Silence Of The Lamb Clarkson University

In this examination of the monster as cultural object, Judith Halberstam offers a rereading of the monstrous that revises our view of the Gothic. Moving from the nineteenth century and the works of Shelley, Stevenson, Stoker, and Wilde to contemporary horror film exemplified by such movies as Silence of the Lambs, Texas Chainsaw Massacre, and Candyman, Skin Shows understands the Gothic as a versatile technology, a means of producing monsters that is constantly being rewritten by historically and culturally conditioned fears generated by a shared sense of otherness and difference. Deploying feminist and queer approaches to the monstrous body, Halberstam views the Gothic as a broad-based cultural phenomenon that supports and sustains the economic, social, and sexual hierarchies of the time. She resists familiar psychoanalytic critiques and cautions against any interpretive attempt to reduce the affective power of the monstrous to a single factor. The nineteenth-century monster is shown, for example, as configuring otherness as an amalgam of race, class, gender, and sexuality. Invoking Foucault, Halberstam describes the history of monsters in terms of its shifting relation to the body and its representations. As a result, her readings of familiar texts are radically new. She locates psychoanalysis itself within the gothic tradition and sees sexuality as a beast created in nineteenth century literature. Excessive interpretability, Halberstam argues, whether in film, literature, or in the culture at large, is the actual hallmark of monstrosity.

The NBC series Hannibal has garnered both critical and fan acclaim for its cinematic qualities, its complex characters, and its innovative reworking of Thomas Harris’s mythology so well-known from Jonathan Demme’s Silence of the Lambs (1991) and its variants. The series concluded late in 2015 after three seasons, despite widespread fan support for its continuation. While there is a healthy body of scholarship on Harris’s novels and Demme’s film adaptation, little critical attention has been paid to this newest iteration of the character and narrative. Hannibal builds on the serial killer narratives of popular procedurals, while taking them in a drastically different direction. Like critically acclaimed series such as Breaking Bad and The Sopranos, it makes its viewers complicit in the actions of a deeply problematic individual and, in the case of Hannibal, forces them to confront that complicity through the character of Will Graham. The essays in Becoming explore these questions of authorship and audience response as well as the show’s themes of horror, gore, cannibalism, queerness, and transformation. Contributors also address Hannibal’s distinctive visual, auditory, and narrative style. Concluding with a compelling interview with series writer Nick Antosca, this volume will both entertain and educate scholars and fans of Hannibal and its many iterations.

A wide-ranging study that examines everything from the blockbuster movie franchise Les Boys to the sovereigntist hip hop group Loco Locass, Hockey, PQ explores how Canada’s national sport has been used to signify a specific Québécois identity. Amy J. Ransom analyzes how Québécois writers, filmmakers, and musicians have appropriated symbols like the Montreal Forum, Maurice Richard, or the 1972 Summit Series to construct or critique images of the Québécois male. Close analyses of hockey-themed narratives consider the soap opera Lance et compte (‘He shoots, he scores’), the music of former pro player Bob Bisonnette, folk band Mes Aïeux, rock group Les Dales Hawerchuk, and the fiction of François Barcelo. Through these examinations of the role hockey plays in contemporary francophone popular culture, Ransom shows how Quebec’s popular culture uses hockey to distinguish French-Canadians from the French and to rally them against their English-speaking counterparts. In the end, however, this study illuminates how the sport of hockey unites the two solitudes.

The first extended examination of the influence of monasticism on Wordsworth's writing. Covering the poet's development between 1806 and 1822, it considers how a series of sources describing medieval monastic life in the north of England influenced Wordsworth's thinking about regional attachment, trans-historical community, and national cohesion.

Agency, Culture and Human Personhood" uses feminist theories, process and liberation theologies, psychodynamics and the problem of intimate partner violence to develop a pastoral theology of human agency. The turn to cultural context for understanding what makes human beings who they are and do the things they do, raises significant questions about human agency. To what extent is agency, the human capacity to act, self-determined, and to what extent is it determined by external factors? If we conceive of persons with too little agency we negate the possibility for change but too much agency negates the necessity for resistance movements. Hoeft argues that agency arises ambiguously from and is constituted of culture. She suggests that such a conception of agency enables the church to foster in victims, perpetrators, and congregations more resistance to violence and proposes practices of ministry that can do just that. The book will challenge deeply ingrained notions of personal responsibility and one's capacity to choose change, yet offers concrete proposals for a creating a less violent world.

A review and record of current literature.