Download Style Sheet 1
(pdf)

Download Style Sheet 2
(pdf)

Session 12: Witches, Cyborgs and Snowman: Oh, My!
Chair: Ann Marie Cook

Witches: The Half-Demons in Contemporary Kaschuba Culture
Magdalena Gajewska
Institute of Philosophy of Culture, University of Gdańsk, Poland

Kaschubas are 500 thousand ethnic group inhabiting North-Western Poland. Through the ages they preserved  their own language, as well as folklore and culture, that were under a strong influence of catholic religion. It influenced also the monsters, demons and witches beliefs. In our article we would like to present, basing on the interviews performed, the actual state of belief in Witches - the Half-Demons in Kaschubian villages. Though the last of official witch trials took place in 1836, the witches are still the intrinsic elements of Kaschubian folklore, what appears in our oppinion in two aspects: 1)as a belief in an existance of wise women who possess the power of healing and putting a curse, 2) witch worship, witch flight, ceremonies organized on the Kaschubian lands, connected with legendary topography. According to the Kaschubian beliefs, a witch does not have a defined personality. As a temptress is disguised in a mask of charm, and as a haunted transforms in a monster. One of the most frequently used accusements towards women was “enamouring a man”. In our study we check or confirm if the sexuality clue is still  important in perceiving a witch. We aslo analyse the mode of rationalization the witch performance, the influence of the religion and positive evaluation, which is achieved by the magic healing named “a prayer”. (While putting a curse is recognized by haunting and demons.) Our goal is to investigate whether the witch is still the one to blame, a victim of accusement. Another question we plan to answer is the one that refers to the contemporary witch cult and the evaluation of the meaning of dreadfullness in the cult. Approval by the games and plays.  It seems cruicial for us, and above all, how does it refer to the violence logics.

Download Conference Paper -

The Voracious Monster: Consumption, Jouissance & Reading The Textual Body
Tom Murphy
English Department, College of Liberal Arts, Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi, Corpus Christi, Texas, USA

This paper argues that Harry Crews is a front runner in changing the enlightened space of Kerouac’s road-trips into monstrous space of consumption and pleasure that reflects American postmodern cultural. Indeed, in Crews’ 1972 text, CAR: A Novel, images of car mass production and destruction invade the home in monstrous proportions in which the boundary between human/car blurs towards a cyborg identity. In “A Cyborg Manifesto,” Donna Haraway states that cyborgs are “couplings between organism and machine, each conceived as coded devices, in an intimacy and with a power that was not generated in the history of sexuality” (150). Moreover, Jeffrey Jerome Cohen states in “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” “[t]he monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy… . A construct and a projection, the monster exists only to be read” (4). CAR: A Novel marks the categorical crisis between consumers and consumed as the text maps the auto-centric cultural shift towards an emergence of human/car hybrid as a new textual paradigm. 
The car represents postmodern spatialization as monstrous in which the body and consumption are to be read. Crews’ text illustrates cars consuming human lives through accidents, meanwhile, the character Herman Mack, decides to strikeout on his own by publicly eating a new Ford Maverick square inch by square inch. Herman’s task of literally ingesting a car embodies Jean Baudrillard’s definition of consumption in The Consumer Society as “a powerful element of social control” in which the monster as consumption is transitory jouissance and acts metaphorically “as kind of a herdsman…[to] keep a patriarchal society functional” (84; Cohen 13). This paper’s triptych aim includes discussion of: Crews’ place in cyborg ontology, the importance of human/car hybrid shift in postmodern texts, and the dawning of a new machine age monster – the cyborg consumer – that enhances Crews’ CAR: A Novel.

Download Conference Paper -

A White Illusion of a Man: Snowman, Survival, and Speculation in Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Roger Davis
English Department, Grant MacEwan College, Edmonton, Canada

The protagonist of Margaret Atwood’s 2003 dystopian novel Oryx and Crake calls himself Snowman after the Abominable Snowman “existing and not existing, flickering at the edges of blizzards, apelike man or manlike ape” (10). The character oscillates between the elusive mythical monster and “the other kind of snowman, the grinning dope set up as a joke and pushed down as entertainment” (271). An isolated survivor of the destruction of humanity, Snowman is Atwood’s vehicle to speculate on the future of humanity given the current debates about potential catastrophes: environmental degradation, unchecked scientific progress, rampant consumerism, human exploitation.
Contextualized within Atwood’s longstanding interest in survival as a Canadian master narrative and within the divided critical debate about the potential hope of the novel, this paper will read Snowman as a site of negotiation between several contradictions arising from European colonial history and the history of late modernity. Representatively, Snowman invokes the purity of whiteness and the optimism of science and progress of European Enlightenment, yet he simultaneously suffers bodily failure as he starves and suffers attacks from creatures and disease in the post-apocalyptic world. He represents the possibility of leading humanity into an altered but potentially better existence while he simultaneously resents and fails to take responsibility for his situation and actions: an almost willful neglect of power.
The novel’s repetitive, circular narrative structure uses Snowman to demonstrate that “Human society…[is] a sort of monster….It never learned, it made the same cretinous mistakes over and over” (293).  Alternatively moralizing and insightful, the novel undercuts modern progress as the failed imaginings of “a white illusion of a man” (271), suggesting the history of progress is the history of monstrosity.

Download Conference Paper -

© Wickedness.Net 2007