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Monster Culture in the 21st Century: A Reader
Author(s): . (Author)
- Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
- Publication Date: 18 July 2013
- Language: English
- Print length: 344 pages
- ISBN-10: 1441187979
- ISBN-13: 9781441187970
Book Description
In the past decade, our rapidly changing world faced terrorism, global epidemics, economic and social strife, new communication technologies, immigration, and climate change to name a few. These fears and tensions reflect an evermore-interconnected global environment where increased mobility of people, technologies, and disease have produced great social, political, and economical uncertainty.
The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century.
The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.
The essays in this collection examine how monstrosity has been used to manage these rising fears and tensions. Analyzing popular films and televisions shows, such as True Blood, Twilight, Paranormal Activity, District 9, Battlestar Galactica, and Avatar, it argues that monstrous narratives of the past decade have become omnipresent specifically because they represent collective social anxieties over resisting and embracing change in the 21st century.
The first comprehensive text that uses monstrosity not just as a metaphor for change, but rather a necessary condition through which change is lived and experienced in the 21st century, this approach introduces a different perspective toward the study of monstrosity in culture.
Editorial Reviews
Review
The essays in this new edited collection are . . . designed to address how monstrosity has come to represent the fears that the new century has brought with it. […] The book does itself an injustice by calling itself a “reader” when, in fact, it is more than just a collection of articles bundled together . . . The editors have clearly worked hard to present a collection of essays in such a way that the book has a through-narrative, and for that they should be congratulated. — Shane Brown, University of East Anglia, UK ― Cinema Journal Published On: 2014-10-01
Preoccupied with zombies, vampires, and ever more unholy configurations of human body parts and consciousnesses, the 21st century is proving to be a monstrous time.
Monster Culture in the 21st Century offers readers an international and interdisciplinary theoretical toolkit that can help us better understand the monstrous’ magical ability to reflect and refract immense political, technoscientific, and ecological changes and anxieties. — Carol A. Stabile, Professor, School of Journalism and Communication and Department of Women’s and Gender Studies, University of Oregon, US Monster Culture in the 21st Century brings together various theoretical and methodological approaches to look critically at the trope of the monstrous as an increasingly ubiquitous mode for managing contemporary crises of identity, technology and globalization through popular media culture. As such it provides refreshing new directions for understanding ‘monster culture’ beyond metaphor and as a necessary condition of our lives in the 21st century. ― Dr. Jane Chi Hyun Park, Senior Lecturer, Department of Gender and Cultural Studies and the United States Studies Centre, University of Sydney, Australia Monster Culture in the 21st Century stands out prominently among the wave of . . . new post-millennial studies . . . [It] succeeds as both a research guide and a classroom tool, in large part due to its expansive scope and, yet also, the unusual particular care given to its myriad topics — John Edgar Browning, Georgia Institute of Technology, USA ― Information, Communication and SocietyAbout the Author
Marina Levina is an Assistant Professor at the Department of Communication at the University of Memphis. Her research focuses on critical studies of science, technology and medicine, network and new media theory, visual culture, and media studies. She is an avid fan of monster and horror narratives and has written articles and book chapters on critical meaning of monsters, and especially their connection to scientific and medical cultural anxieties. She has also repeatedly taught a course on monster films. She is currently working on a book titled Pandemics in the Media (Peter Lang, forthcoming 2013). Recent publications include an edited collection Post-Global Network and Everyday Life (with Grant Kien, Peter Lang, 2010); a chapter in the volume A Foucault for the 21st Century: Governmentality, Biopolitics and Discipline in the New Millennium (edited by Sam Binkley and Jorge Capetillo, Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2009), and articles in Journal of Science Communication and in Spontaneous Generations: History and Philosophy of Science and Technology. You can find her at www.marinalevina.com.
Diem-My T. Bui currently is a Visiting Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research interests include transnational feminist media studies, critical cultural studies, ethnic studies, popular culture, and film. Her work examines cultural production, cultural memory, and embodiments of difference in representations of Vietnamese women in the U.S. cultural imaginary. Her publications are included in the journal
Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies and in an edited book, Globalizing Cultural Studies (2007). She has taught courses on communication, Asian American studies, film studies, and popular culture.
