In a clever way the author has taken the odd yet critical monster trait of hybrid, and created an unnerving tale of an encounter with a gruesome being in the forrest. Used in this sense, hybrid is the offspring of different species; one being human and the other, an amalgam of earth and water creatures. The literary result is a genre known as monster literature. According to David D. Gilmore’s research in “Monsters: Evil Beings, Mythical Beasts, and All Manner of Imaginary Terrors”, the character blueprint for a hybrid monster usually has in it “ . . . recombinations uniting animal and human features or mixing animal species in lurid ways (Harpham 1982; Andriano 1999)”(6). A.S. Byatt creates the ideal creature in a real world setting we all recognize. The isle of England, World War II, and fresh words from Sir Winston Churchill, “But if we fail, then the whole world, . . . will sink into the abyss of a new Dark Age made more sinister, . . . by the lights of perverted science.” This wave of frightening peril moved across the entire world of 1940 as well, with the discovery of Nazi eugenic institutions. Now the stage is set for “The Thing in The Forrest” to be later written in England. The most obvious way hybridization semantically rears its ugly head, is in the description of The Thing, whereby homo sapient emotion and reptilian features inte-…
3. In The Well of Loneliness, Radclyffe Hall took the position that members of the “third sex” are different from birth. Though today, some critics use different terminology and label characters like Stephen “butch,” “mannish” (Esther Newton), or even “transgendered,” do you think that Hall was ahead of her time in suggesting that lesbians are biologically (essentially) different in some way? How is Stephen different from most of the other lesbians in the novel? Even Hall sees two types of lesbian. Though this essay allows for you to be speculative, try to ground your thoughts in some details from the novel, please.…
My paper analyzes the concept of a duality between cooperation and competition and how it fails to apply to “Rogue Farm.” My motive in this paper is: how can Bollinger’s two-sided notion of selfhood be modified to apply to the characters in “Rogue Farm” who belong on a spectrum rather than a duality between cooperation versus competition, symbiogenesis versus Darwinism, and feminine versus masculine? This is my motive because I find it intriguing that there is no distinct line between humans and posthumans, and I hope to stress the importance of the gray area between the two by looking at the farm and Maddie in the story. My tentative thesis (which is still highly open to revision) is: By looking at the spectrum of posthuman characters in “Rogue Farm” through Bollinger’s idea of cooperation versus competition, we can see that dualities may fail to adequately explain a nuanced world of post and transhumanism; this necessitates a new understanding of characters in science fiction literature in terms of a spectrum from…
Most of the literary works we have discussed in class are so distinctive from each other, yet so similar. In "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Beast in the Jungle" we see how symbols are used to portray and dramatize the theme of the story. We also learned how women were treated, or "expected" to act, in works such as "The Yellow Wallpaper", "The Beast in the Jungle", and "My Contraband", which then leads to the subject of miscegenation. We also see miscegenation used in most of Chesnutt's works and in "Desiree's baby" by Chopin.…
Task: Unusual setting, interesting characterisation, vivid description, throughout-provoking themes show in detail how each of these aspects contributes to your understanding of “The Pedestrian” By Roy Bradbury.…
This essay will attempt to explore the idea that although both Jules et Jim and Les Valseuses explore progressive gender dynamics, ultimately their films remain grounded on traditional gender concepts. Both films move around the French-loved triangular structure between protagonists, around which this paper will explore gender in two ways; through a look at the classic woman-man dynamic, but also in familial terms, looking at fraternal, maternal and paternal gender codings, beginning with how the films portray a positive, equal gender dynamic, continuing into how the films contrarily confirm patriarchal gender dynamics, before coming to a conclusion on Truffaut and Blier’s actual comments on gender.…
In Manuel Puig’s novel Kiss of the Spider Woman, Molina and Valentin use fantasy as a way of escapism. Firstly, Molina uses the films he tells in the cell to escape his unfavorable and lonely life by creating a preferred reality through the fantasy he creates in them. Secondly, the setting of the cell itself provides Molina with a sanctuary from the outside world, allowing him to escape from the gender roles in which he is confined in and fantasize about taking on the feminine role with Valentin through the isolation of jail. Lastly, in Valentin’s morphine-induced fantasy at the end of the novel, he can escape from the socially accepted stereotypical male gender roles and express his true feelings about Molina.…
The first incident of an implicit portrayal of sexuality occurs during the narrator’s train ride away from her childhood home towards her new life with her future husband, the Marquis. No physical act of sex is described, but it is the first time that the reader sees the heroine’s sensual side and departure from innocence through Carter’s use of sexual language. It is as if the train ride away from home symbolizes her departure from innocence and into womanhood. Carter uses words such as “ecstasy”, “burning”, “pistons thrusting”, shuddered”, and “throb” to convey the heroine’s newfound sexual arousal and her thoughts about sex. Carter’s description of the heroine’s “young girl’s pointed breasts and shoulders” depicts her innocence and virginity (Carter, 8), yet she is consumed with thoughts of sex. This contrast symbolizes the development of the heroine’s identity from childhood to womanhood.…
Chen, Chih-Ping. “Am I a Monster? Jane Eyre Among the Shadows of Freaks.” Studies in the…
Course Description This comparative survey of cultural expression in Latin America will emphasize works produced or set in late-19th and early-20th centuries. We will consider different Latin American cultural contexts and concentrate on how gender, sexuality, race, and class are absorbed and reflected in literature and film. Emphasis will be placed on how cultural production sustains or interrogates categories used to construct social, political, and cultural hierarchies. Topics of discussion will include authorship and authority, participation in the formation of national cultures, engagement with artistic movements, and strategies of selffiguration. Gender is a core theme in most of these cultural texts, and we will consider the social constructions of gender identity, sexual roles, and erotic desire. This class employs both active and cooperative learning. Students will answer questions, formulate questions of their own, discuss, and explain during class. As a class community, we will participate together in lecture, readings, and discussions. The course will also incorporate an introduction to bibliographic research. All readings and discussions will be in English. Written work will be accepted in English, Spanish, and Portuguese. Course Website https://classes.sscnet.ucla.edu/course/view.php?name=12W-WOMSTD123-1 Course Requirements 1. Attend at all classes. If you will be absent for a class due to an emergency, please notify me in writing. Arriving late or leaving before class is dismissed will be interpreted as a mark of disrespect to the rest of the class. Class attendance is mandatory and missing class will negatively impact your final grade. 2. View the assigned films and read the assigned texts for each week before coming to…
When presented with the challenge of identifying gender and sexuality in science fiction we must first agree that women and men are inherently of equal worth, as many writers of feminist science fiction use the genre’s position to discuss issues of change, injustice, and social partitions (Calvin). The motif of gender and sexuality in science fiction is not restricted to just one subgenre of science fiction but shows up in nearly all varieties, creating hybrids in the science fiction world. The genre of science fiction alone is constantly changing, parallel with the advancement and acceptance of gender equality. The topics addressed by writers such as Pat Cadigan, Judith Merril, William Gibson, and Nola Hopkinson challenge the social construction…
Linda Hutcheon, Narcissistic Narratiue: The Metafictional Paradox. Methuen, London, 1984. 162 pp. Metafiction is now recognized as the designation of a kind of fiction - beginning to proliferate in the 1960s - that turns its attention on its own narrative andlor linguistic identity. Too often, critics have one-sidedly labeled it as an example of the anti-novel, a reaction against the teleological realistic tradition. Its self-reflectiveness has also been denigrated as a sign of exhaustion for the novel genre: no new fields seem left to develop and therefore it has turned inward upon itself. Some critics would argue that in metafiction the life-art connection has been severed or even denied, that the narcissism is a nihilistic exposure of previous illusions about a correlation between literary language and reality. Patricia Waugh's and Linda Hutcheon's books represent two recent contributions towards a revaluation of metafictional self-consciousness. Both suggest that there is no basic contradiction betwen auto-representational art and life. Fiction is not an aberration, for reality itself is a "book" circumscribed by culture and ideological concepts. In light of the theories of Derrida and associate poststructuralists, the mind is as much a product of language as a producer of language. Composing a novel becomes little different from construing one's 'reality7. Choosing this point of departure, Patricia Waugh points out the valuable prospects which metafiction opens up. Through parody and inversion of conventional patterns, the novel resists interpretative closure and displays its condition of artifice. It turns the focus on the very processes by which cultural codes of perception induce semblances of reality. In this way, it most fundamentally explores the entangled relationship between life and fiction. If it is true that our knowledge of the…
Fausto-Sterling, A. (2009). Dueling dualisms. In A. L. Ferber, K. Holcomb, & T. Wentling, Sex, Gender & Sexuality (pp. 6-21). New York: Oxford University Press, Inc.…
Oudshoorn, Nelly, Gender In A Transnational World: (“Sex and the Body”, Beyond the Natural Body: An Archaeology of Sex Hormones), (1994), (pp. 6-8)…
John Fowles’ novel “The French Lieutenant’s woman” is seen as a postmodern text, by the author himself. He is considered to be the first postmodernist in the English literature, even though the postmodernist features were less explicit in British literature than in American. The novel resembles a Victorian text, but actually it is a critical rewrite of the happy-end Victorian novels. The issue of human freedom has always been an interesting subject to James Fowles. Some say that “The French Lieutenant’s woman” is one of his best novels which examine this issue. The action in the novel takes place in a small village in Southwest England – Lyme Regis. The reader meets the main characters in the very beginning of the novel. The author beautifully describes the little village which is very famous with its fossil and geology finds. At the beach, we find the three main characters – Ernestina Freeman, spending some time alone with her fiancée Charles Smitson, and Sarah Woodruff – a mysterious woman, who everyone calls the “French lieutenant’s whore”.…