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Session 10b: Marginal Monsters?
Chair: Peter Mario Kreuter

Questioning the Negative Value of Pain
Shona Hill
Victoria University, Wellington, New Zealand

Resurfacing throughout western history, our monsters embody an ever present form of threat.  Whether as metaphors of anxiety, as narratives of pain and suffering, or as scriptural genres of wisdom, monsters provoke both threat and fascination. As a result, they remain central to discourses of normality.  By transgressing the conventional and separating good from evil, human from inhuman, these liminal creatures also make good business.  As Beal, Ingebretsen and Kearney (amongst others) argue, successful Hollywood monster-movies (horror/neo-noir) have used our sense of unease to illustrate how monsters as god, or god as monster, are an essential ‘undead’ and who keep returning. Many of these films, they claim, like the Book of Job, use a biblical wisdom genre to argue and deliberate the origins of evil, while at the same time seeking to justify the moral sense of the monstrous.  Using Scorsese’ 1992 remake of the neo-noir film Cape Fear, as empirical data, this paper will explore this ambivalence and question what defines the monster in a world which simultaneously accepts and rejects the abjectness of God’s divine wisdom.  Mellor and Shilling’s discussion of the Medieval, Reformation, and Baroque body is used to focus attention on the Ambivalent Body.  I argue that Scorsese’s film incorporates an ever present element of threat, not because an innocent family is stalked by a deadly psychopath, but because the bodily interaction in this film can be read to question the binaries that surround the monstrous, thereby locating ambivalence in the theoretically ‘good’ protagonist, Sam Bowden.  This tension forces the audience to re-assess if constructed ‘normality’ should assign a negative value to pain and chaos, and a positive value to material success.  That is, does the audience know who the monsters are? 

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Knowledge and the Monster: An Unfair Epistemological Marginalization of the Creature?
Sonia Ouaras
Department of English studies of La Sorbonne-Nouvelle University (Paris III), FRance

“Fear of Danger is ten thousand times more terrifying than Danger itself, when apparent to the Eyes; and we find the Burthen of Anxiety greater, by much, than the Evil which we are anxious about.”
Daniel Defoe, Robinson Crusoe.

I wish to engage with the figure of the monster in fiction, with particular attention to the questioning of knowledge and its potential threat due to its flexibility. I approach this topic by focusing on a specific kind of monster, namely those derived from experimental scientific projects. I begin by discussing the etymology of the word “monster” as the mainspring of my essay (Lat. monstrare, i.e. to exhibit or to point out), showing that the aim of “post-human creatures” in fiction enhances our need to visualize contemporary fears. In regard to knowledge, I will show that the monster is created to subvert our understanding of the world – may it be in the field of natural sciences, philosophy, anthropology, or politics – but not in a voluntary way. It is not the creation per se that engenders the introspective step but rather the creator.  It is the creator who distorts knowledge and pushes natural laws to their extreme in pursuit of a dream, his efforts deriving from a megalomaniac need to compete with God/Nature.
This utopia of post-human creation – doomed to dystopia as I wish to demonstrate – requires, and also leads to, a marginalization of both creator and creation.  Drawing from an Aristotelian conception of man as a social being, I demonstrate that seclusion implies that in the end neither creation nor creator can be fully human as they are bound to social exclusion.
On this I focus first on knowledge as a cognitive menace that can lead to seclusion, victimization and pathos in English fiction dealing with monsters.  I then explore the figure of the monster as a creation that evolves in the enclosed space of our mind, discussing how our fear derives from our entrapment in a hermeneutic circle of self-awareness whereby we become conscious that we are always already potential dangers to ourselves.  

The Sublime Monstrosity: Baudelaire on Modernity
Loretta Vandi
Liceo Artistico "A. Serpieri" Rimini Italy

Modernity, for Baudelaire, provides the artist a most valuable and spiritual feature, monstrosity, made up from two absolutely interconnected subjects: woman and metropolis. Both have to be aged, artificial, and challenge the normal ideas and behaviour on life and death. He goes on to distinguish between absolute and ordinary monstrosity, joining the former to the sublime, creative comic (grotesque) and the latter with the ordinary, imitative comic (comedy). The modern woman is that who paints herself, wears eccentric dresses, exhibits instead of concealing her deformed body and feels her personality alive only within the modern landscape of the metropolis – that dark and majestic collection of people and monuments with which no man could refrain from being deeply fascinated. The beauty of these forms (of women and cities) consists in their moral fruitfulness. They offer for consideration plenty of suggestions, but of a cruel and bitter sort. The artist – we may bear in mind that Baudelaire is always speaking about the artist as a total personality independently of representational means used – is involved in a constant pursuit of the vertigo that monstrosity affords him. This is the source of pure art, an art which displays the beautiful that is firmly rooted in the horrible. Here we may detect the artist’s warm approval, and understand with him the necessity of the artifice against naturalness.
The aim of my paper is to demonstrate that Baudelaire’s true appreciation of monstrosity implies on the one hand his uncompromising refusal of life as it is normally lived (an important implication of it is the impossibility to have true long lasting emotions) and on the other his unflagging willingness to risk life, by a close acquaintance with the abnormal, for a continuous transformation of his soul.

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