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Session 1: Monstrous Writing
Chair: Sorcha Ni Fhlainn

Predators and Prey: Newspaper Editors, Readers, and the Monstrous
Andrew O’Day
Department of Media and Film Studies, University of Winchester, United Kingdom

This paper will argue that the monster provides a useful entry point for considering the aesthetic and economical strategies of print media in the late nineteenth-century – a period of sensationalist ‘New Journalism’. This ‘New Journalism’ followed the sensationalist and serialised narratives of Ouida; and belongs to a period when melodrama – pitting good against evil – thrived in the theatre; and when the gothic novel still enjoyed popularity (for example, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde).
The paper will centre on the way in which Jack the Ripper – since his true identity remained unknown - was largely “constructed” as a monster. Part of this “monstrous construction” derives from the ‘Jack the Ripper’ letters (the trade name; the ‘From Hell’ letter written in fiendish red ink; the notion of the Ripper as cannibal, a human monster preying on other humans). But, as this paper will explore, drawing on primary archival material, this “monstrous construction” was jumped upon by the press which, at first, had simply focussed on the victims of the Whitechapel murders; for example, there was a shift to a visual depiction of the Ripper as a gruesome skeleton leaning towards one of the victims in a menacing manner, symbolising Death; and images were accompanied by sensationalist captions (with the use of recurring words such as ‘Fiend’ and ‘Monster’ and exclamations such as ‘Opening The Door To Admit Death!’). Additionally, the Ripper was depicted as a mysterious figure (seen, for example, from behind as he dashes through an archway away from the blindfolded figure of Justice), emphasising, as with the gothic novel, the horror of the unknown.
The paper will then examine the way in which the notion of the monster tied in with the form of these newspapers. Sensationalised and associated with the horror of the unknown, the discourse of monstrosity works in tandem with the serialised form of the Jack the Ripper case, with hermeneutic questions posed in each new issue engaging readers of the day in a continuing narrative: ‘Two More Whitechapel Horrors. When Will The Murderer Be Captured’, ‘East End Horrors. When Will They Cease?’ For people loved a good monster narrative. The paper will conclude by noting that this discourse of monstrosity is not so different from the sensationalist reporting in the tabloids of today (through a similar use of headlines and illustrative material).

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Negligent Monsters: American School Shootings and the Displacement of Monstrosity
Kristen Davis
Australian National University, Canberra, Australia

Immediately after Dylan Klebold finished his shooting spree with his friend, Eric Harris, at Columbine High School in Colorado, and had then turned the gun on himself, his parents’ lawyer informed them to beware. “Dylan is dead”, he said, “so now they’re going to hate you.” Soon enough, he was proven correct when the families of the victims started one civil trial after another alleging Dylan’s parents were negligent in their parenting. Dylan the ‘monster’ was dead, so his parents must, perforce, take his place.
This paper will investigate this phenomenon whereby the monstrosity of the acts of a dead child is assigned to his or her living parents, even when the child acted without his or her parents’ foreknowledge. This is a particularly easy substitution to make due to the stereotypes of the ‘always responsible adult parent’ and the ‘non-volitional child’. For the parents are considered to have not only created the ‘monster’ who could engage in school shootings, but who should also have known their child’s secret intentions even before he or she did. The parent’s monstrosity, thus, is unmistakeable in the actions of the child; the child is never a ‘monster’ on his or her own terms.
The reason for this desperate need to bestow monstrosity on the parents of such killers and to then prosecute them, is, so this paper will argue, to belie the necessity of the community, or the society, to look more closely at the socio-cultural factors surrounding these killings. For, in the Columbine case, as in all the others, the people the killers claim drove them to their acts are never their parents; rather they are the bullies and the jocks who run their high schools and make life living hell for anyone who isn’t like them. Yet, exploration of this culture of fear and misery would mean too deep a soul search for the towns that host this sort of mass murder. Instead, the ‘monstrous’ parents are wheeled out to face the music their children have written, to be hated in the ways their children were hated, and finally to be forced to mask those deep underlying rents in the fabric of their communities in ways their children one day simply refused any longer to do.

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Killing Just For Fun: Amoral ‘Monsters’
Belinda Morrissey
Communication and Media Studies, School of Professional Communication, University of Canberra, Australia

On June 18, 2006, in Collie, a Western Australian mining town, two teenage girls strangled their friend, Eliza Davis, with speaker wire. They had no motive for doing so, other than their claim that they wanted to ‘experience’ killing someone. In the girls’ terms, their acts had no moral force; indeed, it was an entirely amoral act, divorced from any concept of compassion or ethical behaviour.
This paper will argue that the appellation ‘monster’ has a moral dimension on the part of those who use it to describe another’s behaviour. It will place the case it considers in the context of a long line of earlier ‘thrill kills’ where teenagers have killed just ‘for fun’. It will examine the tension between the public condemnation of these killers as ‘monsters’ and the killers’ own amoralistic explanation for their acts. It will analyse whether or not amorality is, in itself, monstrous, or whether it problematizes the concept of the ‘monster’, specifically in moral and ethical terms. 
This paper will diverge from earlier studies of amoral acts, including those of Hannah Arendt and Shoshana Felman on Adolf Eichmann, in that it will move beyond the spectre of the amoral ‘agent’ only ‘following orders’ to justify his deeds, to the figures of these two young girls, and others who came before them, who killed merely because they wanted to, not even because they were asked by someone else to do so. The paper will argue that there is a great difference, even in shades of amorality, between ‘following orders’ and deliberately deciding on one’s own behalf to kill so as to try out the experience. It will claim that in many ways, these teenaged ‘thrill killers’ are both more monstrous than someone like Eichmann, and at the same time, less monstrous; both more responsible and even further steeped in an amoral universe.
Finally, the paper will consider our very capacity to judge these girls. If they are so unlike ‘us’ in their amorality, can we evaluate them in ‘moral’ terms, and denounce them as ‘monsters’? For, as the paper will observe, these seemingly vacuous thrill killers are our community’s most vehement examples of the ‘Other’: terrifyingly incomprehensible, yet uncanny reminders of the capacities for violence and mercilessness present in all of us.

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