Sympathising with the monster by subverting the human-monster dichotomy in fantastic beasts and where to find them

• Main Author: Jahafar, Mohammed
• Other Authors: Jane Wong
• Format: Final Year Project
• Language: English
• Published: 2017
• Subjects: DRNTU::Humanities
• Online Access: http://hdl.handle.net/10356/70403
• Institution: Nanyang Technological University

With the idea of being human disjointed, it resultantly becomes complicated to delineate what it means to be a monster in opposition to this problematic notion of humankind. Michel Foucault’s exposure of the cracks in humanism, coupled with Freud, and Kristeva’s concepts provide a catechistic framework for me to investigate how the dichotomy between the human and the monster is both constructed and dismantled in the original screenplay and movie of J.K. Rowling’s Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (Fantastic Beasts). By appropriating two conventional monster narrative tropes, the Obscurial becomes an instrument to decipher our apprehensions, pathologies and fixations. However, beyond merely collapsing binaries, the Obscurial also demands that to better understand ourselves, we need to sympathise with the monster. But in doing so, it only highlights the inadequacy of such an endeavour.