Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Monsters, fiction'

Because works of Gothic fiction were often disregarded as sensationalist and unsophisticated, my aim in this thesis is to explore the ways in which these works actually drew attention to real societal issues and fears, particularly anxieties around Otherness and identity and gender construction. I illustrate how the context in which authors were writing specifically influenced the way they portrayed the supernatural in their narratives, and how the differences in their portrayals speak to the authors’ distinct aims and the issues that they address. Because the supernatural ultimately became internalized in the American Gothic, peculiarly within female bodies, I focus mainly on the relationship between the supernatural and the female characters in the texts I examine. Through this historical exploration of the transformation of the supernatural, I argue that the supernatural became internalized in the American Gothic because it reflected national anxieties: although freed from the external threat of the patriarchal English government, Americans of the young republic still faced the dangers of individualism and the failure of the endeavor to establish their own government.

This thesis comprises two parts, a novel and an essay. ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ is a work of fiction based on family memories and historical research that speaks to the trauma of abandonment and displacement in an immigrant family living in Australia. The accompanying essay is titled ‘Monsters and Memory’ and is an autoethnographical text which combines theoretical, experiential and embodied research to argue that the inclusion of women’s stories, particularly those of trauma and abuse, must be foregrounded in any exploration of cultural and diasporic memory. Drawing primarily on the work of Said (1978, 1993, 1999, 2001), Bhabha (1990, 1994), Caruth (1995), Kuhn (1999), Metta (2010), Barrett (2010), Reed-Danahay (1997), Ellis (2004), Kapur (2001) and Mohanty (2004), this thesis contributes to current debates in Australia about bicultural identity, refugees and migrants. The novel is located in three countries, India, Iran and Australia, and this allows me to explore the concept of ‘home’ in a rapidly changing world when ‘home’ is no longer a place of refuge and safety. Returning home, therefore, can be fraught with political danger, as in the case of post-revolutionary Iran and post-Rajiv Gandhi assassination India. This is a novel about what happens to a family when a loving mother abruptly walks out on them. Using a first-person narrative, the novel encompasses the narrator’s abandonment as a child in India, her subsequent relocation to Australia, her relationship with her menacing father and her attempt to locate and rescue her sister from the Islamic Republic of Iran. Using a fractured chronology, the narrative has four sections that loop back and forth as the story unfolds. My interest in the complexities of voluntary migration or forced exile from so-called Third- World countries to a First-World country such as Australia prompted my immersion in the stories that women told of their experiences of living in a ‘safe’ country. I was consumed by a desire to ‘hear’ women’s voices, in particular, the voices of Indian and Iranian women speaking accented English. I was interested in their responses to particular written texts and whether those stories accurately represented their bicultural ‘belongings.’ Therefore, I initiated a Reading Group and invited them, over an eighteen-month period, to read four published texts written by Indian and Iranian women. The objective was to record the readers’ responses to the literature they read, with an understanding that they would also read ‘The Historian’s Daughter’ as it evolved. As cultural observer, participant and researcher in the study, I was able to discern “multiple layers of consciousness” and to challenge my own beliefs as a first generation immigrant woman in Australia (Ellis & Bochner, 2000; Ellis, 2004; Anderson, 2006). Reconciling the divide between remaining faithful to memory in all its complexity and slipperiness as well as being mindful of the familial issues involved in recreating events from the past is one of the challenges this thesis grapples with. The dilemma of representing family uncritically is balanced by a desire to reclaim the ‘power of the text to change the world’ and make it a better place (Ellis, 2004). This thesis investigates the power of storytelling as a framework for thinking about the world. I am aware that my personal experiences of race, identity and sexual violence have impacted on both parts of this thesis. It is these experiences, supported by theoretical research, that I offer in the context of providing insights into broader cultural issues within specific immigrant communities in Australia.

According to Michael Sean Bolton, the posthuman Gothic involves a fear of internal monsters that won't destroy humanity apocalyptically, but will instead redefine what it means to be human overall. These internal monsters reflect societal anxieties about the "other" gaining power and overtaking the current groups in power. The posthuman Gothic shows psychological horrors and transformations. Traditionally this genre has been used to theorize postmodern media and literary work by focusing on cyborgs and transhumanist medical advancements. However, the internal and psychological nature of posthumanism is fascinating and can more clearly manifest in a different Gothic setting, 1800s American Gothic Fiction. This subgenre of the Gothic melds well with the posthuman Gothic because unlike the Victorian Gothic, its supernatural entities are not literal; they are often figurative and symbolic, appearing through hallucinations. In this historical context, one can examine the dynamic in which the "human" is determined by a rational humanism that bases its human model on Western, white masculinity. Therefore, the other is clearly gendered and racialized. Margrit Shildrick offers an interesting analysis of the way women fit into this construction of the other because of their uncanniness and Gothic monstrosity. Three works of American Gothic fiction--George Lippard's The Quaker City, Edgar Allen Poe's "Ligeia," and Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" portray these gendered power dynamics present within the posthuman Gothic when applied to the American Gothic; the female characters are either forced by patriarchy into becoming monstrous, or they were never fully human in the first place.

La critique récente sur Aphra Behn (1640-1689) a montré d’une part que ses courts romans entretiennent des liens privilégiés avec le champ de la philosophie naturelle montante et d’autre part, que le monstrueux ou l’exotique sont des motifs privilégiés de ses œuvres. Ce travail vise à mettre en lien ces deux différentes approches, en établissant la centralité de la notion de curiosité dans la fiction d’Aphra Behn. La curiosité est une notion ambivalente au XVIIe siècle qui, bien qu’elle continue à porter des connotations négatives d’origine chrétienne et médiévale, s’est vue revalorisée par la philosophie naturelle. A la même époque, la notion de curiosité suscite également un regain d’intérêt de la part des théoriciens du roman ; Behn se positionne dans le débat esthétique et épistémologique de son temps en revendiquant une mimesis originale du vrai absolu, qui refuse d’intéresser son lecteur par une curiosité pour les choses familières, et choisit de représenter l’extra-ordinaire. Behn tente de discriminer entre une « bonne » et une « mauvaise » curiosité, pour se poser en curieuse et en collectionneuse avisée, mais continue d’entretenir des liens avec une culture plus populaire de la curiosité, celle des spectacles de foires. Le « cabinet de curiosité littéraire » que construit Aphra Behn privilégie des figures de monstres atypiques, qui permettent d’inventer une forme romanesque curieuse et transgressive
Recent research on Aphra Behn has shown the link between the scientific prose of the period and Behn’s narrative fiction, while other scholars have underscored the importance of bodily and moral deformity in her works. Drawing on these apparently heterogeneous studies, this project aims at providing a global aesthetic framework for Behn’s fiction. The epistemological context of the late seventeenth century offers a stimulating insight in Behn’s fiction, especially through the notion of “curiosity”. This notion is at the centre of both the scientific and literary concerns of the period; the growing interest in natural philosophy progressively rehabilitates curiosity – which had been an object of scorn in the Augustinian tradition – first by valuing curiosity as the ideal attitude of the “scientist”, and by having curiosities as its major object of study – the rare, new, and unusual objects of the Wunderkammern replacing the “universal” objects of study of the Medieval and Renaissance science. At exactly the same time, in the literary field, the notion of curiosity undergoes a redefinition, in a somewhat similar fashion to that which occurs in the scientific field, shifting from the “generalities” of idealized romance to a new conception of curiosity in the emerging genre of the novel. Behn advocates for a radical mimesis of truth and extraordinary curiosities. At the time when Aphra Behn writes her fictional texts, curiosity is therefore a polysemic notion, whose unity can nonetheless be found in a set of specificities: curiosity is concerned, both in science and in literature, with the emotions/reactions of the “curious” scientist or reader; it is what leads us to experiment, and it comes from a desire for knowledge. But curiosity is also a transgressive desire: the distinction between two types of curiosity, a “good” and a “bad” curiosity, is central in Behn’s discourse. The parallel between Behn’s fascination with curiosities and the scientific episteme of her time is obvious in the numerous descriptions of exotica in Oroonoko, as the narrator explicitly compares the objects she shows to those which form part of the Royal Society repository, but the rest of Behn’s fiction is also concerned with this preoccupation with curiosity: in several of her other works, moral irregularities are conjoined with ‘natural’/physical irregularities which belong to the realm of curiosities. The various transgressions depicted in Behn’s fiction can therefore be seen as “curiosities”; Behn’s work can be read as a sort of Wunderkammern, as she herself seems to suggest when she wishes her novels were “esteem’d as Medals in the Cabinets of Men of Wit” – novelists collect and experiment on human nature just as natural philosophers do with nature (and art) in the cabinets of curiosities. But in her fiction Behn actually goes beyond the conventional notion of the cabinet of curiosities, by insisting on moral and physical monstrosity. In underlining the importance of the realm of curiosity in Behn’s fiction, this study aims at showing the specificity of her aesthetics and the originality of her conception of the novel; as she states in the preface to Oroonoko, writers, like painters, are supposed to “erase” defects: by deliberately choosing not to idealize nature, men, or society, and by choosing to systematically depict deformity and exceptions instead (rather than exemplary individuals), Aphra Behn invents her own conception of the novel, a sensationalist aesthetic of the “strange and novel”

Uppsatsens syfte är att studera framställningar av manliga bibliotekarier i science fiction-litteratur, analysera vad dessa framställningar förmedlar för föreställningar om bibliotek och biblioteksverksamhet, samt att analysera de manliga bibliotekariernas koppling till maskuliniteter. Titlarna som analyseras är fyra romaner; Audrey Niffeneggers Tidsresenärens hustru, Dmitrij Gluchovskijs Metro 2033, Jules Vernes Paris i tjugonde seklet, och Jasper Ffordes Uppslukad – En fängslande historia om Torsdag Nesta, samt en podcast; Welcome to Night Vale och en tv-serie; Buffy – the vampire slayer. Resultatet av analysen är att ett flertal av de valda titlarna ger enövervägande negativ bild av biblioteket som en exkluderande samhällsinstitution samt är vidarerelaterat till de sätt på vilka bibliotekarierna i de olika titlarna konstrueras som maskulina. Tre olika kategorier framkom särskilt tydligt under analysen; bibliotekarien som monster/mutant, bibliotekarien som sexuellt avvikande, och bibliotekarien som lärdomsgigant och väktare av kunskapen. Dessa ger tillsammans en bild av biblioteksinstitutionen som odemokratisk gentemot användaren och elitistisk. Befinner sig besökaren inom den skara med legitimerad tillgång till biblioteket så kan bibliotekarierna vara till stor nytta och hjälp.

The thesis uses a feminist approach to explore the representation of the cyborg in Japanese film and animation in relation to gender, the body, and national identity. Whereas the figure of the cyborg is predominantly pervasive in cinematic science fiction, the Japanese popular imagination of cyborgs not only crosses cinematic genre boundaries between monster, disaster, horror, science fiction, and fantasy but also crosses over to the medium of animation. In regard to the academic research on Japanese cinema and animation, there is a serious gap in articulating concepts such as live-action film, animation, gender, and the cyborg. This thesis, therefore, intends to fill the gap by investigating the gendered cyborg through a feminist lens to understand the interplay between gender, the body and the cyborg within historical-social contexts. Consequently, the questions proposed below are the starting point to reassess the relationship between Japanese cinema, animation, and the cyborg. How has Japanese popular culture been obsessed with the figure of the cyborg? What is the relationship between Japanese live-action film and Japanese animation in terms of the popular imagination of the cyborg? In particular, how might we discuss the representation of the cyborg in relation to the concept of national identity and the associated ideology of “Japaneseness”, within the framework of Donna Haraway's influential cyborg theory and feminist theory? The questions are addressed in the four sections of the thesis to explore the representation of the gendered cyborg. First, I outline the concept of the cyborg as it has been developed in relation to notions of gender and the ‘cyborg' in Western theory. Secondly, I explore the issues in theorising the science fiction genre in Japanese cinema and animation and then address the problem of defining science fiction in relation to the phenomenon of the cyborg's genre-crossing. Finally, I provide a contextualising discussion of gender politics and gender roles in Japan in order to justify my use of Western feminist theory as well as discuss the strengths and limitations of such an approach before moving, in the remainder of the thesis, to an examination of a number of case studies drawn from Japanese cinema and animation.

Monsters are disruptive characters, who cross boundaries and blend categories. They come in various kinds: Non-human monsters, such as Dracula, created-by-human monsters like Frankenstein, human monsters like Hitler, and more-than-human monsters such as the X-men. These monsters can either be dangerous or helpful to humanity. Dangerous monsters appear as infectious, viral forces, while helpful monsters are inoculative forces for positive change. In either case, they penetrate the borders set up between normatively separate categories. Critics and authors have long realized the connection between heroes and monsters, often portraying them as necessary to one another, as two sides of a single coin. However, this analogy is lacking, because it does not allow for the possibility that a single character can display varying degrees of both heroism and monstrosity. Mario Yerro and Bruna Husky present such characteristics in Yeti and Lágrimas en la lluvia, as evidenced by their physical appearance, their relations to scapegoats, the porosity of species and other boundaries, and the decisions they make in regards to the Other.

This thesis is a short story collection revolving around the central theme of pop culture. The first story, "After the Win," follows the character Cecil, whose wife Rhonda has recently won The Great British Bake Off. Trouble ensues in Cecil and Rhonda's family as Rhonda starts to focus on her post-Bake Off fame instead of her relationships with her husband and daughter. "Making Friends with a Monster" is about Rick, a half-human, half-lake monster living on the shores of Bear Lake. Because of his existence in an in-between place between man and monster, Rick struggles to find companionship in life. That is, until Anna (AKA the Loch Ness Monster) arrives in his lake and presents him with an enticing offer: to return with her to Loch Ness. The story culminates in Rick's decision. The next story, "The Fourth Wall," is the story of Max and Abby, who are close to getting engaged. Max confronts Abby about her family, who she has never told him much about. Finally, she agrees to take him for a visit to meet her parents. As soon as Max arrives, it becomes apparent that Abby's parents believe they are Ricky and Lucy from the beloved sitcom I Love Lucy, and Max is soon sucked in to the illusion. The last story in the collection is "Feelin' Groovy in Point Pleasant, West Virginia,"which is the tale of a Simon and Garfunkel tribute band that encounters the legendary Mothman monster in Point Pleasant, West Virginia, who happens to be an avid Simon and Garfunkel fan.

This thesis scrutinises the complex ‘afterlife’ of sensation fiction in the wake of the 1860s and ‘70s, after the end of the period that critics have tended to view as the heyday of literary sensationalism. It identifies and explores the consistent framing of sensation fiction as a pathological ‘style of writing’ by middle-class critics in the periodical press, revealing how such responses were moulded by new and emerging medical research into the nervous system, the cellular structure of the body, and the role played by germs in the transmission of diseases. Envisioned as a disease characterised by its new immersive and affective reading process, sensation fiction was believed to be infecting its readers. It infiltrated their nervous systems, instigating a process of metamorphosis that gradually depleted their physical and mental integrity and reduced them to a weakened, ‘flabby’, ‘limp’ state. The physical boundaries of the body, however, were not the only limits that sensation fiction seemed to wilfully disregard. ‘[S]preading in all directions’, it contaminated other modes, other media, and other kinds of recreational entertainment, making them equally sensational and pathological. One of these modes was Gothic monster fiction at the end of the nineteenth century, which was repeatedly labelled ‘sensational’ and described as generating the same cardiovascular responses as works by Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth Braddon, and Mrs Henry Wood. This infection of fin de siècle Gothic fiction by literary sensationalism can be gauged in the plots and monsters that those texts portray. Gothic monster narratives at the end of the nineteenth century are shaped by the concerns at the heart of middle-class commentators’ responses to sensation fiction, and by the medical lexicon employed to vocalise these anxieties. Monstrosity is linked to contagion and stimulation, as the monster seems to pollute all those with whom it comes into contact. It triggers a process of degeneration and debilitation akin to that associated with the reading of sensation fiction, producing a host of ‘shocked’, nervous, or hysterical characters. Encounters with the monster are linked to recreational reading or other kinds of behaviour that such reading became associated with, such as thrill-seeking, substance abuse, and illicit sexual desire. The result is a group of texts in which the monster embodies the same threat to boundaries, as well as individual, and, at times, national health that middle-class reviewers associated with literary sensationalism.

This thesis explores the way in which representations of the alien ‘other’ in SF for young adults are used as a tool for exploring the self/other dichotomy in the process of identity formation. It intends to develop a clear view of current, popular forms of representation of the alien other in this area, contribute to the still nascentcriticism of YA SF, and also operate as a constructive tool for creative writers working in this field.The exegesis is a meta-critical commentary on the YA SF field in general and the role of the character of the alien other within it in particular. It elucidates the preoccupation of the YA genre with ideas of identity and subjectivity and links this to developmental psychology, demonstrating the way that the self/other dichotomy in identity formation forms the basis of the character of the alien other and its expression in fiction and explaining the fascination and potential value of these characters to a young adult audience. It further looks at the way these characters are created and read and the limitations and possibilities that exist for authors in their construction, delineating the various archetypical constructions of these characters and exploring the ramifications of various methods of representation.The creative component of the thesis is a young adult fantasy novel, The Path of the Monster that explores the self/other dichotomy, challenging traditional binaries such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ and questioning assumptions and understandings about identity and otherness. It particularly highlights the question ‘who is the monster?’, confronting expectations about the role of the other and simultaneously exploring the feeling of alienation that is common to the adolescent experience.

À en croire Chris Hables Gray nous sommes tous devenus des cyborg citizen. La science-fiction regorge de ces corps fantasmés de cyborgs aux allures de dieux antiques parcourant les espaces intersidéraux ou bien voyageant dans le temps. Toujours plus beaux, performants, rapides et intelligents que l'homo sapiens sapiens, les êtres humains du futur sont généralement divisés en deux catégories : ceux qui ont évolué et ceux qui sont toujours aussi limités que l'homme actuel, « obsolètes » pour employer le mot de néo-mutants comme Lukas Zpira ou Stélarc. Tantôt machine anthropomorphe aux airs de dieu omnipotent, tantôt cerveau synthétique omniscient, l'I.A. renvoie en partie à « la fin », au double sens du terme, de l'humanité. Le cyborg, la fin de l’homme ou un homme meilleur ? Ces « intentions mélioristes » qui laissent sceptique un David Le Breton sont perceptibles dans le cinéma, la littérature ou le jeu vidéo. Le corps s’altère. Humain, trop humain, surhumain, posthumain ? Au travers des progrès scientifiques, tant de la génétique que des technologies de l'information, le corps humain lambda se retrouve trié sur le volet à la naissance par des politiques eugénistes dissimulées sous des propos de luttes contre les maladies à la manière d'un Bienvenue à Gattaca, puis propulsé dans les mondes virtuels, pénétrant des royaumes, jusqu'à présent fictifs, sur une base quotidienne par le biais des technologies qui l'entourent. Le rêve des body hacktivistes est une hétérotopie futuriste, où chacun est libre de choisir sa mutation et où La Mouche de David Cronenberg pourrait côtoyer un Na'vi d'Avatar sans que personne ne s’étonne de ces corps de freaks qui ne sont plus simplement des corps de cyborgs à l'aspect humain mais des corps de monstres à l'esprit humain. Ces biocyborgs sont paradoxalement plus humains que nous. Quelle part restera-t-il de notre corps charnel dans le corps futur ? Y-a-t-il encore une place pour l'homo sapiens sapiens dans le futur ou bien sera-t-il forcé d'abandonner son corps ? À en croire Paul Virilio ou Jean Baudrillard, la disparition du corps est inévitable. Après avoir mis en évidence l’histoire et la généalogie du cyborg, du mythe fictionnel à sa réalisation actuelle, cette thèse se demandera « qu’est-ce que vivre en cyborgs aujourd’hui ? »
According to Chris Hable Gray we all are cyborg citizen now. Science-fiction is full of fantasy bodies looking like ancient gods wandering through space and time, always more beautiful, capable of more performances, faster and smarter than homo sapiens sapiens, generally beings of the future belong to two types: those who evolved and those that remained as limited as present humans, « obsolete » to quote the word of neo-mutants like Lukas Zpira or Stélarc. Some are anthropomorphic almighty god-like machines, others all-knowing synthetic brains, A.I. partly refers to « the end » of Humankind in its double meaning. Is the cyborg the end of man or a better human? Those intended enhancements which puzzled David Le Breton are seen in films, literature or video games. The body alters itself. Human, too human, superhuman, posthuman? Through scientific progress both in genetic and in mass media, the everyday human body finds himself screened at birth by eugenic policies hidden under motives like fight against diseases, as depicted in Gattaca and then thrown into virtual worlds on a daily base, entering kingdoms, fictive so far, using the surrounding technologies. The Body Hacktivist's dream is a futuristic heterotopia, where everyone is free to choose his mutation and where the David Cronenberg's Fly could walk alongside a Na'vi from Avatars surprising no one by their freaks bodies, ultimately: not cyborg bodies looking like humans but freak bodies implanted with human souls. Those biocyborgs are paradoxically more human than we are. What part of our carnal body will remain? Does homo sapiens sapiens have a future or will he need to shed away his body ? If we follow Paul Virilio or Jean Baudrillard, the vanishing of the body is inescapable. After bringing out the history and genealogy of the cyborg, from fictional myth to actual realisation, this thesis will endeavour to show “what is living as a cyborg nowadays?”

Partant du principe qu'une machine ne sait pas qu'elle est une machine et du présupposé selon lequel un robot n'a pas de conscience, ce travail étudie le parallèle entre la fabrication des créatures de roman et la fabrication des machines. Parmi ces figures, Madame Bovary est un archétype. Comme tout autre machine, Emma Bovary ne sait pas qu'elle en est une. Emma est une machine à texte, elle est faite de livres. Pourtant, elle ne peut pas avoir lu Madame Bovary. Parce qu'Emma n'est pas consciente qu’elle est l'appareil de Flaubert, nous l'avons rapproché des fonctionnements et des disfonctionnements du Monstre de Frankenstein, encore écervelé avant l'épiphanie des livres qu'il découvre au creux d'un chemin. Après avoir défini les enjeux stratégiques de ses lectures, Emma est présentée comme une machine homéostatique, d'une part du point de vue de la thermodynamique, et d'autre part, du point de vue de l'entropie, une résultante du bovarysme, causée par les distorsions entre la vie et la lecture. Dans un premier temps Emma perçoit, puis ressent, par les feedbacks de ses lectures. Elle se transforme alors en une mécanique à émotions, gouvernée par son bovarysme. Ce sentiment renvoie à toutes ses perceptions et ses appétits. Par ses désirs, Emma démontre une capacité à comparer et à se projeter, formulant les prémices d'une conscience autobiographique. De la même manière qu'il représente l'inconscient social à partir d'automates déambulatoires, tels la figure du pied-bot ou de l'aveugle, Flaubert réussit à induire une idée de conscience dans sa créature machine
According to the fact that a machine does not know that it is a machine, and to the supposition that a robot has no conscience, this work explores parallels between the creation of the characters of a novel and the fabrication of machines. Among these figures, Madame Bovary is an archetype. Like any other machine, Emma Bovary does not know that she is one. Emma is machine created from text. She is made from the stuff of books. However, she could not have read the book Madame Bovary. Because Emma is not aware that she is a device of Flaubert, there are some similarities between her and the functions and malfunctions of the Monster of Frankenstein that didn't have a conscience until the moment of epiphany with the books he discovered in the woods. After the definition of the strategic challenges of her readings, Emma is presented as a homeostatic machine, first from the viewpoint of thermodynamics, and secondly from the viewpoint of entropy, a result of the bovarysme caused by distortions between life and reading. Emma's perceptions and feelings depend of the feedback of her readings. She becomes an emotional device, governed by her bovarysme. This feeling is present in all her perceptions and her appetites. Through her desires, Emma demonstrates an ability to compare and project herself, formulating the beginnings of an autobiographical conscience. In the same way as he represents social unconsciousness with ambulatory automatons such as the figure of the club-footed Hippolyte or the blind man, Flaubert is able to induce an idea of consciousness in his machine-creature

碩士
國立中興大學
外國語文學系所
103
Chuck Palahniuk’s novel is always famous for its notorious extreme experiment on body. He usually offers readers various of peculiar body image in his novels. Most of the issues in them are about sex and violence. Thus, some people criticize that his motive to focus on these sensational material is but for the market. However, after reading his books closely, I find that he does not do it for pleasing his readers. Actually, behind these curious stories, he often explores and exposes seriously how to detect the function of the system. In this thesis, I choose two of Palahniuk’s novels: Choke and Invisible Monsters. Both of these two intend to criticize the heteronormative hegemony. Choke focuses on the created disease, “sex addiction”, which is the production of the binary language system for maintaining the stability of the hegemony. Power before usually functioned in an obvious way; however, it usually function in the guise of all kinds of discourse in modern society. Pretending as the truth, it is popularized through institution of authority which proliferates it as “knowledge about body”. Such discourse will be internalized as mechanism, controlling people’s mind first. Then, they will start to police themselves. Therefore, although everyone in this novel seems free, both their body and mind are confined by that mechanism. No matter one is in the care center of in the outside world, he or she is a prisoner. As for Invisible Monsters, Palahniuk points out that technology, especially the surgery of sexual Reassignment, becomes more and more advanced today, and it brings much change to the perception of sex and gender. In this novel, Palahniuk questions the motive to categorize sex and if technology really brings us the autonomy of our subjectivity. Or, it is just another trap of binary structure. By creating the characters whose sex and gender are hardly to tell, Palahniuk is finding the answers to these concerns.

The film Monster (USA, 2003) is based on the life of Aileen Wuornos, the Florida prostitute who was one of the few documented female serial killers in the United States. The scriptwriter and director of the film, Patty Jenkins, surprisingly centered the film on a love story, instead of assuming the role of judge or advocate towards the actions of Wuornos. After a flash back sequence that recreates the childhood of Lee (Charlize Theron), the film opens as Lee meets Selby (Christina Ricci), a young and immature lesbian in a bar. Lee responds very rudely and defensively to the clumsy flirtation of Selby, as she does not think of herself as gay and her life as a prostitute has made her very hostile towards society. However, Lee opens up to Selby, as she perceives her as her last chance to find Love. Patty Jenkins cinematically evokes Lee’s hopelessness and despair before meeting Selby in order to emphasize the importance of this same-sex relationship. For Lee, Selby is the innocent child that she has to protect and save, a symbol of the child she once was herself. Inspired, she goes out to work on the highway to earn money for their first date, and a client beats her unconscious, ties her up, rapes her with a tyre iron and pours petrol over her. Fearing for her life, Lee shoots him, and then takes his car and wallet. As her relationship with Selby develops, she enters into the role of provider and protector. After her brutal encounter, she is scared of the streets and makes an attempt to go straight. However, 3 in her attempt to look for a proper job she encounters social rejection and brutalization. Pressurized by her new girlfriend to provide money, Lee goes back to prostitution. However, her last traumatic experience with the rapist john makes her believe that all her clients might turn out to be abusive, which provokes in her a desire for revenge and killing. Unable to stop, she robs her victims to provide for her girlfriend and believes that she can identify which clients deserve to die. After the killing of an innocent man, she is turned over to the police by Selby. Monster is not about sensationalism, but rather portrays the intimate tragic story of a human being who became a serial killer, due to a combination of bad social and personal pathologies. The Meaning of the Form: The aim of this thesis is to explore the representation of women and aggression in Patty Jenkins’ film Monster. I will argue that, while the female characters in Monster do not escape the conventional portrayal of women within the dominant Hollywood cinema, their portrayal does nonetheless create a ‘non-normative’ representation. By exploiting the classical narrative and a particular model of representation of women, Jenkins creates a cinematic text which attacks the patriarchal principles grounding the model. Therefore, the main argument of this thesis will be that Jenkins uses the Hollywood system of narration and representation of women in order to subvert and criticize it. Ultimately she is using the film as means to critique the patriarchal violence within American society itself. In order to substantiate my argument, I will first look at the conventional representation of women in fiction-film genre1, and will then investigate how the performance of aggression is constructed within the film. The film represents aggression as a social phenomenon that develops into a pathological behavior. By establishing the history of the general phenomenon of female aggression, I will examine its specific representation in my film case study Monster. Although the film introduces different female characters that each have their particular expression of aggression and representation, the primary focus of analysis will be Lee, the main character of the film.

碩士
國立臺南藝術大學
音像管理研究所
96
According to the historical materialism and concept of alienation of Marxism, the thesis is mainly about the representation of technology-alienation in Science Fiction works, including novels and films, and the dialectic and critical relation between fictional texts and realities as a historical survey. The texts here are Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Hollywood movies “GATTACA”(1997) and “The Island”(2005). They all focus on life sciences, such as physiology, psychology, mental philosophy, electro-biology, embryology, psychoanalysis, behaviorism psychology, sociology and gene-engineering, etc. They have deeply insight into the meaning of life and concern about humanity. From physiology, psychology to genetics, sciences come to the core of human life progressively, what left after they de-construct the meaning of life? How is the scientific force involved in contemporary global capital economy? How do these science fiction works criticize the phenomenon of technology-alienation? All the above will be the central questions in this thesis. Science fiction movies as a genre, function the representation of social conflict and challenge the social structure in existence; however, as a production of Hollywood cine-industry, they their self are also tools for multinational corporation to actualize the neo-international division of cultural labor. As for this, science fiction movies profoundly express the social conflict caused by cultural imperialism with economy-globalization.

Esta dissertação discute as relações de alteridade presentes na literatura de ficção científica. Isto é feito a partir de dois eixos fundamentais para o género: as representações da mulher e do universo feminino, assim como suas relações com a tecnologia e entrelaçamentos com a máquina. Apesar de historicamente excluídas do pensamento científico, considerado um território de domínio masculino, as mulheres desde cedo protagonizaram o imaginário tecnológico – seja no desenvolvimento de uma relação íntima com essas inovações, a partir da industrialização dos lares, seja na criação de obras ficcionais que expressem, imaginativamente, a experiência feminina diante das novas ciências e tecnologias. Neste trabalho, é promovida uma articulação entre esses dois campos – o “real” e o imaginativo – a partir de três narrativas, representativas de períodos distintos na história da ficção científica norte-americana: “No Woman Born” (1944), de C. L. Moore, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973), de James Tiptree Jr., e “Bloodchild” (1984), de Octavia Butler. As obras têm em comum o facto de serem escritas por mulheres, com temáticas e personagens femininas. Elas possuem, portanto, uma dupla alteridade: ser mulher em um campo tradicionalmente associado ao género masculino, e a introdução de temáticas próprias ao universo feminino em uma grande narrativa – a História (oficial) da Ciência – também tradicionalmente protagonizada pelos homens. Amparada pelas reflexões de Richard Kearney acerca da alteridade, e do diálogo estabelecido com pensadores como Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur e Jacques Derrida, entre outros – assim como por autores ligados aos (Feminist) Science Fiction Studies – a perspectiva fundamental deste trabalho é perceber como essas narrativas podem ser vistas como um retrato sócio-cultural de uma época, assim como refletem os papéis exercidos pelas mulheres na vida dessas sociedades. Dessa forma, considera-se que as obras de ficção científica feminina – e mais tarde feminista – inserem também as mulheres na história e no futuro das ciências e tecnologias.
This dissertation discusses the relations of alterity present in the literature of science fiction. This is done from two fundamental axes for the genre: the representations of the woman and the feminine universe, as well as its relations with the technology and interweaving with the machine. Although historically excluded from scientific thinking, considered a territory of male dominance, women at an early stage played an important role in the technological imaginary – whether in the development of an intimate relationship with these innovations, through the industrialization of homes, or in the creation of fictional works expressing imaginatively the feminine experience in the face of the new sciences and technologies. In this work, an articulation between these two fields – the “real” and the imaginative – is promoted out of three narratives, representative of distinct periods in the history of American science fiction: “No Woman Born” (1944) by CL Moore, “The Girl Who Was Plugged In” (1973) by James Tiptree Jr., and “Bloodchild” (1984) by Octavia Butler. These works have in common the fact that they are written by women, with feminine themes and characters. They have, therefore, a double alterity: to be a woman in a field traditionally associated with the masculine gender, and the introduction of specific feminine themes in a great narrative – the (official) History of Science – also traditionally carried out by men. Supported by Richard Kearney’s reflections on alterity, and the dialogue established with thinkers such as Julia Kristeva, Paul Ricoeur and Jacques Derrida, among others – as well as by authors related to (Feminist) Science Fiction Studies – the fundamental perspective of this work is to perceive how these narratives can be seen as a socio-cultural picture of an era, just as they reflect the roles played by women in these societies. In this way, it is considered that the works of female – and later feminist – science fiction writers also include women in the history and future of science and technology.