What are monsters in literature for? And what and why should we try to relive history through historical fiction?
“Monsters can stand as symbols of human vulnerability and crisis, and as such they play imaginative foils for thinking about our own responses to menace,” explains Stephen T. Asma, professor of philosophy at Columbia College Chicago and author of the 2009 book
On Monsters: An Unnatural History of Our Worst Fears. “Part of our fascination with serial-killer monsters is that we (and our loved ones) are potentially vulnerable to sadistic violence—never mind that statistical probability renders such an attack almost laughable. Irrational fears are decidedly unfunny. We are vulnerable to both the inner and the outer forces.”
In “Monsters and the Moral Imagination,” an article he wrote for the October 30, 2009 issue of
The Chronicle Review, Asma surveys some of the answers to that first question as propounded by philosophers, literary artists, and scientific minds over the centuries. “For the Greeks and Romans, monsters were prodigies—warnings of impending calamity,” he explains. “The medieval mind saw giants and mythical creatures as God’s punishments for the sin of pride. After Freud, monster stories were considered cathartic journeys into our unconscious…”
But he says the reasons for the current exponential rise of the monster culture are harder to pin down.
Read Stephen Asma’s “Monsters and the Moral Imagination Writing” now!In “On Dealing with History in Fiction,” written by Hilary Mantel for the October 17, 2009 issue of
The Guardian UK, the 2009 Booker Prize winner for fiction vigorously argues that we need better history rather than history “because a good deal of what we think we know about the past is unverified tradition and unexamined prejudice.” She says that “To try to engage with the present without engaging with the past is to live like a dog or cat rather than a human being; it is to bob along on the waters of egotism, solipsism and ignorance.” Mantel, a British novelist, short story writer, and critic, won the 2009 Man Booker Prize for Fiction for
Wolf Hall.
Read Hilary Mantel’s “On Dealing with History in Fiction” now!
