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This book explores the relevance of David Bowie’s life and music for contemporary legal and cultural theory. Focusing on the artist and artworks of David Bowie, this book brings to life, in essay form, particular theoretical ideas, creative methodologies and ethical debates that have contemporary relevance within the fields of law, social theory, ethics and art. What unites the essays presented here is that they all point to a beyond law: to the fact that law is not enough, or to be more precise, too much, too much to bear. For those who, like Bowie, see art, creativity and love as what ought to be the central organising principles of life, law will not do. In the face of its certainties, its rigidities, and its conceits, these essays, through Bowie, call forth the monster who laughs at the law, celebrate inauthenticity as a deeper truth, explore the ethical limits of art, cut up the laws of writing and embrace that which is most antithetical to law, love. This original engagement with the limits of law will appeal to those working in legal theory, ethics and law and popular culture, as well as in art and cultural studies.

This book tells the story of visionary urban experiments, shedding light on the theories that preceded their development and on the monsters that followed and might be the end of our cities. The narrative is threefold and delves first into the eco-city, second the smart city and third the autonomous city intended as a place where existing smart technologies are evolving into artificial intelligences that are taking the management of the city out of the hands of humans. The book empirically explores Masdar City in Abu Dhabi and Hong Kong to provide a critical analysis of eco and smart city experiments and their sustainability, and it draws on numerous real-life examples to illustrate the rise of urban artificial intelligences across different geographical spaces and scales. Theoretically, the book traverses philosophy, urban studies and planning theory to explain the passage from eco and smart cities to the autonomous city, and to reflect on the meaning and purpose of cities in a time when human and non-biological intelligences are irreversibly colliding in the built environment. Iconoclastic and prophetic, Frankenstein Urbanism is both an examination of the evolution of urban experimentation through the lens of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, and a warning about an urbanism whose product resembles Frankenstein’s monster: a fragmented entity which escapes human control and human understanding. Academics, students and practitioners will find in this book the knowledge that is necessary to comprehend and engage with the many urban experiments that are now alive, ready to leave the laboratory and enter our cities.

The ‘double’ is a recurring theme in Chinese young adult novels, where two protagonists represent each other’s alter ego. This chapter focuses on Chinese female writer Anni Baobei’s novella, Qiyue and Ansheng (2000), its cinematic adaptation Soul Mate (2016), and other similar narratives, to examine the double and its implications for sexuality for young female characters. These narratives both originate and depart from the paradigmatic framework of an angel/monster dichotomy (Gilbert and Gubar 2000), which usually involves the comparison of a docile and obedient girl with another who is wilder and unrestrained. In the texts under discussion here, the girls build a friendship, a sisterhood and a homosexual affinity. The implicit lesbianism in the narratives of both novella and film challenges Chinese society’s conservative attitudes around sexuality and gender. These stories employ the theme of the ‘double’ to depict the distorted and fluid identity of girls coming of age in post-socialist China, facing the chances and challenges brought by the neoliberal capitalist system and authoritarian political structure. On one hand, these post-80s girls are likely to enjoy a degree of economic power, sexual autonomy and intellectual capacity, but, on the other hand, the dominant patriarchal system represses newly awakening feminist impulses and reaffirms the traditional gender and sexual order through the institutional controls of school and family.

This chapter begins with the question: Is remix a monster, and digital humanities the means through which it is destined to bring down the old-fashioned, exclusionary, and hierarchical modes of humanities past? The answer is that the transgressive potential of remix and the digital humanities lies less in the form of these disciplines, and more in their practice: how they are allowed to intersect, evolve, and escape their traditional (anti)humanist foundations. The transgression and monstrosity of remix in digital humanities are perhaps not the transgression and monstrosity that some might expect. As a “monster,” digital humanities occupies a particularly poignant moment, straining between a nostalgia for the Classical ideals of the humanities, and the knowledge that many of these ideals have led to as much harm as good for humanity, creating Frankenstein's monsters that cannot peacefully exist in the same universe as their creators.

This chapter explores how emotion was used to construct and deconstruct a narrative around the living body of a criminal, George Vass, a murderer who was to be the last man hanged in public in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1863. During his trial and sentence, contemporary newspaper accounts focused on Vass’s lack of emotional response, many describing Vass as without feeling, a bad character: a ‘monster’, in effect. However, by the time of his execution, the press in Newcastle began to ‘humanize’ or ‘re-humanize’ him as an emotional being, describing Vass as a ‘wretched young man’, nervous, caring, and making spiritual preparations for death.\ud \ud In considering, through a legal historical lens, the perception and attribution of emotion as mediated or constructed in contemporary newspaper accounts, this chapter contributes to the growing field of studies into law and emotion. It suggests that emotions were deliberately employed in the newspaper rhetoric, which was performative, constructing a narrative and shaping a criminal subject, presented to the public as ‘Vass’. This chapter concludes that exploring the connection between a nineteenth-century criminal trial and its expected or perceived emotional effect upon the individual reveals the significant role of the reporting of emotion in reinforcing the norms of the criminal justice system.

In his latest and perhaps most adventuresome book, Robert Kastenbaum offers a fresh view of the quest for perpetual youth. The focus is on the "pretty monster" that Oscar Wilde created a century ago in "The Picture of Dorian Gray". We see Dorian first within the frame of his own times, responding to the pressures of modernization by attempting to escape the natural progression of time. Next we enter Dorian, the Opera, a re-imagining of his quest in the postmodern world of interactive computers. Finally, we observe Dorian's obsession and plight in our own graying society. This insightful analysis of the dangers inherent in becoming "terminally young" also provides a set of propositions worth consideration by gerontologists, educators, philosophers, media mavens, and policy-makers.

We have never stopped resurrecting and reanimating the monsters of Romanticism – even contemporary Chinese poetry’s interrelationship with world literature can be divided into terms set by Frankenstein’s monster and Dracula. Looking at a recent debate between poets Xi Chuan and Wang Ao, I examine the assumptions behind their disagreement and conclude that the latter represents the vampiric while the former represents the Frankensteinian. In other words, where Wang Ao wants poetry that sucks the blood of Romantic ideology, Xi Chuan is interested in creating what I call a Frankensteinian hybrid, to both absorb what he sees as the best of that ideology even as he combats it at its worst. Arguing for the ethics of hybridity, this chapter attempts to move the question of the definition of Chinese literary modernity toward a consideration of how Chinese literature should respond to modernity.

This chapter studies jealousy in Shakespeare’s play Othello, showing that knowledge of the true author’s life experiences with pathological jealousy will deepen our understanding and appreciation of this unsettling play. This chapter builds on the previous Oxfordian 1 study of Othello by A. Bronson Feldman, the first psychoanalyst to take up Freud’s call that we re-examine Shakespeare’s works with a revised understanding of who wrote them. Freud (1990), who wrote to his friend Eduard Silberstein about having seen a performance of Othello in Vienna in 1873 when Freud was seventeen, cited Othello in his 1922 explanation that “projected jealousy” defends against guilt about one’s actual or fantasized infidelity by attributing unfaithfulness to one’s partner. In Hamlet (1603), Gertrude anticipates Freud’s formulation when she says: “So full of artless jealousy is guilt” (IV, v, 21).

In this chapter, the author considers absurdity and exaggerated human experiences as forms of inquiry, analysis, and representation of gendered whiteness in higher education from the perspective of a transnational Desi woman in higher education in the US The lack of awareness of one’s privilege or complicity with multiple structures of oppression is an enactment of such privilege. The lack of desire to recalibrate relational and discursive ethics when one is told of their enactment of privilege is oppressive and violent. The author perspective on absurdity and exaggeration is primarily influenced by Sukumar Ray, a children’s literature author in British-colonized India. While monster movies of the 1950s and 1960s, such as The Attack of the 50 Foot Woman, offered critiques of patriarchy, gendered exploitation, and fear of women’s sexuality, the fantastic beasts in Ray’s work provided a critique of colonial oppression and the complicity of the natives.

This project studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today, correlating portrayals in ancient Greek myth, nineteenth- century Symbolist painting, and new, controversial, visions of women in contemporary art. The myth of the Medusa has long been the ultimate symbol of woman as monster. With her roots in classical mythology, Medusa has appeared time and again throughout history and culture and this book studies the patterns in which the Medusa myth shapes, constructs, and transforms new meanings of women today. Hedgecock presents an interdisciplinary and broad historical “cultural reflections” of the modern Medusa, including the work of Maria Callas, Nan Goldin, the Symbolist painters and twentieth-century poets. This timely and necessary work will be key reading for students and researchers specializing in mythology or gender studies across a variety of fields, touching on interdisciplinary research in feminist theory, art history and theory, cultural studies, and psychology.

The conversion of American self-radicalizing terrorists appears a thought- provoking test case for analyzing how ‘emotional’ or at least non-rational factors come into play in the movement from radical thought to radical action. This chapter employs Clarke McCauley and Sophia Moskalenko’s pathways to radicalization, along with the concept of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ to study how American self-radicalizing terrorists, such as Colleen LaRose (‘America’s First Female Self-Radicalizing Terrorist’), the Tsarnaev Brothers (‘the Boston Marathon Bombers’), and Omar Mateen (‘the Orlando Night Club Killer’) self- radicalized. Briefly summarized, McCauley and Moskalenko in Friction: How Radicalization Happens to Them and Us, sketched twelve diverse pathways to radicalization into terrorist activity, echoing contemporary academic findings that there is no single monolithic pathway towards radicalization. Of particular significance to this chapter are a number of pathways, which could lead to violent radical action, characterized as ‘emotional’ or at least, ‘non-rational’, because they are responses neither to ideology nor to political exigencies. Instead, these pathways are responses to combinations of sometimes subtle social factors such as group dynamics, boundary hardening, and even love. Additionally, the chapter also analyzes the romantic appeal of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ whose rhetorical power lies in its ability to tap into the fantasies of the young, which are also gendered in a conservative manner: for young men, for example, the glory of being a warrior and the thrill of adventures on the battlefield, and the promise of unyielding brotherhood are compelling or young women, on the other hand, the romance of being married to a mujahid (and bearing his children), of faithful sisterhood and camaraderie in an ideal state, a Muslim Utopia, appear to be irresistible. Another aspect of jihadi cool’s/chic’s power lies in its mastery of Hollywood-style shots and editing, using cutting edge ‘GoPro cameras’ and drones for dramatic aerial shots, alternating with shots from other cameras capturing different angles, resulting in slick, high resolution productions that could be an hour-long or edited down, much like ‘teasers’ or commercials for full length cinematic films. Thus jihadi cool/chic’s allure lies less in an appeal to reason than to emotions and non-rational factors. Ultimately, the chapter also shows that the rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool’ or ‘jihadi chic’ – a principally emotional or at least non-rational form of persuasion – is a reactive miming of Monstrous discourse. ‘Monster talk’, etymologically traced, is a form of public preachment that warns against (monere) or points to (monstrare) that which stands beyond the gates of the city state, which the ‘Good Citizen’, the monster’s counterpart, guards. The rhetoric of ‘jihadi cool/chic’ is strategically targeted towards disenfranchised young men and women, who seek to create a name for themselves, and who are drawn to the romantic construction of the ‘badass’ and of being countercultural. The chapter concludes that in the case of Colleen LaRose, it was probably mechanism four: love, or the search for it, and in a gender-bending way, mechanism five: risk and status, which were the crucial factors. Comparatively, in the case of Tamerlan Tsarnaev, it was probably mechanism one: personal grievance, conflated with mechanism two: group grievance, as well as mechanism five: risk and status, which were the prime moving elements. Similarly, in the case of Jahar Tsarnaev, it was probably mechanism five: risk and status, along with mechanism six: unfreezing, which were of crucial import. In Mateen’s case, probably factors one (1), personal grievance, and six (6), risk and status, were crucial to his movement from radical thought into radical action. In all four cases, the chapter also tracks the powerful emotional and imaginative appeal of ‘jihadi cool/chic’.

People are dying in the Peruvian Amazon, poisoned by the dangerous effluents of unregulated gold mining, and killed by profiteers who value profits over people and their places. The land is dying, too, pockmarked by pools of noxious chemicals. Places are manufactured at the intersection of humans, habitats, and the other-than-human beings who share them, and this place is undergoing a transformation, a Frankenstein’s monster created from the intersection of global markets and industrial interest. Knowing place from multiple historical/cultural/ethnic/ethical points of view, as well as from scientific ones, is crucially important for a full understanding—and for the educational efficacy—of places. A place is something more than the geographical space, and it is necessarily greater than mere cultural descriptors and narratives. Places are spaces with stories upon stories written into them like living palimpsests.

In drawing upon the tradition in trauma theory of studying children's engagement with fairy tales in the place of trauma, the author argues that in the context of Djuna Barnes's novel, however, one can hardly assume that the love story of Beast Thingumbob is meant to provide any escape for Julie. Like most of Ryder, elements of the story of Beast Thingumbob are so preposterous that it could read as a tragic, yet dry and satiric, escape from the sexual abuses inherent in the construction of this family and its surrounding society. In Ryder, Barnes creates a small society that circulates around the anarchist theory of Wendell Ryder, based on those of Wald Barnes. In Ryder, however, storytelling and fantasy do not provide an escape from sexual trauma and abuse, but work to convince children to accept the societal parameters and rules that allow for this abuse to continue, even in the realms of fantasy.

This chapter explores the notion of the Other and the constitution of the Gothic monster in Crichton's text, examines not only the fictional interplay among the cultures of the novel but also the real-life contributions of the historical Arab Ibn Fadlan (877–960) and the English Beowulf poet on the construction of the American Gothic tradition. In order to achieve his purpose, Crichton employs the Gothic monster in his novel. In Michael Crichton: A Critical Companion, Elizabeth Trembley calls Eaters of the Dead the "most gothic of Crichton's novels", stating that "the mist monsters are supernatural creatures of astonishing evil". Textually, the mist monsters of Eaters of the Dead are indeed murderers undeserving of sympathy. However, a meager group of scholars have taken notice of Eaters of the Dead, and, with the exception of some of the work of Elizabeth Trembley, most of their scholarship has not been favorable of the novel.

[Extract] Human beings behave badly, regularly. It begins young. The parent says 'no': the toddler shouts and stamps in a temper tantrum. The rage is palpable. Aggression swells up in the little monster. In many human societies that kind of violent rage is barely contained even among adults. Volatile, unpredictable, and dan¬gerous savagery is commonplace. Sadism, carnage, and cruelty abound in them. They are populated by touchy unstable personalities prone to the same kind of explosive aggression that we see in tyrants from Stalin to Saddam Hussein. The endemic violence of contemporary Middle Eastern societies reminds us just how difficult it is to create civil societies. Pursuing conflicts and disputes by vehe¬ment, vicious, callous, and terrible means has been the rule, not the exception, in human history.