2022 Fiscal Year Research-status Report
Theories and representations of "hybridity" in Western history of thought
| Project/Area Number |
20K00103
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| Research Institution | Tokyo Metropolitan University |
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Principal Investigator |
グロワザール ジョスラン 東京都立大学, 人文科学研究科, 准教授 (30781885)
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| Project Period (FY) |
2020-04-01 – 2024-03-31
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| Keywords | monsters / hybrids / teratology / Aristotle / Ambroise Pare / Fortunio Liceti / Pierre Boaistuau |
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| Outline of Annual Research Achievements |
In FY2022, I focused my research on hybrid monsters. There is a complex relationship between hybrid beings and monsters: not all monsters are hybrids, and hybrid beings are not necessarily monsters, but there is still a strong connection between hybridity and monstrosity. I tried to clarify this relationship in the history of teratology, namely the “science of monsters”, from its origins in Aristotelian biology until the early seventeenth century. Originally, in Aristotle, hybridity and monstrosity are completely separated: even if a monstrous being looks like a combination of several species, this is nothing more than a superficial analogy that we make, without any ground in the biological phenomenon of hybridity. This rationalistic and reductionist view of hybrid monsters was challenged throughout the Christian Middle Ages but the profusion of hybrid monsters in medieval culture: from art to literature and theology, hybrid monsters were so ubiquitous in medieval representations that they became, quite paradoxically, as much familiar as they were extraordinary, embodying, so to speak, “a familiar image of the strange”. These hybrid monsters were doomed to disappear from scientific teratology, but I could show that, in its first developments in the late sixteenth century and early seventeenth century, some credibility was still lent to the existence of hybrid monsters, so that much of the medieval representations and conceptions about them were integrated in the early stages of teratological science.
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| Current Status of Research Progress |
Current Status of Research Progress
3: Progress in research has been slightly delayed.
Reason
Delays due to the coronavirus pandemic in the previous years made me adapt my research plan to dedicate more time to the study of hybridity representations in the Medieval and Modern periods before moving on to more contemporary issues such as technological hybridity in post-humanism theories and genre hybridity in contemporary art.
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| Strategy for Future Research Activity |
For FY2023, I plan to investigate representations of hybrids in literature and science in the eighteenth and nineteenth century. I want to understand the part hybrids played in the aesthetics of the Enlightenment, especially in such authors as Diderot and Restif de la Bretonne, and how these aesthetic issues were related to scientific and philosophical debates from which originated the theory of biological evolution.
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| Causes of Carryover |
Expenditure was lower than initially expected because I did not make research trips to Europe due to the coronavirus pandemic. I plan to use the remaining amount to make a research trip to Europe this year or buy academic publications necessary for the research project.
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