Or: How Literacy Serves a Monster-Making Practice

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Jules Sturm (Zurich)​

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“The monster’s body is a machine that, in its Gothic mode, produces meaning and can represent any horrible trait that the reader feeds into the narrative.” (Jack Halberstam, Skin Shows)
 
Who is the monster and who the monster-maker? In their analysis of Gothic fiction, Jack Halberstam (1995) claims that the literary nineteenth-century monster is made by the reader: The monster comes into existence through the act of reading, which is – as every cultural technique – normative, categorical, and potentially violent. It is also subjective, embodied, and infused with affect. So, while the reader is here clearly seen as complicit in meaning-making, the figure of the monster, as well as the practice of reading, are simultaneously given subversive power by way of the embodied subject’s contribution to textual production. I take the monster as a spectacular instance of «corporeal literacy», in which reading becomes a form of cultural «writing» where socially othered bodies are composed as well as de- and re-composed through reading. With a short introduction to the concept of corporeal literacy and an engagement with a text about a literary example of «queering» monster-making, I hope to elicit a shared reflection on the bodily potential or dangers of reading in the creation of today’s «monsters» and a contemporary technology of monstrosity.

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Dienstag, 11.00–12.30 Uhr

Viaduktraum 2.A05