ESSAY 5: FUN WITH MONSTERS
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Emailed Draft for Peer Review:
(8:00 a.m.) Monday, April 22
Deadline for Email Feedback:
(9:30 a.m.) Tuesday, April 23
Open Conferences w/Dr. HW:
(10:00 a.m.-3:00 p.m.) Wednesday, April 24
Deadline for Required WAC Visit: (8:00 p.m.) Wednesday, April 24
Due:
(5:00 p.m.) Friday, April 26 @ WAC
Late Work:
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In “Monster Culture (Seven Theses),” Cohen argues that the “monster’s body is a cultural body...The
monster’s body quite literally incorporates fear, desire, anxiety, and fantasy...giving them life and an uncanny
independence” (4). These monstrous bodies “resist attempts to include them in any systematic structuration.
And so the monster is dangerous, a form suspended between forms that threatens to smash distinctions” (6).
Drawing on 4-6 scholarly sources, compose a well-developed, 6-10 page essay in response to one of the
prompts below. The essay must be formatted in MLA and supported with sufficient textual evidence.
1. Literary Analysis: Using The Creature from Lake Michigan, Cabin in the Woods, The Walking Dead, or
another text of your choosing, explore the representation of the monster or monstrous body. Using Cohen and
additional sources, argue for a “reading” of the monster. What anxiety, fear, or desire might this monster be
projecting for contemporary society?
2. Historical Analysis: Choose a monster and trace its lineage and meaning in literature, film/TV, and/or
history. Then offer a reading of its current manifestation(s). What fears, desires, or anxieties does this
monster represent in our current cultural psyche?
3. Cultural Criticism: Explore society’s current fascination with the Uncanny, the monstrous, and the
immortal. Compose an argument that explains why film, television, and literature are currently saturated with
zombies, shifters, vampires and other monsters. What is it about postmodern society that draws us to the
monster? What collective anxieties, fears, and/or desires does this movement reveal?
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Possible Scholarly Texts:
Baudrillard, “The System of Objects”
Carroll, “The Nature of Horror”
Cohen, “Monster Culture: Seven Theses”
del Toro, “Why Vampires Never Die”
Foucault, “Panopticism”
Freud, “The Uncanny” (full text is online)
Klosterman, “My Zombie, Myself.”
Books Available in the Writing Assistance
Center for In-House Study:
Cohen, Monster Theory
Freud, The Uncanny
Hedges, Empire of Illusion (cultural criticism of
postmodern society)
Latham, Consuming Youth
Otten, A Lycanthropy Reader: Werewolves in
Western Culture
Overstreet, Not Your Mother’s Vampire
Rickels, The Vampire Lectures