"Deus in Animo": Kantian Ugliness and the Narrative Aesthetic of Frankenstein

Abstract:Where they are based in Immanuel Kant's categories of the sublime or monstrous, recent aesthetically based accounts reflect the conventional view of Victor Frankenstein's creature as a monster. This project instead engages Kant's category of the ugly, which makes possible a dialectical, narrative-based aesthetic, one folding both Victor's and the creature's interiority to within the social form of disinterested play otherwise known as intersubjectivity. Robert Walton's encounter with the creature provides a fleeting example of this phenomenon: employing Mojca Kuplen's "positive aesthetic of disgust," it offers a stimulus to revised forms of ethics or agency, thus invoking Theodor Adorno's end of aesthetic inquiry.