This paper looks upon monsters as a medium; how concentration of fear can result in the demonisation of individuals. It explores how the use of craft, with a focus on stop motion animation, can be used as a tool to build empathy and help to heal fragmentations of society. Working with contemporary mythologies, crafted techniques are metaphorically related to the fragility of societal structures and collective narratives. Hand crafting references relics of consumer culture and explores variable autonomies over personal narrative, investigating imbalances of power.

Seres insólitos estiveram presentes no cordel europeu, especialmente entre os séculos XVIII e XIX, alimentando debates sobre verossimilhança, fé, ciência e política. Mais de um século depois, o fenômeno do cordel arrefece na Europa, mas tem vida no Brasil. Parte desses folhetos trata de criaturas insólitas, especialmente transformações, ou nascimentos extraordinários, abordados como curiosidade ou, mais frequentemente, relacionados à intervenção divina. Ainda que nem sempre datados, é possível presumir que os exemplares coletados para este trabalho tenham sido publicados entre as décadas de 1960 e 1980. Neles, a aparição de monstros é frequente e se situa principalmente entre o satírico e o religioso / Uncanny beings were present in European chapbooks, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stimulating debates concerning verisimilitude, faith, science and politics. Over a century later, the chapbook phenomenon loses strength in Europe but gains life in Brazil. Some of these brochures deal with uncanny creatures, mainly metamorphoses, or bizarre births, considered as curiosities or, more frequently, as results of divine intervention. Even though they may not bear a date, it can be presumed that the chapbooks analyzed in this dissertation were published from the 1960s to the 1980s. Monsters appear quite frequently in this material, in registers that are situated mainly between the satirical and the religious

The aim of this study has been to investigate in feminist terms whether or not the character Grendel’s mother symbolizes early matrilineal tribes in the form of the Norse goddess Gefion, also claimed to be the Earth goddess. The claim has been brought forward in an article by Frank Battaglia on the grounds that the chthonic deity is mentioned on several occasions in Beowulf. However, Grendel’s mother’s possible connection to the goddess has not been treated extensively in a feminist context, despite the apparent link between feminism and matrilineal tribes in a patriarchal hierarchy. The modern translations of her character as a monster stand in stark contrast to the original manuscript where she is depicted as an aglӕcwif, “female warrior”. The subject has given rise to a number of feminist researches on the theme of the so called “woman-as-monster” stereotype. These argue that Grendel’s mother has fallen victim to enforced marginalization due to etymological faults as well as sexist stereotypes in Anglo-Saxon literary culture. On the background of Moi’s definition of a woman and Kristeva’s concept of the abject, results demonstrate that Grendel’s mother may very well symbolize the female Other in a new social order, embodied or represented as the Earth goddess.

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”.

Honors Project--Smith College, Northampton, Mass., 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 49-52).

Esta dissertação trata das relações de poder que marcam a produção científica ocidental moderna a partir da abordagem dos estudos sobre Gênero e Ciência da feminista historiadora da ciência estadunidense Donna Haraway. Esta autora propõe a concepção de toda a produção de conhecimento como pratica política, assumindo a perspectiva parcial como fundamento para uma ciência objetiva e apontando a perspectiva de objetividade calcada na ideia de imparcialidade como produtora de um tipo de saber que historicamente serviu como instrumento de dominação: o conhecimento que se propõe como universal. Em sua narrativa, o androcentrismo, o etnocentrismo, o racismo e as divisões de classe operam na conformação e nas transformações desta ciência a partir da construção de um sujeito privilegiado do conhecimento, o cientista, figura constituída a imagem e semelhança do homem branco ocidental independente. Meu recorte de sua obra são as reformulações dessas relações ao longo da historia da ciência ocidental moderna observadas por ela na emergência e nas produções de um conjunto especifico de disciplinas do campo das ciências naturais biológicas, fortemente marcadas pelas teorias e tecnologias da informação e da comunicação produzidas no campo da cibernética. Na construção de um discurso critico sobre os saberes / poderes hegemônicos, Haraway traz para a cena da ciência figuras monstruosas, entre elas o ciborgue, tanto como meio de revelar categorias culturais atuando na produção do conhecimento como para materializar novos significados para natureza, os corpos e as relações de diferença. Em conexão com esses monstros, refigurados em suas narrativas, a autora defende uma relação de conexão, e não de divisão, entre sujeito e objeto do saber. / This dissertation abords the power relations that mark the modern occidental scientific production from the point of view of the Gender and Science studies of the north-american feminist and historian of science Donna Haraway. The author proposes a conception of all the knowledge production as a political practice, assuming a partial perspective as a fundament to an objective science and pointing the objectivity perspective based on the idea of impartiality as a producer of a type of knowledge that historically served as an instrument of domination: the knowledge that proposes itself as universal. In her narrative, the androcentrism, ethnocentrism, racism and the class divisions operate on the conformation and the transformations of this science from the construction of a knowledge privileged persona, the scientist, character developed from the image and similarity of an independent western white man. My extract of the book is the reformulations of these relationships along with the modern western science observed by the author in the emerging and in the productions of a specific group of disciplines in the field of biological natural science, which were strongly marked by the theory and technology of information and communication produced in the cybernetic science. In the construction of a critic discussion about the hegemonic nowerpowers, Haraway brings monstrous characters to light, among them a cyborg, as much as a way to revel cultural categories acting in the knowledge production as to materialize new meanings to the nature, bodies and the differences relationships. Compromised with these monsters, human figures and non-human redefined in her narratives, the author defends a relationship of connection, and not of division, between the subject and the object of knowledge.

Esta dissertação trata das relações de poder que marcam a produção científica ocidental moderna a partir da abordagem dos estudos sobre Gênero e Ciência da feminista historiadora da ciência estadunidense Donna Haraway. Esta autora propõe a concepção de toda a produção de conhecimento como pratica política, assumindo a perspectiva parcial como fundamento para uma ciência objetiva e apontando a perspectiva de objetividade calcada na ideia de imparcialidade como produtora de um tipo de saber que historicamente serviu como instrumento de dominação: o conhecimento que se propõe como universal. Em sua narrativa, o androcentrismo, o etnocentrismo, o racismo e as divisões de classe operam na conformação e nas transformações desta ciência a partir da construção de um sujeito privilegiado do conhecimento, o cientista, figura constituída a imagem e semelhança do homem branco ocidental independente. Meu recorte de sua obra são as reformulações dessas relações ao longo da historia da ciência ocidental moderna observadas por ela na emergência e nas produções de um conjunto especifico de disciplinas do campo das ciências naturais biológicas, fortemente marcadas pelas teorias e tecnologias da informação e da comunicação produzidas no campo da cibernética. Na construção de um discurso critico sobre os saberes / poderes hegemônicos, Haraway traz para a cena da ciência figuras monstruosas, entre elas o ciborgue, tanto como meio de revelar categorias culturais atuando na produção do conhecimento como para materializar novos significados para natureza, os corpos e as relações de diferença. Em conexão com esses monstros, refigurados em suas narrativas, a autora defende uma relação de conexão, e não de divisão, entre sujeito e objeto do saber. / This dissertation abords the power relations that mark the modern occidental scientific production from the point of view of the Gender and Science studies of the north-american feminist and historian of science Donna Haraway. The author proposes a conception of all the knowledge production as a political practice, assuming a partial perspective as a fundament to an objective science and pointing the objectivity perspective based on the idea of impartiality as a producer of a type of knowledge that historically served as an instrument of domination: the knowledge that proposes itself as universal. In her narrative, the androcentrism, ethnocentrism, racism and the class divisions operate on the conformation and the transformations of this science from the construction of a knowledge privileged persona, the scientist, character developed from the image and similarity of an independent western white man. My extract of the book is the reformulations of these relationships along with the modern western science observed by the author in the emerging and in the productions of a specific group of disciplines in the field of biological natural science, which were strongly marked by the theory and technology of information and communication produced in the cybernetic science. In the construction of a critic discussion about the hegemonic nowerpowers, Haraway brings monstrous characters to light, among them a cyborg, as much as a way to revel cultural categories acting in the knowledge production as to materialize new meanings to the nature, bodies and the differences relationships. Compromised with these monsters, human figures and non-human redefined in her narratives, the author defends a relationship of connection, and not of division, between the subject and the object of knowledge.

Orientador: Mario Luiz Frungillo / Dissertação (mestrado) - Universidade Estadual de Campinas, Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem / Made available in DSpace on 2018-08-17T22:14:51Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Caetano_PauloRobertoBarreto_M.pdf: 587967 bytes, checksum: 1d7432ee7974f2b24848a218c0e9938a (MD5) Previous issue date: 2011 / Resumo: O romance Lavoura Arcaica, de Raduan Nassar, é um rico objeto para se pensar o caráter referencial dos personagens. A figura paterna, encarnando uma tradição que valoriza o trabalho, o comedimento como valores essenciais à vida, encontra forte resistência nos filhos Ana e André. Assim sendo, o embate que se delineia reflete um clássico confronto entre tradição e liberdade. Tal disputa é fruto (e estopim) para atos tidos como monstruosos: o incesto e o filicídio. Indo além do procedimento da caracterização dos personagens como recurso de análise do romance, esta dissertação se ocupa em discutir a prática de ações capazes de "monstrificar" os personagens. Destarte, a investigação menciona peculiaridades que fazem com que um ser seja visto como ente horrífico. A pesquisa se ocupa também com a noção de concatenação de situações-limite como elemento construtor das idiossincrasias. Com isso, o modo como as pessoas dessa família se tratam, como tratam o tempo e algumas leis fornece subsídios para que eles sejam vistos como "ameaças morais". O lugar do incesto e do filicídio fulgura, portanto, como elemento fundamental na análise desses personagens / Abstract: The novel Lavoura Arcaica, by Raduan Nassar, is a rich object to think the referential character of the personages. The father, embodying a tradition that says how worthy is work, the restraint as values essential to life, finds strong resistance in Ana and André. Thus, the conflict that emerges reflects a classic clash between tradition and freedom. Such dispute is a result (and wick) for acts taken as monstrosity: incest and filicide. Going beyond the procedure of characterization of the personages as an analysis resource of the novel, this paper is concerned about discussing the practice of actions capable of "monsterizing" personages. Therefore, this research mentions the peculiarities that make someone to be seen as being horrifying. This research also deals with the notion of extreme concatenation of the on-the-edge situations such as a building element of the idiosyncrasies. With that, the way the personages treat the time, each other in this family and some laws provides subsidy so they can be seen as "moral threats". The incest and filicide altogether, thus, appear as a key element in the analysis of the personages / Mestrado / Literatura Brasileira / Mestre em Teoria e História Literária

Seres insólitos estiveram presentes no cordel europeu, especialmente entre os séculos XVIII e XIX, alimentando debates sobre verossimilhança, fé, ciência e política. Mais de um século depois, o fenômeno do cordel arrefece na Europa, mas tem vida no Brasil. Parte desses folhetos trata de criaturas insólitas, especialmente transformações, ou nascimentos extraordinários, abordados como curiosidade ou, mais frequentemente, relacionados à intervenção divina. Ainda que nem sempre datados, é possível presumir que os exemplares coletados para este trabalho tenham sido publicados entre as décadas de 1960 e 1980. Neles, a aparição de monstros é frequente e se situa principalmente entre o satírico e o religioso / Uncanny beings were present in European chapbooks, especially during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, stimulating debates concerning verisimilitude, faith, science and politics. Over a century later, the chapbook phenomenon loses strength in Europe but gains life in Brazil. Some of these brochures deal with uncanny creatures, mainly metamorphoses, or bizarre births, considered as curiosities or, more frequently, as results of divine intervention. Even though they may not bear a date, it can be presumed that the chapbooks analyzed in this dissertation were published from the 1960s to the 1980s. Monsters appear quite frequently in this material, in registers that are situated mainly between the satirical and the religious

Made available in DSpace on 2016-03-15T19:42:22Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 Veronica DAgostino Piqueira.pdf: 959865 bytes, checksum: af3af03c97b9613293c5dcfac01b96ee (MD5) Previous issue date: 2013-01-23 / Universidade Presbiteriana Mackenzie / Hoping to contribute to broaden the discussion on the issue of popular American cultural imaginary, the objective of this dissertation is to reflect on the concept of normality and abnormality featured in the movie Freaks (1932), dedicated to the representation of the social and cultural universe of sideshows. We will present the influences that pierced the way director Tod Browning, searching referrals for the formation of his author cinema in his history since his youth as itinerant artist until the dimension of slapstick actor, director and writer of his own films. We'll also discuss some of the reasons that led to the emancipation of the horror genre during the Great Depression, seeking aesthetic, literary and political references in the narrative of his major classics. Based on these studies, this research transits in an interdisciplinary way by languages History of Culture and Film, presenting an encounter between monsters and humans and the way how they are expressed in the body exposed in Freaks. / Esperando contribuir para ampliar as discussões sobre a questão do imaginário cultural popular americano, o objetivo da presente dissertação é refletir sobre o conceito de normalidade e anormalidade apresentado no filme Freaks (1932), dedicado à representação do universo social e cultural dos sideshows. Apresentaremos as influências que transpassaram o caminho do diretor Tod Browning, buscando referências para a formação do seu cinema autoral em sua história vivida desde a juventude como artista itinerante até a dimensão como ator de pastelão, diretor e roteirista de seus próprios filmes. Discutiremos também algumas razões que levaram à emancipação do gênero de horror no período da Grande Depressão, buscando referências estéticas, literárias e políticas na narrativa de seus principais clássicos. Baseando-se nesses estudos, esta pesquisa transita de forma interdisciplinar pelas linguagens História da Cultura e Cinematográfica, apresentando o encontro entre monstros e humanos e o modo como são expressos no corpo exposto em Freaks.