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Introduction: Angels and Demons
| Content Provider | Semantic Scholar |
|---|---|
| Author | King, Andrew |
| Copyright Year | 2011 |
| Abstract | This special issue of Critical Survey stems from a conference at Canterbury Christ Church University in June 2010 that was intended to explore continuities and ruptures in the representation and deployment of angels and demons and related binaries, be they in nineteenth-century print media or seventeenth-century Protestant texts, twenty-first century bestsellers or company PR strategies. From the first it was decided that discussion should not be limited to actual angels and demons, but the more general binaries of good and evil, lucid self and obscure Other. Considerations of the generic processes of demonisation and its opposite were also welcome, as were attempts to think outside such binaries (insofar as such is possible). Was it the case that the undoing of binaries, vital to Cixous’ feminist enterprise and deconstruction generally, was salient today for the various politics of gender, sexuality, ‘race’, class, disability, and place, or had such deconstruction been so co-opted by conservative commercial culture (as was always possible according to Christopher Norris) that alternative strategies were necessary? All these ways of thinking about angels and demons are represented in the essays that follow. Why this topic now? Even if barely visible to those of us in the academy with pretentions to critical analysis and sceptical distance, the angel and demon binary still inhabits huge swathes of cultural space in the technophilic twenty-first century. The demonisation of Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden over the last two decades is well documented, but that mythologising tactic is not confined to war or even to its extension, politics. Representations of angels and demons – especially demons – are ubiquitous. As I write this Introduction in the late spring of 2011, the New York pop star, Lady Gaga, playing Mary Magdalene in her pop video of Judas, is singing that ‘Jesus is [her] virtue, / Judas is the demon [she] cling[s] to’. Touched by an Angel, a popular nine-season CBS fiction series |
| Starting Page | 1 |
| Ending Page | 8 |
| Page Count | 8 |
| File Format | PDF HTM / HTML |
| DOI | 10.3167/cs.2011.230201 |
| Volume Number | 23 |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://www.berghahnjournals.com/downloadpdf/journals/critical-survey/23/2/cs230201.pdf |
| Alternate Webpage(s) | https://doi.org/10.3167/cs.2011.230201 |
| Language | English |
| Access Restriction | Open |
| Content Type | Text |
| Resource Type | Article |
