Cohen's Monster Theory and The Rule of St. Benedict

I found this week particularly interesting, the texts we read, "The Rule of St. Benedict" and "Cohen's Monster Theory", were by far (in my opinion) the most interesting texts we've read so far. At first, "The Rule of St. Benedict" seemed very monotonic, straightforward and simplistic, everything I knew about monks from my  little bit of exposure simply seemed to be outlined in this text. I remember that for most of the time I spent reading "The Rule of St. Benedict" I was thinking, "Why is Dr. Comber having us read this? I don't even think there is anything worth discussing here." But sure enough when we came together and with some guidance from Dr. Comber, I found that the topics of discussion were actually quite interesting. I'm not sure if I've heard it elsewhere or just recently when we discussed how the monks were to live in their community, but it really was astonishing how much you could learn about a culture or community by examining the rules made for it's members. I would just like to point out how easily anyone could see the difference in "culture" from Burris to Muncie Central, simply given by the rules that teachers and staff have placed over their students. At Burris I think it's obvious that our rules are much more laid back than say any other normal public school, but why is that? I felt that when I went to Central it was hard to be bitter against teachers who had stupid, remedial rules because I quickly learned that they were necessary. The majority of students at Central could not be trusted to be responsible with the amount of freedom that Burris students have (I won't go into specifics because I don't want to waste your time with examples about rules at a school that most don't care for) .

I thought "Cohen's Monster Theory" was very tedious and hard to read, 23 pages with lots of references that I didn't understand and background knowledge that I didn't have. I had really high hopes for "Cohen's Monster Theory" because of what my sister said about it and she had begged me to take your Contemporary Lit class so that I could get exposed to the ideas in this theory. The most that I took away from reading Cohen's work is in Thesis V, the idea of how we as people turn anything that is different or outside the social norm or that threatens our personal beliefs into a monstrous figure could not be more true. From large scale transformations like the Jews during the reign of Hitler, or even small scale transformations like the freshmen that just reek of BO after gym class and then even they are "exiled" or more like shunned for being different (or smelling different) from the rest of us.

I thought it was really different to learn about how much was revealed about a culture/society through the rules and ideas that are placed over it's people.

Works Consulted

Jeffrey Jerome Cohen. "Monster Culture (Seven Theses)." Monster Theory; reading culture. (1996) :                      3-26.  Print.

St. Benedict of Nursia. "The Rule of St. Benedict". Dr. Comber. Medieval Links. n. pag. Web. 4         September 2013.