Question: The association of women with monsters is an old one, as Huet reminds us. And as Cohen notes, “the difficult project of constructing and

The association of women with monsters is an old one, as Huet reminds us. And as Cohen notes, “the difficult project of constructing and maintaining gender identities elicits an array of anxious responses throughout culture, producing another impetus to teratogenesis [monster-making].” Why is this the case? Working with Dark Water and the story that inspired it, but not neglecting the other materials from the week on Monstrous Mothers, I’d like you to think about why mothers feature so prominently in monster tales.

Assigned Readings: 5 in total, one is movie, four are readings.

Nakata Hideo, dir., Dark Water (Honokurai mizu no soko kara; Tōhō, 2002) https://archive.org/details/DarkWater_201702

Marie-Hélėne Huet, Monstrous Imagination, 1-10.

Barbara Creed, “Horror and the Monstrous-Feminine,” in The Monster Theory Reader, ed. Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock, 211-25.

Suzuki Kōji, “Floating Water,” in Dark Water, trans. Glynne Walley, 13-51.

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen, ed., Monster Theory: Reading Culture, vii-xiii, 3-25.

Rules:

Please make full use of the assigned readings. Don’t limit yourself simply to the readings mentioned in your particular topic: make use of all relevant readings from the course thus far. You may, if you wish, draw in sources that are not in the assigned readings. They must come from properly peer-reviewed academic sources —Wikipedia or its equivalents and yōkai fan sites are not appropriate sources; please give a full citation for any outside sources you use. Your essay should be about 2000-2500 words long (double spaced, in a normal font, with 1” margins)

For works on the syllabus( WHICH ARE ASSIGNED SOURCES), brief, in-text citations are sufficient—e.g., (Freud, Uncanny, p. 63). For works that aren’t on the syllabus, I’d like a full citation; in that case, a footnote or endnote might Be more convenient. Guidelines on citation style follow.

So, be sure to use quotations marks—and cite the source—whenever you use language taken directly from a book or an article. And when you paraphrase or summarize, you must indicate, with a note1 or an in-text citation (Foster, Book of Yōkai, p. 37), the source of the idea or the argument you are summarizing.

Citation form

The following examples—taken, with slight modification, from Prof. Susan Klein’s excellent and concise guide to citation form (at faculty.humanities.uci.edu/sbklein/ gender/paper-index-12.htm )—cover the form appropriate for the writing you’ll do for this course, especially when citing texts assigned in the syllabus or suggested in the paper topics.

You need to cite your sources, not only for direct quotations, but also for ideas. In-text citations are sufficient; there’s no need to attach a bibliography. If we have read only one work by an author, the name or title is sufficient. Here are some examples of appropriate ways of citing works we have read in class:

1. Direct quotation: As Amino observes, “kugai persons included a wider group than simply priests collecting donations.” (p. 5).

2. Paraphrase of an idea: According to Goble, scholars do not agree about when Japan’s medieval period begins. (p. 32).

3. Simple paraphrase: In “The Lady Who Admired Vermin,” the princess is described as having eyebrows resembling caterpillars. (p. 120).

When citing or quoting an author who has more than one article used in the course, make sure you distinguish which article you mean by citing the title of the work:

Vivian Sobchack argues that Hollywood has a “particular idea of history” (“Surge and Splendor,” p. 24). Note: there’s no need here to repeat the author’s name because it’s at the beginning of the sentence.

Eijanaika proposes that we must rethink commonplace notions of historical agency (Keirstead and Lynch, “Eijanaika,” p. 73).

When two authors share the same surname, make sure you let us know which one you’re citing:

According to Helen McCullough, XYZ is true (Intro to Genji and Heike, p. 12).

According to William McCullough, XYZ is true ("Marriage Institutions," p. 15).