with Liz Gloyn
Today’s guest is Dr. Liz Gloyn, author of Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury 2020). Dr. Gloyn’s current work deals with myth-related fan fiction; she has a chapter called “The Reception of Classical Monsters in Modern Popular Culture: A Case Study in Fan Fiction” coming out in The Oxford Handbook of Monsters in Classical Myth.
At right: Ray Harryhausen’s stop-motion animation model of Medusa, used in the 1981 film Clash of the Titans (dir. Desmond Davis). From a 2020 exhibit at the Scottish National Gallery of Modern Art. Photo by Adam Harangozó. Public domain CC0-1.0.
Dr. Gloyn, how did you first get interested in studying ancient monsters?
I have to admit that it was a bit of an accident—a friend of mine was organizing a conference on classical reception in the work of Ray Harryhausen, and I desperately wanted to give a paper. So I sat down to rewatch Clash of the Titans (1981) and take random notes of things I noticed to see if an idea for a paper surfaced. What I ended up spotting was a close connection between water and the monsters Perseus encounters along his journey. As I was working on the conference paper and the article it turned into, I realized very quickly that nobody in monster studies or classical reception seemed to be talking specifically about classical monsters in popular culture—there was plenty about monsters in ancient sources and about modern monsters, but the monsters in films like Clash might as well not have existed. It seemed like such a major gap in the scholarship that I ended up writing Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture to fill it.
Do you have a favorite ancient monster, and if so, how did it become your favorite?
While the Minotaur and Medusa appear to be the most frequently deployed monsters in contemporary culture, I think my favourite must be the Sphinx. I always think of her as the monster who’s come up with the perfect response to mansplaining—when men won’t listen to her riddle properly and try and explain what they think she’s said, she just eats them! Oedipus defeats her by actually listening to her properly, which is a salutary reminder of how rare that quality is in the heroes of Greek myth. This isn’t a dominant thread in modern receptions, but I’m hoping it might become one if I keep on making the case for it.
Do you have a sense of what fears or anxieties ancient monsters in the modern world might be expressing—what cultural context shapes them?
This question cuts to the heart of ancient monsters in the modern world. Despite being generated by the cultural context of societies which lived over two millennia ago, these monsters are still adapted to suit the fears and anxieties of modernity—and they seem to be able to respond to any fear or anxiety in some way. There’s also something about the cultural capital of classical monsters, because of their association with Greek myth, which has made them more respectable as a way to explore contemporary anxieties than other kinds of monsters might have been. For me, it is their malleability and adaptability which makes them such a powerful continuing presence in particularly Western media and art.
Are there any modern adaptations that you find particularly interesting and useful, or especially inaccurate and misleading?
I’m not sure that accuracy is the most helpful way of thinking about this question—after all, ancient writers themselves changed how myths worked all the time! However, given the flexibility of myth, it’s not surprising that it has been adopted by people with various extreme political viewpoints to express those views. One of the most common examples is the use of Medusa to put women politicians in their place; Mary Beard has catalogued political cartoons featuring women leaders as either Medusa-like harridans or as already beheaded by some hero from the leading men of the opposing party. The implicit violence and misogyny in these kinds of images are just the tip of the iceberg as far as upsetting and dangerous uses of myth are concerned. However, it’s important to remember that there’s no monopoly on how figures from myth are used—the way that Medusa has been adopted as a figure of strength by women who have survived sexual violence is an excellent example of how you can find modern receptions in every possible niche within the cultural sphere.
What do you think is different about classical monsters in fan fiction as compared to other kinds of media?
Most other sorts of modern media are heavily mediated before they reach an audience—for instance, a film has to work its way through all the levels of development and production in a studio, or a book has to work through all the levels of editing at a publisher. People who write fanfic can literally type something up and post it—that’s all there is to it! It’s a completely different kind of popular culture, one which I think has a lot to tell classicists about how the ancient world is perceived by people on a day-to-day level, and it’s been very exciting to start exploring a little bit of how those dynamics play out in this chapter.
Dr. Liz Gloyn is Reader in Latin Language and Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK, where she is currently Co-Director of the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome. Her research interests beyond classical reception studies explore the intersection between Latin literature, the Roman family and ancient philosophy. She is the author of The Ethics of the Family in Seneca (CUP 2017) and Tracking Classical Monsters in Popular Culture (Bloomsbury 2020). You can find details of her blog and social media accounts on her Linktree.