising from personal conflict or underlying anxiety into a more constructive outlet such as work” is clearly evident. Sendak admits that he drew the monsters in this text based on his own relatives. By analysing the pictures through the precepts of visual literacy, that is the illustrators use of “vectors, line, shape, gaze, and distance” it becomes clearly evident that the monsters represent not a nightmare or fear but a “healthy release of impulse”. Thus the authors argue that monsters in children's picture books are elements that should be revered not feared.

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Dysmorphic Bodies of Alice in Wonderland
Lois Drawmer
Department of Arts and Media, Buckinghamshire Chilterns University College, High Wycombe, Bucks, United Kingdom

This paper will examine the ways in which the imaginary and grotesque creatures which inhabit Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland form part of the cultural engagement with the existence of the spectacular and the monstrous. I will argue that Carroll's metaphoric and literal monsters in this book and through his interests in photographing young girls draw upon contemporary Victorian intellectual thought, and in particular in the interest in the fantastic and the monstrous which I will argue actually derives from the apparent antithesis: the new intellectual emphasis on taxonomies, logic and rationality of science and mathematics of the period.
Carroll's interest in logic and maths inform the apparent chaos and fragmentation of Alice 's world, where the monstrous and fantastic are derived from existing structures and systems of organisation. In a book full of hybrid, fantasy creatures, I will argue that the ‘real' monster which inhabits the narrative is Alice herself. Carroll structures Alice as the pivotal protagonist in a story about unstable identities, and shifting boundaries. In mediating and indeed fetishising the point of view of pre-adolescent young girl, Carroll effectively ventriloquises Alice 's identity. But Carroll does more than this: the character of Alice serves as a repository for male anxieties about female sexuality and latent desire actually inscribed upon the body. Carroll's fascination with young girls and abhorrence of sexually mature women (the Duchess, and the Queen) reveal complex responses to contemporary gender constructions which converge in a narrative framework of pastoral nostalgia. The encounters which Alice has with the fabulous and grotesque creatures in the narrative serve only to heighten the sense of unease which cannot be resolved even through the literary device of a framing ‘dream' structure, as, I will argue, it emanates from the spectacle of Alice herself.

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Depraved Paedos and Other Beasts: The Media Portrayal of Child Sexual Abusers in Ireland and the U.K
Michael Breen

No abstract is presently available

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