Beauty and Monstrosity in Art and Culture

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. The two notions are explored through the axis of human transformation, focusing on body, identity, and gender, while questioning both how humans transform their body and space as well as how humans themselves are gradually transformed in different contexts. The pandemic, gender crisis, moral crisis, sociocultural instability, and environmental issues have redefined beauty and the relationship we have with it. Exploring these concepts through the lens of human transformation can yield valuable insights into what it means to be human in a world of constant change. The book will be of interest to scholars working in art history, archaeology, philosophy, architecture, and cultural studies.

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.

INTRODUCTION 1 PRELUDE "The Garden: A Topological View" 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" 2b. "A Beauty's Letter and the Beasts: Ariadne's Heroidian Epistle (Ov. Her. 10)" 2c. "Infernal Women: Polysemic Winged Figures in Etruscan Art." 3 ON OTHERNESS: A New Kind of Body 3a. "Bodies of Hybridity: Animal, Cyborg, and the Supernatural Becoming" 3b. "Teratological Machine in the Female Body: the "Hottentot Venus" as Beauty-and-the-Beast From a Decolonial Feminist Perspective" 3c. "Female Body, Disgust, and the Erotic Redefined: The Dialectic Mindshaping" 4 HYBRIDITIES: New Genres and Contexts 4a. "Anthropogarde of Stage, Cult, and the Popular: Co-ritus, Labyrinths, Actions" 4b. "The Politics and Poetics of Contemporary Africanfuturist fiction" 4c. "Beauties and Beasts; A Personal Lens to the Backstage of Story-creation" 5 PERFORMING THE HUMAN: Metamorphosis in Art 5a. "WHEN UGLINESS IS TURNED INTO ORGANS OF SEDUCTION" 5b. "ReWired, ReMixed, and ReImagined: An Interview with Stelarc" 6 TECHNOLOGY VS CANONIZATION: Alternative Ontologies and Crossing Boundaries 6a. "Creating Life: An Embryo Assembly Line" 6b. "Art of the AIs, By the AIs, For the Art's Sake." 6c. "Robots-Signs of Disruption" 7 SPATIAL ONTOLOGIES: Space and Human Transformation 7a. "Architectural Representation as a Body without Organs" 7b. "Exploring the Urban Jungle: Making Space for Wildness in Cities" 8 THE END OF THE HUMAN: Death and Reflections into Morbidity 8a. "The Aesthetics of Hollowed Experience: Benjamin, Ensor, James" 8b. "Desiring the Zombie" 8c. "Medusa, Monstrous Beauty, and Neuroaesthetics" 9 CODA "Truth, Beauty, and Hungry Monsters" 10 UN-ENDING "Portrait of a Transforming Human"