Werewolves, Giants, and Gulliver:Marvelous Bodies in the Posthuman Predicament
0
조회
0
다운로드
0
인용
0
참고문헌
키워드
초록
This essay proposes to reappraise the monstrous creatures at the liminality of humanity in Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as marvelous bodies in the posthuman predicament, particularly at the intersection of the posthuman and the colonial. Apart from its latest theoretical sophistication and primary associations with the cyborgic human, posthuman thinking is not confined to the present century but stimulates new readings of older texts, committed to reconsidering the human itself and the human-nonhuman boundaries, challenging the unitary, normative subject of the Enlightenment, and understanding bodies of difference from non-normative perspective. This essay focuses on the different ways Gerald’s and Swift’s monstrous creatures appear to viewers, for the monstrous is associated both etymologically and cognitively with morphological transgression and constructed as such in certain frames of view. Despite the manifestly colonial agenda of the Topography as a whole, the story of the werewolves of Ossory grants them potent subjectivity in both text and illustration, and Gerald’s own intervention in the story suggests ambiguity, thus partially conceding to the ailing she-wolf demanding to die a human. In contrast, Gulliver is the first giant in the Travels whose voracious body and behavior, threatening carnage and cannibalism, embodies the very monstrous, and he further suffers a series of dysmorphic transformation. Oblivious to his own posthuman shapeshifting, Gulliver turns to all other bodies than his own the dehumanizing view of a micrographer like Robert Hook, denying their wholeness in difference. It is this Gulliverian eye that reduces Irish bodies to mere edibles, wearables, and biodegradables in A Modest Proposal. Gulliver is subjected to that very microscopic inspection by Brobdingnaggian philosophers and labelled Lusus Naturæ. It turns out that monstrosity is in the enhanced and Enlightened eye of the beholder, like the deformed eyes of the Laputans.
Abstract
This essay proposes to reappraise the monstrous creatures at the liminality of humanity in Gerald of Wales’s Topography of Ireland and Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels as marvelous bodies in the posthuman predicament, particularly at the intersection of the posthuman and the colonial. Apart from its latest theoretical sophistication and primary associations with the cyborgic human, posthuman thinking is not confined to the present century but stimulates new readings of older texts, committed to reconsidering the human itself and the human-nonhuman boundaries, challenging the unitary, normative subject of the Enlightenment, and understanding bodies of difference from non-normative perspective. This essay focuses on the different ways Gerald’s and Swift’s monstrous creatures appear to viewers, for the monstrous is associated both etymologically and cognitively with morphological transgression and constructed as such in certain frames of view. Despite the manifestly colonial agenda of the Topography as a whole, the story of the werewolves of Ossory grants them potent subjectivity in both text and illustration, and Gerald’s own intervention in the story suggests ambiguity, thus partially conceding to the ailing she-wolf demanding to die a human. In contrast, Gulliver is the first giant in the Travels whose voracious body and behavior, threatening carnage and cannibalism, embodies the very monstrous, and he further suffers a series of dysmorphic transformation. Oblivious to his own posthuman shapeshifting, Gulliver turns to all other bodies than his own the dehumanizing view of a micrographer like Robert Hook, denying their wholeness in difference. It is this Gulliverian eye that reduces Irish bodies to mere edibles, wearables, and biodegradables in A Modest Proposal. Gulliver is subjected to that very microscopic inspection by Brobdingnaggian philosophers and labelled Lusus Naturæ. It turns out that monstrosity is in the enhanced and Enlightened eye of the beholder, like the deformed eyes of the Laputans.
참고문헌 (46)
- Arbuthnot, John, "It cannot Rain but it Pours: or, London strow’d with Rarities"
- Armstrong, Philip, "What Animals Mean in the Fiction of Modernity" (2008), Routledge
- Bildhauer, Bettina, "The Monstrous Middle Ages" (2003), U of Toronto P
- Braidotti, Rosi, "The Posthuman" (2013), Polity
- Braidotti, Rosi, "The Posthuman Predicament", 69~86
- Brown, Michelle P, "Gerald of Wales and the Topography of Ireland: Authorial Agendas in Word and Image", Journal of Irish Studies, 20, pp.52~63 (2005)
- Campbell, Mary Baine, "Wonder and Science: Imagining Worlds in Early Modern Europe" (1999), Cornell UP
- Cohen, Jerome Jeffrey, "Of Giants: Sex, Monsters, and the Middle Ages" (1999), U of Minnesota P
- Connolly, S. J., "The Oxford Companion to Irish History" (2002), Oxford UP
- Davies, Surekha, "The Unlucky, the Bad and the Ugly: Categories of Monstrosity from the Renaissance to the Enlightenment", 49~75
- Defoe, Daniel, "Robinson Crusoe" (1975), Norton
- Felton, D, "Rejecting and Embracing the Monstrous in Ancient Greece and Rome", 103~131
- Gascoigne, John, "The Royal Society, Natural History and the Peoples of the ‘New World(s),’ 1660-1800", The British Journal for the History of Science, 42(4), pp.539~562 (2009)
- Gerald of Wales, "The History and Topography of Ireland" (1983), Penguin
- Gerald of Wales(Giraldus Cambrensis), "The Topography of Ireland" (2000), In Parentheses Publications
- Godden, Richard H., "Embodied Difference: Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman", 3~31
- Godden, Richard H., "Monstrosity, Disability, and the Posthuman in the Medieval and Early Modern World" (2019), Palgrave Macmillan
- Human: Monsters, Aliens, and Others in Popular Culture, "Representations of the Post", pp.2002, Graham, Elaine L
- Guðmundsdóttir, Aðalheiður, "The Werewolf in Medieval Icelandic Literature", The Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 106(3), pp.277~303 (2007)
- Haraway, Donna J, "Modest_Witness@Second_Millennium.FemaleMan©_Meets_OncoMouse™: Feminism and Technoscience" (2018), Routledge
- 이시연, "스위프트의 “배설적 상상”에 나타난 여성, 몸, 소비", 영미문학페미니즘, 16(1), pp.91~115 (2008), 한국영미문학페미니즘학회[DOI]
- Malcolmson, Cristina, "Gulliver’s Travels and Studies of Skin Color in the Royal Society", 49~66
- Malcolmson, Cristina, "Studies of Skin Color in the Early Royal Society: Boyle: Cavendish, Swift" (2013), Ashgate
- McKibben, Sarah E, "In their ‘owne countre’: Deriding and Defending the Early Modern Irish Nation after Gerald of Wales", Eolas: The Journal of the American Society of Irish Medieval Studies, 8, pp.39~70 (2015)
- Michaud, Nicolas, "Gulliver’s Creation of Reality through Disability: Swift, Idealism, and the Act of Perception", 131~144
- Milberger, Kurt Edward, "Gulliver in Stable: Anti-Cartesian Satire and the Bête-machine in Part Four of Gulliver’s Travels", 85~101
- Mills, Robert, "Jesus as Monster", 28~54
- Mittman, Asa Simon, "Are the ‘Monstrous Races’ Races?", Postmedieval: A Journal of Medieval Cultural Studies, 6(1), pp.36~51 (2015)
- Mittman, Asa Simon, "The Other Close at Hand: Gerald of Wales and the ‘Marvels of the West", 97~112
- Mittman, Asa Simon, "Classic Readings on Monster Theory: Demonstrare Volume 1", pp.9~15 (2018), Arc Humanities Press
- Mittman, Asa Simon, "The Ashgate Research Companion to Monsters and the Monstrous" (2013), Routledge
- Newton, Michael, "Bodies without Souls: The Case of Peter the Wild Boy", 196~214
- Ogden, Daniel, "Some Organic Readings in Narrative, Ancient and Modern", pp.255~278 (2020), Barkhuis
- Palmeri, Frank, "Humans and Other Animals in Eighteenth-Century British Culture: Representation, Hybridity, Ethics" (2006), Ashgate
- Park, Katharine, "Unnatural Conceptions: The Study of Monsters in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century France and England", Past & Present, 92(1), pp.20~54 (1981)
- Popkin, Richard H, "The Philosophical Basis of Eighteenth-Century Racism", Studies in Eighteenth-Century Culture, 3(2), pp.245~262 (1974)
- Pötzsch, Janelle, "Jonathan Swift and Philosophy" (2017), Lexington Books
- Smelik, Anneke, "The Scientific Imaginary in Visual Culture" (2010), V&R Unipress
- Swift, Jonathan, "Gulliver’s Travels" (2012), Cambridge UP
- Wallace, Karen Bruce, "Grendel and Goliath: Monstrous Superability and Disability in the Old English Corpus", 107~126
- Wiseman, Susan, "Monstrous Perfectibility: Ape-Human Transformations in Hobbes, Bulwer, Tyson", 215~238
- Fudge, Erica, "At the Borders of the Human: Beasts, Bodies and Natural Philosophy in the Early Modern Period" (1999), Palgrave Macmillan
- Wittkower, Rudolf, "Marvels of the East: A Study in the History of Monsters", Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 5, pp.159~197 (1942)
- Zwijnenberg, Robert, "How to Depict Life: A Short History of the Imagination of Human Interiority", 21~37