Monstrous Liminality: Or, The Uncanny Strangers Of Secularized Modernity

Description

This book examines the transformation of the figure of the stranger in the literature of the modern age in terms of liminality. As a ‘spectral monster’ that has a paradoxical and liminal relationship to both the sacred and the secular, the figure of the modern stranger has played a role in both adapting and shaping a culturally determined understanding of the self and the other. With the advent of modernity, the stranger, the monster, and the spectre became interconnected. Haunting the edges of reason while also being absorbed into ‘normal’ society, all three, together with the cyborg, manifest the vulnerability of an age that is fearful of the return of the repressed. Yet these figures can also become re-appropriated as positive symbols, able to navigate between the dangerous and chaotic elements that threaten society while serving as precarious and ironic symbols of hope or sustainability. The book shows the explanatory potential of focusing on the resacralizing – in a paradoxical and liminal manner – of traditionally sacred concepts such as ‘messianic’ time and the ‘utopian,’ and the conflicts that emerged as a result of secularized modernity’s denial of its own hybridization. This approach to modern literature shows how the modern stranger, a figure that is both paradoxically immersed and removed from society, deals with the dangers of failing to be re-assimilated into mainstream society and is caught in a fixed or permanent state of liminality, a state that can ultimately lead to boredom, alienation, nihilism, and failure. These ‘monstrous’ aspects of liminality can also be rewarding in that traversing difficult and paradoxical avenues they confront both traditional and contemporary viewpoints, enabling new and fresh perspectives suspended between imagination and reality, past and future, nature and artificial. In many ways, the modern stranger as a figure of literature and the cultural imagination has become more complicated and challenging in the (post)modern contemporary age, both clashing with and encompassing people who go beyond simply the psychological or even spiritual inability to blend in and out of society. However, while the stranger may be altering once again the defining or essentializing the figure could result in the creation of other sets of binaries, and thereby dissolve the purpose and productiveness of both strangeness and liminality. The intention of “Monstrous Liminality” is to trace the liminal sphere located between the secular and sacred that has characterized modernity itself. This space has consequently altered the makeup of the stranger from something external, into a figure far more liminal, which is forced to traverse this uncanny space in an attempt to find new meanings for an age that is struggling to maintain any. Cover Title Copyright Contents Acknowledgements Introduction The Secular, The Sacred, and Resacralization Modernity, Liminality, and The Uncanny The Modern Stranger Modern Monsters and Haunting Spectres Chapter Summary Notes: Introduction I: Frankenstein and the “Birth” of Secularized Modernity Frankenstein and Secularization The Historical Shift of the Monstrous Modernity’s Monstrous Secret The End of the Natural and the Beginning of Artificial Reality The Uncanny Stranger in a Secular Void Notes: Chapter I II: Leopardi and Baudelaire: Kindred Spirits of the Modern Stranger The Monstrosity of the Liminalizing Space of Secular Modernity The Modern Dantes: Wanderers of a Modern and Liminalizing Hell A Rupture in History and the Illusion of Progress Battling the Storm that is Modernity in the Streets of Paris Notes: Chapter II III: Violence, The Great War, and The Modern Stranger The Great War, Irony, & Dark Utopias The Stranger in No Man’s Land Trenches, Violence, and The City Sickness and Irony: Zeno’s Ironic Utopia Divine Violence & Messianic Time in Miller’s Leibowitz Notes: Chapter III IV: Boredom - An Infinite Epilogue to the Modern Stranger The Difficult Task of Defining Boredom The (In)Action Films of Michelangelo Antonioni Digital Boredom A Heroic Lack of Attunement Notes: Chapter IV V: The Sacredness of Digital Liminality Hybrid Religions of Cyberpunk God is (In) Cyberspace Strangers in Cyberspace Cyberspace: Heaven or Hell? Notes: Chapter V VI: Strange Gender and Post-Humanism From Shelley’s ‘Hideous Progeny’ to Haraway’s Cyborg A Spiral Dance in the Abyss Cyborgs, Dogs, and Abortions Acker’s Resacralization of the Symbolic Notes: Chapter VI Conclusion: Spectral Monsters and Modern Strangers Spectres and Monsters Spectres and Phantoms Addressing the Monster in the Spectral Room Adaptation and the Future of the Modern Stranger—A Coda Notes: Conclusion References Index