The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts
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ICFA 33: The Monstrous Fantastic Conference Paper Abstracts Wednesday, March 21, 2012 4:30-6:00 p.m. 1. (SF) The Many Faces of the Black Vampiress: Octavia Butler's Fledgling Pine Chair: Isiah Lavender, III University of Central Arkansas “Shori Matthews has told us the truth”: Unreliable Narration in Octavia Butler's Fledgling Florian Bast University of Leipzig, Germany Octavia Butler, the first black woman to be commercially successful as a science fiction author, is known for her novel’s minute dissections of the complexities of power hierarchies and resistance. Her oeuvre has received considerable attention from scholars of the fantastic and of African American women's literature. As such, it is part of a more recent tendency in academia to investigate more closely the dynamic interplay of minority literature and the fantastic in popular culture. Butler's texts' construction of narrative perspective has largely been overlooked in this or, in fact, any context. In creating their narrators as characters at the heart of their fantastic contents, such as time travelers, human-vampire hybrids, or human-alien children of a third sex, Butler's writings invoke postmodern imaginings of the subject to bespeak dynamics of power and oppression created at the intersection of race, gender, and class. As part of a larger scholarly project investigating agency in Butler's oeuvre, my presentation will address one of these constructions critically. ‘Unspeakable Desire:’ Interracial Liaisons in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling Marie-Luise Löffler University of Leipzig While Octavia Butler’s fiction has generally received a substantial amount of scholarly attention, her latest novel Fledging (2005) – centered around a young African American female vampire – has been largely neglected in most critical discussions of her work. Besides drastically departing from traditional conventions of vampire literature, one of its most striking features centers around the construction of multi-layered interracial bonds throughout its storyline. This paper will focus on the representation of a highly complex interracial sexual relationship between the black female protagonist and a white man in the novel – one of “the most disruptive and transformative articulation[s] of cross- racial contact” (Paulin 5) in African American literature. In contrast to conventional literary depictions that have largely focused on such relationships being of an overall destructive nature, I argue that Butler utilizes the fantastic figure of the female vampire to construct an intimate relationship between a black woman and a white man that profoundly departs from the multiple historically-grounded racial and gendered implications that have not only signified such sexual relationships in American culture and literature in general, but in African American literature in particular. Monsters and Power: The Construction of Race and Identity in Octavia Butler’s Fledgling Thomas Cassidy South Carolina State University In Octavia Butler’s final novel, Fledgling, Shori Matthews is, like her Shelley-esque predecessor, a creation of modern science whose outward signs of difference indelibly mark her as unnatural. Bioengineered with melanin by a race of fair-skinned vampires to be the first of their kind to endure the sunlight, she is treated by some of her fellow Ina as the racialized creature from James Whales Frankenstein movies, when they mount a campaign to burn her alive. When she appeals to a panel of elders to attest to the truth of her unnatural, hybridized identity, what’s at stake is her identity as one of the Ina. Like most literary vampires, the Ina are implicitly aristocratic in their dealings among themselves, and with the humans symbionts whose blood they feed off of. Shori’s challenge is to insert herself into this discourse in such a way that she does not simply repeat it but also introduces an implicitly racialized difference 2. (VPA) Monstrous Comic Books Oak Chair: Daniel Felts University of Memphis The Darkness in the “Dark Phoenix Saga”: Gender, Power, and Identity in the X-Men Gregory Cavenaugh Rollins College By examining shifting depictions of the 1980 X-Men "Dark Phoenix" narrative, this paper seeks to gain understanding of how changing concerns about gender in the United States inform the depiction of female power and its link to societal order. “It” All Depends: Complicated Monstrosity in Nightschool: The Weirn Books Lynette James USM Stonecoast This paper explores the methods used to complicate the definition of the monstrous in the Nightschool graphic novels by Svetlana Chmakova through close readings of the Nightschool books through the lenses of rhetorical analysis, cultural studies, and literary theory including such works as Rhetorics of Fantasy, Not Your Mother’s Vampire, The Uses of Enchantment, and Scott McCloud’s work on comics. Monsters in the Fourth Dimension: The Imaginative Plane of the 3D Comic Book David Steiling Ringling College of Art and Design This presentation is a brief examination of the way in which monsters and the monstrous are integrated within the immersive space of the 3D comic book. Examples from the introductory period of the 1950s, along with some other significant experiments with 3D comics will show how the virtual space of 3D sequential art is manipulated to construct atmospherics of horror, the uncanny or the sublime. 3. (FTV) Expressive Monsters: Polanski, Aronofsky, and Soul Eaters Cypress Chair: Mark Bould University of the West of England Dialectical Progression in Roman Polanski's Apartment Trilogy Robert Niemi St. Michael’s College Roman Polanski’s so-called “Apartment Trilogy” consists of three fascinating and powerful horror films: Repulsion (1965), Rosemary’s Baby (1967), and Le Locataire [The Tenant] (1976). The monstrous events that transpire in Repulsion are entirely in the realm of psychological horror, i.e., all of the horrors emanate from the increasingly warped mind of the protagonist, Carol Ledoux (Catherine Deneuve). The second film, Rosemary’s Baby (1968) is best classified as “supernatural horror”; all of the weirdness can be attributed to the doings of a powerful satanic cult. The final film in the Trilogy, The Tenant, represents a kind of dialectical culmination as it combines and melds psychological and supernatural horror elements into a cryptic and truly frightening configuration that surpasses its predecessors in ambiguity, complexity, and dramatic impact. My presentation will trace genre and thematic development in the Apartment Trilogy in dialectical terms (thesis, i.e., psychological horror; antithesis, i.e., supernatural horror; synthesis, i.e., psychological-supernatural horror) and discuss the implications. Soul Eater and the Monsters of Expressionism Janine Villot University of South Florida In the Japanese anime Soul Eater, monsters permeate the story, which takes place in a fantastical version of our world. Soul Eater's horror setting and visual style utilize the same methods of expression found in German Expressionistic films such as The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari spoke to the heart of Germany's issues at the time, and Soul Eater, with its secondhand German Expressionistic influence, updates the themes. Both works focus on the debilitating effects of trauma, but for The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, trauma arises from post-World War I issues, while Soul Eater locates trauma in psychological conditions. Using The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari as comparison allows the understanding that Soul Eater's outward manifestation of monstrosity acts as both an expression and a distortion of the monstrous within. Two kinds of monstrosity dominate Soul Eater: the born monster and the created monster. Both can be found in the ranks of Soul Eater's villains: born monsters in the animalistic witches, and created monsters in the murderous people whose evil souls have mutated their forms. However, the true issue of monstrosity lies in two of the more complex characters whose madness leads them to straddle the line between antagonist and protagonist: Dr. Franken Stein, a born psychopath based on both Mary Shelley's (in)famous doctor and his monster, and Crona, a mass murderer created by his mother. The paper first examines the issue of the monstrous in Soul Eater, particularly in their unique transformational qualities. The paper then compares and contrasts Soul Eater's presentation of the monstrous to that of the German Expressionistic film, The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. The paper concludes that comparing The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari to Soul Eater allows a deeper understanding of how this fantastical anime addresses contemporary psychological concerns based on reality. The Insane Quest for Perfection: Identity and Otherness in Darren Aronofsky's Black Swan Patricia Williamson Central Michigan University Director Darren Aronofsky’s dark exploration of the creative process and its toll on the artist received critical acclaim and numerous award nominations upon its 2010 release. The film focuses on the trials and tribulations of Nina, a meek, hard-working ballerina who must transform herself into the perfect Swan Queen by confronting a darker side of her identity. Aronofsky revisits many of the same tropes and themes he has used in his past films, including an exploration of internal and external validation, shifting identities, entertainment as artistic endeavor, otherness, and jealousy. This examination of the film will delve into the depiction of the creative process as a form of transformation