Romantic Automata: Exhibitions, Figures, Organisms

Abstract

students created a pastiche or parody representing what they found to be most alive in Frankenstein and what fills in one of the novel’s textual gaps, elisions, ellipses, or unexplained secrets. They wrote a short preface describing the purpose and the intratextual conventions they reanimated. This activity enabled them to become active readers and inventive coauthors, adding to the Frankenstein legacy. Their work fostered inquiries into slippery authorship, modes of creation, textual doubling. They discovered that first-person narratives have distinct persuasive purposes, that Frankenstein has ghostwritten and corrected parts of Robert Walton’s journal, that the novel encourages readers to add to its incomplete form, to replicate, correct, and augment its textual body. About half the class wrote either a pastiche or parody imitating the novel’s epistolary form and narrative styles. The other half of the class created multi-media adaptations of Frankenstein. Both Ruston’s monograph and Hammerman’s collection help us to bridge the many conceptual curiosities generated by Frankenstein: the science of the early nineteenth century and its relevance to today’s science/technology; the unknowable about life and death; the qualities distinguishing human and nonhuman or posthuman. Both publications offer comprehensive surveys, accessible to undergraduates, of the Romantic-period’s scientific underpinnings and contemporary applications of the novel’s major themes. Both publications are particularly useful resources for those of us who routinely teach Mary Shelley’s novel and its numerous adaptations, parodies, and sequels. The open-endedness of Frankenstein continues to invite, as these publications demonstrate, additional speculation, application, and scholarship.