120032 PS Interdisciplinary Course (501) = Proseminar Cultural Studies (2009W)

Apart from Stoker's Dracula and Leroux's Phantom of the Opera, authors in the late 19th and early 20th centuries created a number of surpassingly beautiful, but also extremely dangerous female monsters. In this interdisciplinary course we will use feminist and psychoanalytical theories to reveal (gender-specific) differences in the portrayal of male and female monsters and in the heroes' struggle against these monsters. The theoretical concepts will help us to explain, for example, how and why the corporeal beauty of the female monsters is linked with their usurpation of (male) powers and how this link helps to justify their violent and shocking destruction.
All texts will be situated in their historical/cultural contexts and we will discuss why monsters cannot be inscribed in the category of the "other", but radically question dualistic categories. We will therefore use Julia Kristeva's theory of the abject to explain the ambiguous position the monsters occupy on the margins of Western culture.