The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us: Monstrosity and Humanity
A three-day conference
De Montfort University, UK
18, 19, 20 November 2011
Keynote Speakers:
David Punter, University of Bristol
Andy Mousley, De Montfort University, Leicester
From the 12th-century Old French mostre,
meaning a prodigy or marvel, the general use of
the word ?monster? has been derogatory:
something large, gross, malformed or
abnormal. The monstrous creates fear and
loathing, and includes difference through race,
culture, society, ideology, psychology and many
other Others. This fear is not produced by
something entirely alien but by the recognition
of ourselves within the Other. In his
Introduction to Cogito and the Unconscious
Slavoj ?i?ek argues that the Cartesian Subject
has at its heart the monster which emerges when
deprived of the ?wealth of
self-experience?. The ease by which the border
between ?human? and ?monster? is transgressed
has long been debated in literature;
Frankenstein makes a monster by trying to
perfect the human, both nineteenth-century
Flora Bannerman, in Varney the Vampire, and
twenty-first-century Sookie Stackhouse
recognise the human origins of the vampire. At
the heart of the monster is the human; at the
heart of the human is the monster.
This conference seeks to understand the
relationship between the human and the monstrous
across the centuries and across disciplines. In
what ways and to what ends have the human and
the monster been defined and polarised? How has
the monster been subdued, and with what
success? How do definitions and separations of
the human and the monstrous change and through
what pressures and motivations? How does the
emerging field of posthumanism enable us to
conceptualise the monstrous in relation to the human and humanism?
Proposals are invited for 20-minute papers which
may address, but are not limited to:
? Monstrosity in the humanities
? The monster and criminality
? Psychology and the monster
? Monstrosity and the internet
? The human and the monster in the post-national world
? Monstrosity and miscegenation
? Liminality and transgression
? Theories of monstrosity and/or the human
? Historical monsters
? Humanism, the post-human and monstrosity
Please send abstracts of 300 words to Dr Deborah
Mutch, Department of English, Clephan Building,
De Montfort University, Leicester, LE1 9BH, email: (dmutch /at/ dmu.ac.uk)
Deadline for abstracts: 1 June 2011
Dr Deborah Mutch
Senior Lecturer in English
Faculty of Humanities
De Montfort University
Leicester LE1 9BH
0116 207 8126
The Monster Inside Us, The Monsters Around Us:
Monstrosity and Humanity Conference
18, 19, 20 November 2011
http://www.dmu.ac.uk/research/humanities/news-events-conferences/monster-humanity-conference.jsp
