Frankenstein

Undergraduate / Graduate

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is arguably the most famous horror story ever written. Frankenstein is also a mythopoetic tour de force whose searching moral and ethical questions-at what cost should we pursue scientific advances, or seek to control nature? Where is the boundary between the drive to create and the desire for power? What are the effects of social marginalization and isolation?-are more relevant today than ever. In this seminar we will examine the novel both as it engaged earlier cultural works (including Plutarch's Lives, John Milton's Paradise Lost, and Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman), and as it morphed over the course of two centuries into a full-blown modern myth. We will consider some of the many afterlives of Frankenstein (including James Whale's classic films, Frankenstein and Bride of Frankenstein, Ahmed Saadawi's absurdist war novel Frankenstein in Baghdad, Victor LaValle's comic book series, The Destroyer, and Rachel Ingalls's suburban fairy tale, Mrs. Caliban) as a test case for better understanding processes of literary adaptation, remediation, and intertextuality more generally. Students will have the option of producing their own creative adaptation as their culminating project for the course.