Literature paper and film response
shawn23
cohen_-_monster_culture_powerpoint.pptxCohen – “Monster Culture (Seven Theses)”
CSCL 3461 – 8 February 2017
Monsters and Culture
early in the chapter, Cohen lays out what he calls “a new modus legendi: a method of reading cultures from the monsters they engender” (3)
follows with seven more specific theses that constitute that method
How might cultures be read by and/or through the monsters they create?
How might this also be a reciprocal operation (cultures creating monsters and monsters creating cultures)?
Are Cohen’s theses exhaustive, or could others be added?
Category Crises
in the third thesis, Cohen suggests that monsters point to larger category crises
“[t]his refusal to participate in the classificatory ‘order of things’ is true of monsters generally: they are disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration. And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6)
Category Crises - Questions
Why are monsters seen as non-participants in the order of things?
How do monsters’ incoherent bodies elude systematic structuration?
How might monsters smash distinctions and/or threaten established categories?
Representing as Monstrous
as part of the conversation surrounding the fourth thesis, regarding the monster as a locus of difference, Cohen states that “[r]epresenting an anterior culture as monstrous justifies its displacement or extermination by rendering the act heroic” (7-8)
gives a number of examples, including treatment of Native Americans and of warring ethnic groups in a disintegrating Yugoslavia,
also points to the larger categories of gender, sexuality, and race
Representing as Monstrous - Questions
Why are anterior (past) cultures easy targets for such representation?
How might such representation render harsh treatment of those cultures a heroic act?
How might this principle be applied to gender, race, and sexuality?
Difference as Arbitrary
further on in the same thesis, Cohen argues that “[b]y revealing that difference is arbitrary and potentially free-floating, mutable rather than essential, the monster threatens to destroy not just individual members of a society, but the very cultural apparatus through which individuality is constituted and allowed” (12)
Difference as Arbitrary - Questions
Why would knowledge of the arbitrary nature of difference be so threatening?
How does this awareness endanger both the individual and apparatus levels?
How might difference be seen as mutable rather than essential, and is that necessarily a bad thing?
Destructive v. Deconstructive
the fifth thesis asserts that the monster polices the borders of the possible
Cohen contends that “[t]he monster’s destructiveness is really a deconstructiveness: it threatens to reveal that difference originates in process, rather than in fact (and that ‘fact’ is subject to constant reconstruction and change)” (14-5)
Destructive v. Deconstructive - Questions
How could an unproductive destruction also be a productive deconstruction?
How does difference originate in process rather than in fact?
What happens when the fluidity of difference is revealed?
