1st Edition

Beauty and Monstrosity in Art and Culture

Edited By Chara Kokkiou, Angeliki Malakasioti Copyright 2024
262 Pages 5 Color & 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

262 Pages 5 Color & 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

262 Pages 5 Color & 15 B/W Illustrations
by Routledge

This edited volume takes a new look at an old question: what is the relationship between beauty and monstrosity? How has the notion of beauty transformed through the years and how does it coincide with monstrous ontologies? Contributors offer an interdisciplinary approach to how these two concepts are interlinked and emphasize the ways the beautiful and the monstrous pervade human experience.... Read more

INTRODUCTION

Chara Kokkiou and Angeliki Malakasioti

 

1 PRELUDE

“The Garden: A Topological View”

Angeliki Malakasioti

 

2 THE ANCIENT HUMAN: Retracing the Past

2a. “An Exquisite Appearance, a Beautiful Mind? Thinking of Plato’s Charmides in Plutarch’s Life of Demetrius

Lucia Athanassaki

2b. “A Beauty’s Letter and the Beasts: Ariadne’s Heroidian Epistle (Ov. Her. 10)”

Vaios Vaiopoulos

2c. “Infernal Women: Polysemic Winged Figures in Etruscan Art.”

Bice Peruzzi

 

3 ON OTHERNESS: A New Kind of Body

3a. “Bodies of Hybridity: Animal, Cyborg, and the Supernatural Becoming”

Yiou Wang

3b. “Teratological Machine in the Female Body: the “Hottentot Venus” as Beauty-and-the-Beast From a Decolonial Feminist Perspective”

Andrea Torrano

3c. “Female Body, Disgust, and the Erotic Redefined: The Dialectic Mindshaping”

Chara Kokkiou

 

4 HYBRIDITIES: New Genres and Contexts

4a. “Anthropogarde of Stage, Cult, and the Popular: Co-ritus, Labyrinths, Actions”

Knut Ove Arntzen

4b. “The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Africanfuturist Fiction”

Mourad El Fahli

4c. “Beauties and Beasts: Enchanted Environments as Vehicle for the Creator’s Self-discovery

Alexandra Antonopoulou

 

5 PERFORMING THE HUMAN: Metamorphosis in Art

5a. “WHEN UGLINESS IS TURNED INTO ORGANS OF SEDUCTION”

ORLAN

5b. “ReWired, ReMixed, and ReImagined: An Interview with Stelarc”

Stelarc and Angeliki Malakasioti

 

6 TECHNOLOGY VS CANONIZATION: Alternative Ontologies and Crossing Boundaries

6a. “Creating Life: An Embryo Assembly Line”

Sandra P. Gonzalez-Santos

6b. “Art of the AIs, By the AIs, For the Art’s Sake.”

Hideki Nakazawa and Mika Kusakari

6c. “Robots: Signs of Disruption”

David J. Gunkel

 

7 SPATIAL ONTOLOGIES: Space and Human Transformation

7a. “Architectural Representation as a Body without Organs”

Ozan Avci

7b. “Exploring the Urban Jungle: Making Space for Wildness in Cities”

Siân Moxon

 

8 THE END OF THE HUMAN: Death and Reflections into Morbidity

8a. “The Aesthetics of Hollowed Experience: Benjamin, Ensor, James”

Richard Velkley

8b. “Desiring the Zombie”

Yorgos Drosos

8c. “Medusa, Monstrous Beauty, and Neuroaesthetics”

Michelle Zerba

 

9 CODA

“Truth, Beauty, and Hungry Monsters”

Chris Hables Gray

 

10 INSTEAD OF AN EPILOGUE

10 Un-Ending: Portrait of a Transforming Human

Chara Kokkiou and Angeliki Malakasioti

Biography

Chara Kokkiou is a Visiting Assistant Professor at Tulane University, Department of Philosophy, with interdisciplinary academic interests in ancient philosophy, bioethics, and classics and a primary research focus on compassion.

Angeliki Malakasioti is Assistant Professor in the Department of Audio and Visual Arts, Ionian University, with artistic and research activity in the fields of digital space and culture, audio-visual representations, new technologies, and creative methodologies.