Throughout the course we took turns alternating as a scribe creating notes for each class, here are a few examples to help give you a taste of what our class discussions were like.
1. Defining and Exploring Monsters
Casey Graziosi 8/27/18
“Monsters have been manufacturing complex meanings for four hundred years of American history. They do not mean one thing but a thousand…So do not expect a neat definition when it comes to a messy subject like monsters.” (Poole xiv)
- According to JJ Halberstam: monsters are “meaning machines” (Poole xiv)
- Monsters make meaning: you put something into them, and out comes something else. They may represent anything from gender to class and can be broken down/read in a multitude of manners.
- Monsters are a “beast of excess” (Poole xiv)
- They are too much of something (physically, sexually, etc.) or made up of multiple things (too many eyes, a combination of species, etc.) and this excess both scares and intrigues us.
- Monsters exist in an echo chamber
- Monsters amplify voices that don’t normally get heard; they represent marginalization or live in the margins.
- According to Freud: monsters exist in “the Uncanny” (Poole 14)
- The Uncanny is a creeping feeling of nausea and panic, mostly related to physical gore (specifically fear of castration).
- Poole disagrees, reasoning that if we were solely repulsed by monsters, then they would not also be alluring. He favors Julie Kristeva’s theory of the “abject,” which is described as “a combination of both fear and desire.” (Poole 15)
- Poole also notes that Freud approaches monsters from an individual standpoint when he should be analyzing them from a cultural one.
- The Uncanny is a creeping feeling of nausea and panic, mostly related to physical gore (specifically fear of castration).
America’s History with Monsters
“American monsters are born out of American history. They emerge out of the central anxieties and obsessions that have been part of the United States from colonial times to present and from the structures and processes where those obsessions found historical expression.” (Poole 4)
- Monsters break up the normal timeline of history; monstrous time is like queer time, time is not linear—its recursive and in the process of being something else
- Monsters are real (or at least more than “symbolic” implies)
- We must move monsters out of the individual neuroses and realize that our society creates them so that we can talk about real moments and events, both past and present. In this way, monsters have concrete affects on people’s lives, because while they may still be metaphors, they are also a part of our cultural discourse.
- Americans love monsters, and have created more than most any other culture
- Societal “Others” are often turned into monsters through cultural discourse. They are then more easily viewed as inhuman scapegoats to be “logically” feared. In this way Americans victimize people by turning them into monsters to be destroyed.
- We create monsters as a sort of catharsis, putting everything we fear, everything that shamefully attracts us, into one place.
Monsters are products of cultural hysteria, and cultural hysteria comes from somewhere. It is our job to understand why/where that is
2. Circe & Class Presentations
Nolan Ross 9/20/18
Casey presented on Desire & Roland Barthes
- Bildungsroman — German word: “coming of age story.”
- Basis for much of our epic stories, arguably all of the ancient world’s stories & epics.
- Story of Circe one of a young woman learning to become herself.
- When arriving on Aiaia, Circe explores with what brings her pleasure — a very ludic action.
- A Lover’s Discourse: book by Barthes.
- Solipsism — desire is solipsistic; that is, “self masturbatory,” or giving pleasure to oneself.
- Barthes argues an experiential vision on love; phenomenology (scribes note: I’m not sure why we brought up phenomenology at this point about Barthes’ experiential vision of love).
- Barthes argues that there are 80 different aspects of the discourse on desire. Below are a few:
- Encounter — the 1st taste of pleasure –> we then anticipate that event & it’s pleasure again; anticipation brings us pleasure (arguably more so than the event anticipated).
- Tenderness — resentment of not being able to fully control something (say, another person).
- Union — dream of total(izing) one’s union with other (person, etc.).
- Suicide — the annihilation of oneself for another; — not just, say, “because the one I love does not love me, I will kill my self” but also believing that the enjoyment of being with the other person/at that point in one’s life is the peak of enjoyment in life. Since life cannot get any better than this peak, one might as well kill themselves while life is great than wait for it to go down hill again.
- Demons — A lover creates and/or becomes their own demons—we always bring negativity (back) into our own lives, no matter how many times we dispel it.
- Monstrous — “Subject…realizes” they/he has trapped their lovers/others and wants their lovers to only focus on them. We make it so that we demand the full attention from those we love, and put them in a place where they would oblige our demand regardless of what they want.
- In conclusion, Love is not about another person but about ourselves and what we want. The other whom we “love” is only a means by which we can get our desires and can have the conversation about desire with ourselves.
- Barthes doesn’t think Love exists, we all act upon our desires to please ourselves, not in consideration for our lover/other people.
Jamie presented on Jean Baudrillard’s Simulacra
- Simulacra and Simulation (1981) – book written by Baudrillard; later became a basis for the philosophical side of The Matrix movie.
- Disneyland and its “main street America” section — Baudrillard uses Disneyland’s “main street America,” which shows a fictionalized view of what main streets in the USA once looked like during the 1930s-50s, to explain how a society can take to reflecting an idealized creation onto reality, mirroring the idealized main street onto our real main streets. Over time it is forgotten that our real main streets are reflecting an idealized image (the Disneyland main street) so that we believe that the ideal was a true fact of our past, and not an ideal untruth of what past main streets used to look like. The ideal past then becomes reality (in this Disneyland main street example).
- In summary, there is no reality, just things we’ve created, one upon the other.
Circe
- Piety: one’s duty to their ancestors and respecting what they did for you.
- One is expected to do certain things/traditions to respect the ancestors.
- Example: placing flowers on the graves of our family.
- Hospitality: one must treat anyone who shows up on your doorstep with respect, for they might be a god.
- Carried into the middle ages as taking care of whoever shows up at your door (the “god” part not necessarily involved).
- Travelers and pilgrims could more-or-less expect to be treated well by strangers and taken care of until they were ready to leave.
3. The Devourers
Miko Martin 10/24/18
Indian History
- Mongols- Muslims continued too rule India, kicked out by the British
- Rewriting of India’s history as a written response to Modi’s election as an act of resistance against Hinduism
- India recognized a third gender in 2014, but gay sex was still illegal until 2018
- People are killed from eating beef/wearing leather as BJP kills outside of equality laws
Devourers
- Finish reading by Monday
- Extra resources on canvas for Devourers and Penny Dreadful
- Published late 2015 early 2016
- Author lives in India, US, and Canada
- Kolkata- Bohemian setting, post-colonial
- Novel spans 1000 years and regions
- The act of eating flesh for pleasure
- Raksha- magical beast god/man hybrid (outside of India colonizers)
- India has a cosmopolitan background and experience with other peoples for 1000s of years
- Colonialism=werewolves
- “I happen to be a good storyteller”
- Transports from reality
- Hybridity of creating and devouring
- Emphasizes differences between man
- Talking about problematic/queer things have to be ‘stories’
- Every story has a frame that distances the reader and brings them back in continuously
- Frame- translation of stories from other people pieced together and written on the skin of the victims then bound together, effectively changing
- He wants to get the right story out
- The werewolves are hunters/scavengers
- Identity- creating a story of ourselves for the world
- Never forget the individual, the resistance
- Demand specificity and individualism
- “Intimacy is the only way real magic works”
- Intimacy is hard because it is messy, just like sex and eating
Bauls
- Religious experience
- Traditional music and instruments
- Sacred group of musicians, protected tribe
- Play until people die of starvation and dehydration
- Like a rave where music is the LSD
- Professor is observing and analyzing
- Importance in accepting both identities
- Animal magnetism (kitten and pack of dogs)
- Importance of the kitten
- Protectiveness
- Hidden violence
- Trust no one Creates doubt from the beginning
