A Genetic Fallacy: Monstrous Allegories of Mixed-Race in Gothic and Contemporary LiteraturePosted in Dissertations, Literary/Artistic Criticism, Media Archive on 2016-06-14 20:25Z by Steven |
A Genetic Fallacy: Monstrous Allegories of Mixed-Race in Gothic and Contemporary Literature
University of Lethbridge, Alberta, Canada
2016
119 pages
Rylan Spenrath
A Thesis Submitted to the School of Graduate Studies of the University of Lethbridge in Partial Fulfilment of the Requirements for the Degree Master of Arts
My thesis examines the similar intersections of hybridity that are embodied in both representations of monstrosity and the politics surrounding people of mixed-race. Drawing from Robert J.C. Young’s text Colonial Desire, I argue that monstrosity and mixed-race present diachronically parallel embodiments of hybridity. Jeffrey Jerome Cohen views monsters as “disturbing hybrids whose externally incoherent bodies resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration” (loc 226); however, monsters and multiracial people do not inherently disturb category. Gothic representation of monstrosity in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde confirms that hybridity can be exploited in order to strengthen colonial categories of Self and Other. Postmodern monstrosity in Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, and Octavia Butler’s Imago, complicate ostensibly rigid categories of identity only for the Gothic binary to resurface beneath the masks of superheroes and supervillains.
Table of Contents
- Abstract
- Acknowledgements
- List of Figures
- Introduction: The Intersection of Hybridity, Multiculturalism, and Monstrosity
- Chapter One: Hybridity Unsettled: Gothic Monstrosity and the Uncanny Valley
- Chapter Two: Distinctly Ambivalent: Category Crisis and the Postmodern Monster
- Chapter Three: Monster Masks: Monstrosity in the Superhuman Genre
- Conclusion
- References
Read the entire thesis here.