Difference in Monstrosity: Grendel and the Green Knight

The concept of the monster lays the very foundation of the cultural self. Every distinct cultural identity insists upon a dialectical relationship with “the other”. Semantically thinking, the self, ipso facto, bespeaks a subjective and homogeneous domain isolated from the outside. In this sense, the concept of identity roots itself in a “strategic and positional” basis (Stuart Hill, Who needs ‘identity’? 17). Paradoxically, the construction of self is doctrinally accompanied by that of the other, ergo resorting to acts of differentiation to put accentuation on the self.