cfp.english.upenn.edu

“Our Monsters, Ourselves”

This panel seeks papers on the historical significance and meaning of the monsters everywhere in our cultural moment. Following the line of thought that a society’s supernatural monsters in many ways define them, “Our Monsters, Ourselves” hopes to open the discussion of the ways monsters in recent fiction and film represent the tacit panics, problems and pleasures of English-language, North American culture in 2010. Monsters are defined, for this panel, as those creatures presented as explicitly and literally “supernatural” or “artificial” by their authors.

A short list of dramatis personae might include vampires, ware-wolves, robots, ghosts, AI figures, witches and demons.

Topics might include papers on the symbolic/metaphoric power of the monster as:

* a dangerous stranger / social pollutant

* a repressed desire / compulsion

* an atavistic echo / animal force

* hybridity / miscegenation

* an avenging angel / force of justice

* a stereotype (for queer, female, aging, ethnic, etc. identity) or counter-stereotype

*all technological advance

*an individual / rebel /proto-humaniod

*a moral barometer

*a disease/ rhizome/ terrorist cell

Please send 200-400 word abstract to ourmonstersourselves@gmail.com by _______.