“Ancient Monsters in Modern Speculative Fiction,” co-authored by Associate Professor of Classics Jesse Weiner, was recently published as a chapter in The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth, edited by Debbie Felton.
Written with Benjamin Eldon Stevens of Howard University, and Brett M. Rogers of the University of Puget Sound, the chapter examines how monsters from ancient Greek and Roman materials may be found in every genre and medium of modern speculative fiction, including science fiction, horror, and fantasy, as well as in formats including print, film and television, and games.
The authors argue that “ancient monsters continue to do what they did in classical sources: they ‘demonstrate’ or reveal the imaginary but consequential boundaries that separate categories of being, especially ‘human’ and ‘natural’ from purported ‘others,’ and indicate the limits of human knowledge.” Using the Cyclops, Medusa, and the Minotaur as examples, they suggest the complexity of reception histories and of interrelated definitions of monster/monstrosity and human/humanity, exploring an understanding of modern speculative fiction in terms of Promethean science fiction, Sphinxian horror, and Protean fantasy. The authors also examine how two modern monsters — Frankenstein’s Creature and the Kraken — in their classical entanglements suggest a potential teratopolitics.
Earlier this month, Weiner presented a talk at the annual meeting of the Pacific Ancient and Modern Language Association in Palm Springs, Calif., as a member of a panel on “Gendered Bodies and (Inter)Medial Translation.”
“Cryptic corpora: Translating the cinaedus across Time, Language, and Culture” explored what Weiner said is “the difficult, perhaps impossible task, of translating identities, sexual or otherwise, that no longer exist and may never have existed in actuality.” He examined the ways translators have attempted (or not) to import the figure into contemporary discourses, drawing in part on the concept of “language ideologies,” and suggesting that “figures like cinaedus have served as mirrors that reflect the preoccupations and hangups of modernity.”
Weiner was also awarded a course development grant from the Intercollegiate Center for Classical Studies in Rome (The Centro) that will allow him to travel to Rome to develop a course on materiality, monuments, and memory there. Building on his dissertation work on monumentality in Latin epic poetry, he said the course “will incorporate archaeological materials and look forward from antiquity, through the Middle Ages and Renaissance, to the Mussolini regime.”
