Monster culture in the 21st century : a reader

Author(s)

    • Levina, Marina
    • Bui, Diem-My T.

Bibliographic Information

Monster culture in the 21st century : a reader

edited by Marina Levina and Diem-My T. Bui

Bloomsbury Academic, imprint of Bloomsbury, 2013

  • : pb

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Includes index

Description and Table of Contents

Description

In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty. The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century. The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.

Table of Contents

Introduction: Toward a Comprehensive Monster Theory in the 21st Century by Marina Levina and Diem My Bui 1. Ontology and Monstrosity by Amit S. Rai Part I: Monstrous Identities 2. Heading Towards the Past: The Twilight Vampire Figure as Surveillance Metaphor by Florian Grandena 3. Playing Alien in Post-Racial Times by Susana Loza 4. Battling Monsters and Becoming Monstrous: Human Devolution in The Walking Dead by Kyle W. Bishop 5. The Monster in the Mirror: Reflecting and Deflecting the Mobility of Gendered Violence Onscreen by Megan Foley 6. Intersectionality Bites: Metaphors of Race and Sexuality in HBO's True Blood by Peter Campbell 7. Gendering the Monster Within: Biological Essentialism, Sexual Difference, and Changing Symbolic Functions of the Monster in Popular Werewolf Texts by Rosalind Sibielski Part II: Monstrous Technologies 8. Abject Posthumanism: Neoliberalism, Biopolitics and Zombies by Sherryl Vint 9. Monstrous Technologies and the Telepathology of Everyday Life by Jeremy Biles 10. Monstrous Citizenships: Coercion, Submission, and the Possibilities of Resistance in Never Let Me Go and Cloud Atlas by Roy Osamu Kamada 11. On the Frontlines of the Zombie War in the Congo: Digital Technology, the Trade in Conflict Minerals, and Zombification by Jeffrey W. Mantz 12. Monsters by the Numbers: Controlling Monstrosity in Video Games by Jaroslav Svelch 13. Killing Whiteness:The Critical Positioning of Zombie Walk Brides in Internet Settings by Michele White Part III: Monstrous Territories 14. Zombinations: Reading the undead as debt and guilt in the national imaginary by Michael S. Drake 15. The Monster Within: Post-9/11 Narratives of Threat and the U.S. Shifting Terrain of Terror by Mary K. Bloodsworth-Lugo and Carmen R. Lugo-Lugo 16. The Heartland Under Siege: Undead in the West by Cynthia J. Miller and A. Bowdoin Van Riper 17. When Matter Becomes an Active Agent: The Incorporeal Monstrosity of Threat in Lost by Enrica Picarelli 18. Monstrous Capital: Frankenstein Derivatives, Financial Wizards, and the Spectral Economy by Ryan Gillespie 19. Domesticating the Monstrous in the Globalizing World by Carolyn Harford About the Contributors Index

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