10th Global Conference: Monsters and the Monstrous (Myths and Metaphors of Enduring Evil)

10th Global Conference
Monsters and the Monstrous

Monday 10th September ? Thursday 13th September 2012
Mansfield College, Oxford

Call for Papers:

For this 10th Anniversary of the Monsters and the
Monstrous Project we are looking forward to the
future, and so are starting from Franco Moretti's
comment that "the monster expresses the anxiety
that the future will be monstrous." Our focus then
will be on Monsters of the Future, no matter from
which time or place that future is viewed. So
whether the present is Medieval, Renaissance,
Enlightenment, Romantic, Modernist or Post
Modernist it is the ways that, as further noted by
Moretti, a "new order of beings" makes manifest
the terror of an unknown and uncontrollable
tomorrow and the forms these creatures take.

As such the monster becomes not the return of the
repressed but an immanent Imaginary that
constantly harasses and harangues the borders of
the Real. Just as Grendel, Caliban, Frankenstein's
Monster, Dr. Moreau's creatures and the clones
from Blade Runner can be seen to manifest a hybrid
future that blurs the borders between
human/non-human, the humane and the in-humane, the
converse is equally true where the tomorrow they
envision is as much degenerative as it is
evolutionary. Here, as in Wells' the Time Machine,
or Lovecraft's Mountains of Madness, the future is
in fact a portal to the past and that the true
anxiety we feel is not for inevitable change but
for a monstrous stasis that, like the vampire,
will lock us forever in a never-ending present
(not unlike Wittgenstein's immortality of the
never-ending moment). This then is a call for
monstrous visions of the future, whether it is a
new and alien land or one that is only too
familiar; for the Post-Human, the Non-Human and
the Anti-Human, the Robot, the Golem and the
Cyborg, the Pure-bred, the Hybrid and the
Mudblood, the Unborn, the Unliving and the  Undead.

Papers, reports, work-in-progress, workshops and
pre-formed panels are invited on issues related to
any of the following themes:

Monstrous Places/Spaces of the Future:
~The city, the town, the home of the future.
~Environmental disasters, global warming, nuclear
meltdowns, plagues and terra incognito.
~Dystopias/utopias
~New Worlds, forgotten worlds, undiscovered
worlds: Atlantis, Shangri-la. Eldorado

Human Monsters:
~Medical experimentation, cloning, reproduction.
~Cyborgs, robots and inanimate bodies made real
~Hybrids, both real and supernatural, post-human
and beyond human.
~Evolution and degeneration
~Actual bodies and supernatural bodies.
~Monsterisation of the human body: fragmentation,
surgical modification and bodies without organs

Monstrous Aliens & Alien Invaders:
~Invasions of unknown beings, conquistadors,
Martians, heavenly or alien life forms.
~Humans as invaders, Starship Troopers, Iain M.
Banks' The Culture
~Parasites, diseases, flora and influences

Monstrous Generations:
~The glorification of Youth, Logan's Run and In Time.
~Monstrous adolescents.
~Demonic children and alien babies.
~Middle-aged zombies and serial killers, possessed
grandparents
~Romantacising the Monster: Paranormal Romance,
dark lovers and heroes, Twilight, Vampire Diaries
and Dexter.

Monstrous Politics:
~Protest, revolt and revolution
~Zombie Capitalism and undead labour
~Class, status and the aristocracy
~Post colonialism, diasporas and migration.
~Ageism, sexism, health-ism and separatism e.g,
District 9, Metropolis, Matrix, Daybreakers.

Papers can be accepted which deal solely with
specific monsters. This project will run
concurrently with our project on The Erotic? we
welcome any papers considering the problems or
addressing issues on Monsters and The Erotic for a
cross-over panel. We also welcome pre-formed
panels on any aspect of the monstrous or in
relation to crossover panel(s).
300 word abstracts should be submitted by Friday
16th March 2012. If an abstract is accepted for
the conference, a full draft paper should be
submitted by Friday 22nd June 2012. Abstracts
should be submitted to the Organising Chairs;
abstracts may be in Word, WordPerfect, or RTF
formats, following this order:

a) author(s), b) affiliation, c) email address, d)
title of abstract, e) body of abstract, f) up to
10 keywords
E-mails should be entitled: Monsters Abstract
Submission

Please use plain text (Times Roman 12) and abstain
from using any special formatting, characters or
emphasis (such as bold, italics or underline).
Please note that a Book of Abstracts is planned
for the end of the year. All accepted abstracts
will be included in this publication.We
acknowledge receipt and answer to all paper
proposals submitted. If you do not receive a reply
from us in a week you should assume we did not
receive your proposal; it might be lost in
cyberspace! We suggest, then, to look for an
alternative electronic route or resend.

Organising Chairs

Sorcha Ni Fhlainn
Inter-Disciplinary.Net
School of English, Trinity College, Dublin, Ireland
E-mail: [email protected]

Rob Fisher
Network Founder & Leader, Inter-Disciplinary.Net
Freeland, Oxfordshire
United Kingdom
E-mail: [email protected]

Simon Bacon
Poznan,Poland
Email: [email protected]

The aim of the conference is to bring together
people from different areas and interests to share
ideas and explore various discussions which are
innovative and exciting. All papers accepted for
and presented at this conference are eligible for
publication in an ISBN eBook. Selected papers may
be invited to go forward for development into a
themed ISBN hard copy volume. Some papers may also
be invited for inclusion in the Journal of
Monsters and the Monstrous.

For further details of the project, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/monsters-and-the-
monstrous/

For further details of the conference, please visit:
http://www.inter-disciplinary.net/at-the-interface/evil/monsters-and-the-
monstrous/call-for-papers/