Monsters: Work in Progress
At a time when the material conditions of human existence on the planet are apparently in question, and as the human becomes increasingly hybridised with the technological, this work-in-progress seminar will explore how the figure of the monster has been used to think the nature and limits of human life.
The seminar will draw on examples from literary fiction, cinema, and environmental humanities to chart this monstrous thinking.
James Donald is Emeritus Professor of Film at UNSW Australia and Visiting Professor at the University of Liverpool (UK). He is author of Some of These Days: Black Stars, Jazz Aesthetics, and Modernist Culture (2015), Imagining the Modern City (1999), and Sentimental Education (1992), and editor of thirteen volumes, including Fantasy and the Cinema (1989), Close Up: Cinema and Modernism (2000) and The SAGE Handbook of Film Studies (2008). He was editor of Screen Education in the late 1970s and founding editor of New Formations. He is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
