Abstract for Conference on Monstrosity
The Literacy(ies) of Monstrosity: Reading the Monster across Multimodal, Multimedia Narratives Any audience engaging with monster media (any mode of narration that includes a monstrous presence, force, threat, or entity) has a desire to witness the monster as the embodiment of the Other, the thing both like us and grotesquely unlike us; this witnessing necessitates close-reading of the texts to identify markers, signs, or evidence of something scary/foreboding/deadly. When audience members do this repeatedly, they develop patterns of searching for…