Free Event FRANKENSTEIN Lightning Lecture Series
FRANKENSTEIN LIGHTNING LECTURE SERIES
Friday, October 29th @ 6:30 in N127
or via Zoom Meeting ID: 947 400 7710
Please join us before the show for show for four 10-minute TED Talk-Style presentations on FRANKENSTEIN by scholars from the K-State Department of English.
Mark Crosby, “The Ghost Story Competition”
- This talk will set out the immediate historical and philosophical context for Mary Shelley’s composition of Frankenstein and offer a brief discussion of the extant manuscript to highlight some misassumptions about the famous novel.
Spencer Young, “The Climatological Frankenstein“
- From the cataclysmic eruption of Mt. Tambora precipitating the “Year Without a Summer” that inspired Mary Shelley to compose her novel to the creature’s confrontation with Victor on the Mer de Glace, the environment is a specter that haunts the pages of Frankenstein. This talk will explore the role of the natural world in Frankenstein and its wider implications for our present-day climatological crisis.
Shirley Tung, “The Feminist Origins of Frankenstein“
- In Frankenstein, the role of the female is violently suppressed: the women in the novel are effectively silenced either by their male counterparts or by their untimely deaths, the female creature is immediately destroyed, and even nature itself is coded as a feminine object for the masculine gaze to “penetrate.” This talk situates Frankenstein within context of the feminist writings of Shelley’s mother, Mary Wollstonecraft, to examine the novel as a cautionary tale about the perils of denying female agency.
Gabrielle Coffey, “Frankenstein as Body Horror”
- Frankenstein, a key precursor to the contemporary “body horror” genre, locates much of its horror within the physical body. Horror is situated in the body in two key ways. First, the creature’s body itself is horrific; despite being made from “beautiful” features, it is monstrous and uncanny, generating fear by being “wrong.” Secondly, the creature’s experience of having a body is horrific, generating an existential dread of being othered from all of humanity, incapable of any substantial connection or reproduction. In the text’s anxiety over the monstrous birth of the creature, his potential bride, and any future potential offspring, we also find a female fear of the body—that of childbirth, wherein we see reflections of Mary Shelley’s own traumatic experiences with birth. This interpretation of the text allows us to see a trajectory from this text to many contemporary feminist body horror texts, which use the genre to voice anxieties about female conditions and experiences.