Starboard Vineyard Tours 20: Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film, Andriano

For this episode, we read Joseph D. Andriano's Immortal Monster: The Mythological Evolution of the Fantastic Beast in Modern Fiction and Film (1999). Andriano reads his primary texts - an eclectic collection, from Moby Dick to Jaws, King Kong to Grendel (1971) - as the great myth of the immortal monster, transformed over the decades and by different creators' hands. For him this myth speaks to our culture's deeply held beliefs about the boundaries of the human and the animal. We find ourselves perplexed and not especially convinced by this methodology. Still, these many monsters give us plenty to talk about, especially our old friend the white whale.Topics: monsters, mythology, animalsNext episode we will be reading Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (2016), by André M. Carrington.