PREFACE
Dean’s Medusa attacks the “consensus trance” that makes cultural categories—beauty, ugliness, utility—appear to be Reality. Rejecting Aristotelian essence and Kantian noumena, Dean seeks the “Genius” of the thing through intensified, animist/totemic perception. Medusa’s horror is revealed as a mask hiding divine beauty. Her serpents become sentinels, petrifying sight becomes life-giving recognition, and erotic, synesthetic imagery dissolves observer and observed. Roses finally bloom around her neck as the narrator tastes them: hidden Reality becomes embodied beautytraditions into a single tragic vision.

Dean is doing something considerably more radical than simply offering another interpretation of Shelley. The important distinction is between changing the interpretation of Medusa and challenging the conceptual vocabulary by which interpretation itself takes place