Afterword

Abstract

The contributions to this special issue suggested insightful interpretations of various 19-century monsters in Anglophone fiction from the vantage point of 21-century readers. Taken together, these insights amount to a practice of monstrous reading: in Jeffrey Jerome Cohen's (1996) sense, this is a method of analysing a specific historical point in Anglophone culture through the monsters it created. Yet it also means rereading well-known monsters themselves – a re-reading which creates the antinomy (a paradoxical and hence, in some sense, monstrous construction) of simultaneously affirming their horrifying status and denying their monstrosity, it being a mere prejudice or convention. This paradoxical impasse – that "[o]ne cannot say: 'here are our monsters,' without immediately turning the monsters into pets" (Derrida 1990, 80) – led Derrida to argue that "the future is necessarily monstrous: [...] A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future; it would already be a predictable, calculable, and programmable tomorrow" (Derrida 1995, 386-387). In our current age of monsters, characterized by the dual processes of the monstering of humanity and the humanising of the monstrous, Fred Botting rightly poses the question: "When monsters are no longer monstrous, no longer surprising or unpredictable, what of the future?" (Botting 2003, 361). In light of the readings of the monster's 19-century past, this afterword poses the question of its methodological future. Positioning ourselves within the ongoing debate on reading practices within literary studies, described by Rita Felski as "the method wars" (2014, v), we attempt to distil from monster theory the practice of monstrous reading and highlight some of its implications for literary and cultural studies. Viewed from afar, it is clear that even the current state of theory itself might be treated as monstrous (Guttzeit 2018a, 551). Theory 'after theory' (Eagleton 2004) oscillates between life and death, just like our era's most popular transgressor, the zombie. What is more, both the spectral and the posthuman turns have made pressing the question of monstering and humanising reading(s). The cyborg (Haraway 1991) and the ghost (Derrida 2006) are emblematic of these developments, and both – like other monsters – have been used to suggest characteristics of reading practices. In an analysis of Shelley Jackson's Patchwork Girl (1995) – her seminal hypertext appropriation of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein – N. Katherine Hayles argues that "electronic hypertexts initiate and demand cyborg reading practices" which, while specific for the medium, "may also be evoked through the content of print texts" (Hayles 2000, n.p.). Hayles' insistence on the role of the reader being "spliced into an integrated circuit with one or more intelligent machines" needs to be extended with regard to current critical and popular reading practices in the context of what has been called "the Age of Amazon" (McGurl 2016). Invoking yet another monster, Sibylle Baumbach draws on the figure of medusa for her concept of "medusamorphosis" as definitive of readerly fascination (2015, 2). Taking up Derridean theory, Andrew Sofer, in the field of theatre studies,