Monsters. Real or imagined, literal or metaphorical, they have exerted a dread fascination on the human mind for many centuries. They attract and repel us, intrigue and terrify us, and in the process reveal something deeply important about the darker recesses of our collective psyche. Stephen Asma's On Monsters is a wide-ranging cultural and conceptual history of monsters - how they have evolved over time, what functions they have served for us, and what shapes they are likely to take in the future. Asma begins with a letter from Alexander the Great in 326 B.C. detailing an encounter in India with an "enormous beast - larger than an elephantthree ominous horns on its forehead." From there the monsters come fast and furious - Behemoth and Leviathan, Gog and Magog, the leopard-bear-lion beast of Revelation, Satan and his demons, Grendel and Frankenstein, circus freaks and headless children, right up to the serial killers and terrorists of today and the post-human cyborgs of tomorrow. Monsters embody our deepest anxieties and vulnerabilities, Asma argues, but they also symbolize the mysterious and incoherent territory just beyond the safe enclosures of rational thought. Exploring philosophical treatises, theological tracts, newspapers, pamphlets, films, scientific notebooks, and novels, Asma unpacks traditional monster stories for the clues they offer about the inner logic of an era's fears and fascinations. In doing so, he illuminates the many ways monsters have become repositories for those human qualities that must be repudiated, externalized, and defeated. Asma suggests that how we handle monsters reflects how we handle uncertainty, ambiguity, insecurity. And in a world that is daily becoming less secure and more ambiguous, he shows how we might learn to better live with monsters - and thereby avoid becoming one. About the Author: Stephen T. Asma is Professor of Philosophy at Columbia College Chicago, where he holds the title of Distinguished Scholar. In 2003, he was Visiting Professor at the Buddhist Institute in Phnom Penh, Kingdom of Cambodia. There he taught “Buddhist Philosophy” as part of their Graduate Program in Buddhist Studies. His book, entitled The Gods Drink Whiskey: Stumbling Toward Enlightenment in the Land of the Tattered Buddha (HarperOne, 2005) explores the Theravada Buddhism of the region. He has also traveled and studied in Thailand, Laos, Vietnam, Hong Kong, and Mainland China - eventually living in Shanghai China in 2005. Asma is the author of several books: Stuffed Animals and Pickled Heads: The Culture and Evolution of Natural History Museums (Oxford University Press, 2001), Following Form and Function (Northwestern Univ. Press, 1996), and Buddha for Beginners (Hampton Roads, 2008). He has written many articles on a broad range of topics that bridge the humanities and sciences, including “Against Transcendentalism” in the book Monty Python and Philosophy (Opencourt Press, 2006) and “Dinosaurs on the Ark: Natural History and the New Creation Museum” in The Chronicle of Higher Education (May, 2007). He has also written for the Chicago Tribune, In These Times magazine, the Skeptical Inquirer, the Chronicle Review, Skeptic magazine, and Chicago Public Radio’s news-magazine show Eight-Forty-Eight. His wide-ranging natural history of monsters is published by Oxford University Press in the Fall of 2009. In this book, titled On Monsters, Asma tours Western culture’s worst nightmares. And his book Why I Am a Buddhist will be published by Hampton Roads Publishing in 2010. His website is: www.stephenasma.com |