This dissertation uses psychoanalytic theory to examine the similar portrayals of monstrous femininity in two Middle English poems, Robert Henryson’s the Testament of Cresseid and the Awntyrs off Arthure. In the Testament, Cresseid’s leprosy is interpreted through Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection, suggesting that Cresseid experiences the abject to create a new identity as a leper. Rather than view Cresseid’s dream as an assembly of very real divinities who pass judgment over her sleeping body, I interpret the dream in a strictly physiological sense, arguing that Cresseid not only creates the judgment from her own conflicted psychology, but actively shapes her own destiny. Cresseid’s disease does not annihilate her identity, but gives her a significant position in society, because her status as a leper facilitates the economy of salvation. I continue with Kristeva’s theory to understand the characterization of the grotesque corpse of Gaynour’s mother in the Awntyrs off Arthure. Her rotting body is doubly abject, both as a corpse and a mother. While abjection provides a useful opening for discussing the portraits of Gaynour and her mother, Kristeva’s theory does not consider all women in the text, and only confirms misogynist stereotypes. To supplement Kristeva, I use Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s theory of desire to illuminate the text as a whole, and explain the role of the corpse in shaping the narrative. / Thesis (Master, English) -- Queen's University, 2009-08-20 03:15:54.674

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IMAGINATION AND DEFORMATION: MONSTROUS MATERNAL PERVERSIONS OF NATURAL REPRODUCTION IN EARLY MODERN ENGLAND examines the creation in early modern English reproductive, teratological, wonder, and fictional literature of the "monstrous mother"--a female reproductive figure capable of generating both fetal and non-fetal forms of offspring through the power of her imagination. While earlier critics have identified monstrous mothers in early modern English literature--figures who produce grotesque and/or excessive offspring, deny or obstruct nurture, commit infanticide, and sometimes exhibit their own physical deformities--such mothers require offspring to expose their monstrosity. That is, deformed, numerous, starving, sickly, or slain bodies testify to their mothers' monstrous desires, reproductive natures, and parenting practices. In contrast, I argue that monstrous maternity develops independently of the birth of offspring, and specifically, manifests during conception and pregnancy, before women deliver issue that exposes their monstrous maternal inclinations. While monstrous maternal power primarily develops from women's desires, it also remains embodied within conceiving and pregnant women, and thus permits women to generate not only deformed offspring and power, but also new, monstrous forms of generation.While monstrous mothers exercise powerful imaginative force that permits them to produce numerous types of "monstrous births," they also face antagonistic attempts to suppress their monstrous tendencies. Yet the authors of regulatory imagination texts, particularly sixteenth- and seventeenth-century obstetrical manuals, are repeatedly confounded by the monstrous mother's ability to innovate her imaginative influence when confronted with attempts to limit it. Thus, antagonism actually augments monstrous maternal power. Early modern fictional literature depicts the growth and innovation of monstrous maternity even as practitioners, husbands, and communities attempt to suppress it. Fictional works therefore re-theorize regulatory imagination theory, as they persistently underscore the uncontrollable nature of monstrous mothers and monstrous maternal reproduction.

I slutet av 90-talet sköljde en våg med asiatisk skräckfilm in över västvärlden. Filmerna handlade om kvinnor som dött en våldsam eller orättvis död och nu var tillbaka för att hämnas. Takashi Miike är en av de mest kända japanska regissörerna som har bidragit till den japanska skräckfilmsgenren som fick så stor spridning i väst. Syftet med den här uppsatsen är att undersöka vilka kvinnoroller som finns representerade i fyra utav Miikes skräckfilmer och hur de framställs. Uppsatsen utgår från klassisk feministisk filmteori och undersöker om Barbara Creeds ”the monstrous feminine” och Carol Clovers ”the final girl” finns representerade i Miikes filmer. Bland uppsatsens slutsatser går det att finna att ”the final girl” delvis finns representerad i Miikes filmer, dock inte i samma utsträckning som i amerikansk skräckfilm, samt att man kan stöta på en viss problematik när man applicerar Creeds och Clovers teorier på filmer som inte följer ett västerländskt berättande.

This thesis investigates small-scale mappae mundi, world maps, created in the thirteenth-century, which record the historical, mythical, social, and religious reality of the world for wealthy English patrons. My research focuses on two maps found in a Psalm book (British Library Add. MS 28681, f. 9 and f. 9v) on either side of a single page. One depicts the world in typical mappae mundi fashion, with Jerusalem at the centre of a network of cities, topographic features and monstrous creatures while the other lists place names and geographic descriptions. The maps depict the world in very different manners, one textually and the other visually, but their placement on the same leaf emphasizes their connection. This work explores the iconography, socio-historic context and literary precedence of mappae mundi in order to comprehend the distinct need for mixed-media to represent and understand a complex worldly existence in thirteenth-century England.

Student Number : 9803476V - MA research report - School of Arts - Faculty of Humanities / By drawing on contemporary scholarship that addresses spectatorship in the cinema generally, and in the horror genre specifically, I analyze the perverse pleasure afforded by The Blair Witch Project. To do this I argue that pleasure in horror is afforded through the masochistic positioning of the viewer, especially in relation to psychoanalytic theories surrounding gender in spectator positioning. I also look at the way the film re-deploys conventions, both documentary conceptions of the ‘real’, as well as generic expectations of horror, to activate the perverse pleasure of horror.

This study explores the patriarchal unconscious underlying the Korean horror genre through a critical feminist psychoanalytical reading of the family dynamics and female agency in three landmark texts, namely, The Public Cemetery under the Moon (Kwon, Chul-hwi, 1967), Mother's Han (Lee, Yusup, 1970) and Woman's Wail (Lee, Hyuksu, 1986). By closely examining these horror film texts using insights from feminist psychoanalytic approaches and situating the texts within historical events and popular culture in the Park Chung Hee era, this study produces an understanding of the cultural dilemmas of women's desire and agency, and especially those of mothers. These textual analyses demonstrate that Confucian virtues, especially as been reinvented under Park Chung Hee's leadership to facilitate developmentalist goals, have formed the roots that shape the mother-child relationship into one that both parties want to dissolve. Through placing the cinematic representation of the monstrous feminine within a historical understanding of Korean horror cinema, this dissertation also demonstrates that the sacred, perfect image of the mother as it is known in Korean popular culture today is in fact historically produced formation within the genre. Besides, with Woman's Wail, a very characteristic Confucian female monster is discussed, namely, the mother-in-law. With this very rare type of the female monster, the misogynistic gender politics within Confucian patriarchy is saliently represented. The feminist psychoanalytic discussion on the spectatorship focuses on the interplay between the image and the Confucian female spectator. In a close reading of the two women's desires in The Public Cemetery under the Moon, this study explores the ways in which the female spectator may find visual pleasures in Korean horror cinema and the ways in which they are communicated and negotiated vis-à-vis the matrix of gender politics in Confucian culture. Taken together, this work demonstrates how the Confucian value system re-invented in the Park Chung Hee era has been a crucial apparatus for women's oppression, and at the same time, how women's agency is nonetheless evinced despite the strictures of Confucianism.

La fin du Moyen Âge est le théâtre de l'apparition et de la diffusion d'images singulières : celles d'hommes et de femmes intégralement couverts de poils. Attribut de l'homme sauvage, mais également de personnages ensauvagés et notamment d'ermites et de saints, le corps velu fait figure de véritable motif iconographique aux deux derniers siècles du Moyen Âge. Cette thèse, s'appuyant sur la méthode de l'analyse sérielle et s'inscrivant dans les problématiques de l'anthropologie historique, propose l'étude du motif à travers un corpus de 940 images. Il s'agit de comprendre à travers une collection représentative de sources (tendant à l'exhaustivité), comment le corps velu, à priori laid et bestial, est associé à la fin de la période à un ensemble de personnages tout à fait positifs, voire admirables. Une première partie, organisée autour du rapport entre texte et image, cherche à définir clairement les rapports entre l'iconographie du motif et les représentations littéraires et carnavalesques de l'homme sauvage. La question des emprunts mutuels entre la culture courtoise et la culture dite « folklorique » sous-Tend ce premier temps de l'analyse. Y sont également abordées les pratiques médiévales de la pilosité et la place occupée par le poil et la nudité dans l'art de cette période. Dans une seconde partie sont étudiés les éléments constitutifs de « l'être sauvage ». La relation entre le corps velu, le bestial et le démoniaque est abordée à travers l'iconographie d'Ésaü, de Merlin et d'Ursus, le roi mythique des Belges. La réflexion sur le rapport entre l'homme, la bête et l'espace sauvage est ensuite déplacée dans le champ des représentations de l'Orient, et dans celui de l'érotique courtoise faisant du sauvage une antithèse du chevalier. En dernier lieu, la troisième partie s'intéresse à la conception dynamique de la sauvagerie à travers le concept « d'ensauvagement ». L'analyse de la villosité comme conséquence du recours à la forêt permet de comparer l'iconographie de l'homme sauvage et celle des ermites et des pénitentes velus. L'excès de poil, davantage qu'un attribut bestial et dégradant, y apparaît alors très largement comme une manifestation du merveilleux ou du miraculeux. Parce qu'il n'altère pas le corps humain, il fait tour à tour figure de défaut d'humanité (laideur, animalité) ou de surplus héroïque (force, détachement du corps ou résistance à la souffrance). En conclusion, ce travail met en valeur le rôle de l'aristocratie dans la promotion de la figure de l'homme sauvage, qui constitue un moyen pour cette dernière d'affirmer son contrôle symbolique sur l'espace forestier. Le succès du personnage, également porté par le renouveau de l'érémitisme, entretien un rapport étroit avec celui d'autres figures comme les ermites velus, emblématiques du recours à la forêt et du renoncement au monde. Ces derniers trouvent une traduction iconographique particulière à travers les images de Marie-Madeleine, dont la diffusion dans l'espace germanique s'explique en partie par l'influence de la mystique rhénane. / The end of the Middle Ages saw the apparition and diffusion of rather peculiar images: those of men and women entirely covered in hair. An attribute of the wild man, but also of individuals who took to the wild -Notably hermits and saints, the hirsute body became a veritable iconographic motif during the final two centuries of the Middle Ages. Adopting the methodology of serial analysis and drawing on the approach of historical anthropology, this thesis examines this motif through a body of 940 images. Drawing upon a representative collection of sources (verging on the exhaustive), the central research question is how the haircovered body, a priori ugly and bestial, came to be associated at the end of this period with a series of positive, at times revered, figures. Part one addresses the relation between text and image. It aims to clearly define the relationships between the iconography of the motif on the one hand, and literary and carnivalesque representations of the wild man on the other. The question of mutual borrowings between courtly culture and ‘folkloric' culture is central to this analysis. Medieval practices with regard to hairiness, and the place that hair and nudity occupied in the art of the period, will also be considered. Part two addresses those elements which constituted the ‘wild being'. The relationship between the hair-Covered body, the bestial, and the demonic are explored through the iconography of Ésaü, Merlin and the mythical Belgian king Ursus. This reflection on the interstices of man, beast and wild spaces then shifts to representations of the Orient, and to a courtly eroticism in which the savage was the antithesis of the chivalrous knight. Finally, Part three considers the constitution of wildness over time, drawing upon the concept of ‘ensauvagement'. Analyzing villosity as a consequence of recourse to the forest points to a comparison between the iconography of the wild man and that of hair-Covered hermits and penitents. An excess of hair, rather than being a bestial or debased condition, is thus transformed into a manifestation of the marvellous or miraculous. Because it does not alter the human body itself, it is by turns perceived as a lack of humanity (ugliness, animality) or as a heroic supplement (strength, detachment from the corporal, or resistance to suffering). In conclusion, this study underlines the role of the aristocracy in the promotion of the figure of the wild man, which offered a means of asserting symbolic control over forested spaces. The success of this figure, also assisted by the renewal of eremitism, is closely related to that of others, such as the hirsute hermit, similarly emblematic of an embrace of the forest and withdrawal from the world. These themes find particular iconographic expression in images of Marie-Madeleine, the diffusion of which across the Germanic lands can partly be explained by the influence of Rhinish mysticism.

Die vorliegende Arbeit ist als deutsch-französisch doppelbetreute Dissertation in Straßburg sowie Berlin entstanden und reiht sich dezidiert in die literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Hermeneutik der Fremde ein. Dafür wartet die Untersuchung mit einer willkommenen Perspektivierung auf die in der Zeit des Mittelalters diskursiv wie narrativ verhandelte Figur des „Monströsen“ auf, deren „Darstellung und Funktion“ an Hand eines ausgewählten hochmittelalterlichen Textcorpus (Straßburger Alexander, Herzog Ernst B, Wigalois) exemplifiziert werden soll. Gerade dieser Fokus erscheint äußerst reizvoll, birgt er doch so relevante Themen und Fragen der germanistischen Mediävistik wie die nach den Transformationsmöglichkeiten und Mechanismen zwischen diskursiven und narrativen Texten, daran anknüpfend das Verhältnis von faktualem und fiktionalem Erzählen und die dabei ebenso evozierten Authentizitätsansprüche der Narrationen. Letztlich ruft der Fokus auf der Hermeneutik des Fremden mit deren In- und Exklusionsmodellen die Möglichkeiten und Grenzen bei der relationalen Wahrnehmung und beim Umgang mit ethnographischen sowie pathographischen Hybriditäten, Alteritäten oder gar Ambiguitäten auf.

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