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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 5: Monsters Medicinal
Chair: Richard Stamp
Monster Myths and Metaphors in the Debate Over New Reproductive Technologies
Theo Vurdubakis
UMIST, United Kingdom
In occidental modernity, the habitat of the monstrous
is sought less and less in what lies beyond the gaze of reason – such
as other-worlds or blank spots on maps (‘here there be monsters’)
– and more and more in the workings of (techno-scientific)
rationality itself: It is thus no longer the sleep of
reason that
begets monsters. Technoscience has long been held both in awe
and suspicion with the latter acting as a kind of counterbalance
to the continual cultural investment in the image of scientific
knowledge as progress, as the motive force of beneficial change.
This paper explores the ways in which monster myths and
metaphors have framed Euro-American encounters with new
reproductive technologies. At each successive moment in their
development these technologies have provided the occasion for
virulent argument on the role and effects of technology in human
affairs. The paper focuses on the ways in which utopian images
of a world rendered ever more amenable to human desires, have
been closely shadowed by unsettling metaphors of violation and
monstrosity. In such discussions, it is argued, figures of
occidental cultural folklore such as Jekyll, Moreau or
Frankenstein function as convenient shorthand for expressions of unease
with the direction and pace of technological development
or even loss of confidence in the techno-scientific project of
instrumental control. Against this backdrop, the chimeric notions
of the 'designer baby' or the human 'clone' appear Janus-faced,
representing both the powers of human creativity and the
monstrous progeny of an excessive epistemophilia. They
constitute in this sense, potent metaphors for the
biotechnological revolution's claimed power to re-shape both
nature and society for 'good' or 'ill' and therefore demonstrate
the uncanny ability of monster myths to adapt themselves to ever
changing cultural preoccupations
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Invading Boundaries: Hybrids, Disease, and Empire
Kate Hebblethwaite
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
Studies of ‘Invasion of England’ novels
have tended to focus primarily on military invasions by human aggressors
and largely overlook the potentiality of narratives in which the ‘foreign
threat’ is
not only not English, but also not necessarily human. This paper, which
focuses primarily on Rudyard Kipling’s ‘The Mark of the Beast’ and
Bram Stoker’s Dracula, will explore the idea of the invading animal/man
hybrid, arguing that, if the overarching issue of the foreign monster
is his bodily hybridism, the threat that such assailants pose thus work
at a concomitantly more elemental level than those invasion stories in
which both the invader and the invaded is human. The threat is part animal,
the stake is humanity and the battlefield is the physical as well as
the imperial body.
This paper will argue that the battle for Empire as manifested
by Kipling and Stoker takes place primarily not over the battlefields
of colonial land, but over the body of the members of its colonising
elite. The foreign hybrid that is the ‘Silver Man’ and the
Count thus raise fears not only of a reverse colonisation but also of
a reverse evolution. Indeed, the actual implementation of each monster’s
offensive is through the transmission of a disease-like virus, which
causes its victims to undergo a physical regression down the evolutionary
scale. All boundaries are broken down and the battle for Empire is reduced
to the miniature of cells. This, I will argue, is in direct correspondence
with contemporary beliefs about germ theory which held that not only
was disease a kind of degeneration with the capability to reverse the
evolutionary process, but that ‘foreign’ diseases acted as
a rebellion on microscopic levels, infectious bacteria from infectious
foreigners threatening a cellular overthrow of their colonising overlords.
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