Graduate Scholar Talk - November 1, 2018

Monstrosity in Fantastic Literature

Speaker: Irene Bulla, Department of Italian

In her dissertation, titled “’Impossible Tales’: Language and Monstrosity in the Literary Fantastic,” Irene Bulla reads nineteenth and twentieth-century fantastic literature through its monstrous figures. She shows how Western fantastic literature engages with monstrosity as a linguistic problem and uses it to explore the limits of discourse. The monster is a bizarre, uninterpretable sign, whose disruptive presence allows for a critique of overly confident, rational constructions of ‘reality.’