Name : Niyatiben
A. Pathak
Roll No.25
Enrollment No.
Topic . Frankenstein
study of cultural studies .
Paper .5
romantic literature
Submitted to. Department
of English MKNU.
To evaluate my assignment click here
Preface……
Culture refers to the
cumulative deposit of knowledge , experience, belief, values, attitudes,
meanings, hierarchies, religion, notions of time , roles, spatial relations,
concept of universe, and material object and possessions acquired by a group of
people in the course of generations through individual and group
striving.
‘ culture’ is the mode of producing meaning and ideas. This ‘mode’ is a
negotiation over which meanings are valid. Elite culture control meanings
because it control the terms of the debate and a culture is a way of life
of a group of people the behavior, beliefs, values, and symbols that they
accept. generally without thinking about them and that are passed along by
communication and imitation from one generation to the next.
Culture studies looks at mass or popular culture and everyday life.
popular culture is the culture of masses. A culture study argue
that culture is about the meanings of community or society
generates cultural studies believes that the ‘culture’
of communities includes various aspects like: Economics ,
Spiritual, Ideological, Erotic, and Political.
Culture is not natural thing. it is production and consumption of culture.emphsis
on discourse and textually are at Centre to cultural studies .
It believe that we cannot ‘read’ cultural after only within the
aesthetic realm.
“ Culture is the great help out of a present
difficulty, culture being a pursuit of our total perfection by means of getting
to know , or all the matter we most concern the best which may thought and
compare to turning a stream of fresh and free thought upon our stoack nation
and habits which we followed stonchelly but mechanically”.
Cultural studies explores culture power and identity.
in cultural studies , we analyze a wide variety of forms of cultural expression
such as t.v., film, advertising, literature, atr, and video games. as well as
we study social and cultural practices like shopping and social justice
movements.
Culture has two aspect: the know meanings and directions,
which its member are trained to; the new observations and meanings, which are
offered and tested. these are the ordinary processes of human societies and human
minds, and we see through them the nature of a culture: that it is both
the most ordinary common meanings and the finest individual meanings we
use the word a whole way of life—the common meanings; to mean the arts and
learning—the special processes of discover and creative effort”
#
Raymond William
Cultural
studies ……..
Cultural
studies is an innovative interdisciplinary field of research and teaching that
investigates the ways in which “culture” creates and transforms
individuals experience , everyday life , social relations and power . research
and teaching in the field explores the relation between culture understood as
human expressive and symbolic activities and culture understood as distinctive
way of life. combining the strengths of the social sciences and the humanities,
cultural studies draws on methods and theories from literary studies,
sociology, communications studies, history, cultural anthropology and
economics. by working across the boundaries among these fields, cultural
studies addresses new question and problems of today world. rather than seeking
answers that will hold for all time cultural studies develops flexible tools
that adapt to this rapidly changing world.
Topic ….
1.Revolutionary births
a.
The
creature as proletarian
b.
’’
a race of devils”.
c.
From
natural philosophy to cyborg
2.the
Frankenpheme in popular culture: fiction, drama, film,television.
a.the greatest horror story novel ever written :
b.Frankenstein on the stage :
c. film Adaption .
introduction ……
Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus is a
novel written by
English author
Mary Shelley (1797–1851) that tells the story of
Victor Frankenstein, a young scientist who
creates a grotesque but
sapient creature in an unorthodox scientific
experiment. Shelley started writing the story when she was 18, and the first
edition of the novel was published anonymously in London on 1 January 1818,
when she was 20.Her name first appeared on the second edition, published in
France in 1823.
Shelley travelled through Europe in 1814, journeying along the river
Rhine in Germany
with a stop in
Gernsheim which is 17 kilometres (11 mi) away from
Frankenstein Castle, where, two centuries
before, an
alchemist
was engaged in experiments
. Later, she travelled in the region of
Geneva
(Switzerland)—where much of the story takes place—and the topic of
galvanism
and other similar
occult
ideas were themes of conversation among her companions, particularly her lover
and future husband,
Percy Shelley. Mary, Percy,
Lord Byron
and
John
Polidori decided to have a competition to see who could write the best
horror
story. After thinking for days, Shelley dreamt about a scientist who created
life and was horrified by what he had made; her dream later evolved into the
novel's story.
(wikipedia, 2018)
In the novel Victor Frankenstein is
the first character, who makes a cultural discourse and who occupies our
attention, a character for whom his desire to create life is everything while
to accept that life is not important. For him the creation ‘Monster’ is
not his child and responsibility now. In below given quote we can see his
hunger for knowledge and to create a life through that knowledge:
“The world was to me a secret which
I desired to divine. Curiosity earnest research to learn the hidden laws of
nature, gladness akin to rapture, as they were earliest sensation I can
remember”
Humanity
which sees the moral or ethical consent of the novel and by this I also want to
prove my point that why Marry Shelley wants to create a male monster? But by
this regard I can say through observing all aspect the aspects of novel and its
study that I have, and naturally this clear when its shows the power of men and
in other hand the ugliness of the monster that she wants to show and also we
can say in cultural studies of this novel that, “A message on the Irony and
Danger in the Quest for power” cause the generation is what that creates or
challenge.
⁘⁘⁘Age of Revolution Modern Consumer culture Frankenstein is “a vital
metaphor, peculiarly appropriate to CULTURE dominated by a consumer technology,
neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self and
frightened at what it is discovering. - George Levine From CNN descriptions of
Saddam Hussein as an “American Created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that
warn of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning.
Age of Revolution Modern Consumer culture Frankenstein is “a vital metaphor,
peculiarly appropriate to CULTURE dominated by a consumer technology,
neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in touch’ with its authentic self and
frightened at what it is discovering. - George Levine From CNN descriptions of
Saddam Hussein as an “American Created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that
warn of genetically engineered “Franken-foods,” test-tube babies, and cloning.
1)Revolutionary births :
Born like its creator in an age of revolution ,Frankenstein challenged accepted
ideas of its day. As it has become increasingly commoditized by modern consumer
culture , one wonders whether its original revolutionary spirit and its
critique of scientific ,philosophical , political , and gender issues
have become obscured , or whether instead its continuing transformation
attests to its essential oppositional nature.
Today, as George Levine remarks, Frankenstein is,
“ A vital metaphor
, pecuniary appropriate to a culture dominatedBy consumer technology ,
neurotically obsessed with ‘getting in Touch’ with its authentic
self-frightened at what it is discovering”
Hardly a day goes by without our seeing an image or allusion to
Frankenstein , from CNN, description of Saddam Hussein as an “American –
created Frankenstein” to magazine articles that warm of genetically
engineered “ Franken foods” test-tube babies and donning.
a) The Creature as
proletarian :
Mary Shelley lived during times of great upheaval in Britain; not only was her
own family fall of radical thinkers , but she also met many other such as
Thomas Paine and William Blake. Persy Shelley was thought of as a
dangerous radical bent on labor reform and was spied upon by the government .
In Frankenstein ,Mary Shelley’s own divisions between revolutionary ardor and
fear of the masses.
Who worried about the mob’s “excess of a virtuous feeling”, fearing its “sick
destructiveness” many Shelley’s creature is a political and moral paradox
, both an innocent and a cold blooded murderer.
Monsters like the creature are indeed paradoxical. On the one hand they
transgress against “ the establishment” ; if the monster survives he represents
the defiance of death an image of survival , however disfigured . on the other
hand we are reassured when we see that society can capture and destroy
monsters.
Such dualism would explain the great number of Frankenstein amount movie that
appeared during the cold war. But the creature’s rebellious nature is rooted
far in the past. In the De Lacys shed he reads three books, beginning
with Paradise Lost . not only are the eternal questions about the ways of god
and man in paradise lost relevant to the creature’s predicament , but in
Shelley’s time Milton’s epic poem was seen as timothy Morton puts it , as ,
“ A seminal work
of republicanism and sublime that inspired
Many of
the romantics”
The creature next reads a volume from Plutarch’s lives
, which in the early 19th century was reads as,
“ A classic
republican text , admired in the Enlightenment by such writers as Rousseau”
Goethe’s the sorrows of young whether , the creature’s third book , is the
prototypical rebellious romantic novel. In short , says Morton ,
“the creature’s
literary education is radical”
But the creature’s idealistic education does him little good , and he has no
chance of reforming society . his self-education is his even more tragic second
birth into an entire culture impossible for him to inhabit , however well
he understand its great writings about freedom.
b) “A Race of
devils”
Frankenstein may be analyzed in its portrayal of different “Races” .though the
creature’s skin is only described as yellow , it has been constructed,
“ out of a cultural
tradition of the threatening ‘other’- Whether troll or giant , gypsy or negro-
from the Dark inner recess of xenophobic fear and loathing”
Antislavery discourse had a powerful effect on the depiction of Africans in
Shelley’s day , from gaudily dressed exotics to naked objects of pity.
Victor could be read as guilty slave master .interestingly, one of Mary
Shelley’s letters mentions of an allusion to Frankenstein made on the floor of
parliament by Foreign secretary George cunning (1770-1827) ; speaking on
march 16,1824. On the subject of proposed ameliorations of slave conditions in
the West Indies :
“ To turn him loose in
the manhood of his physical Strengths , in the maturity of his physical
passion, But in the infancy of his instructed reason would Be to raise up
a creature resembling the splendid Fiction of a recent romance”
But Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak describes the novel as a critique of empire and
racism , pointing out that,
“ Social
engineering should not be based upon pure ,Theoretical , or natural –
scientific reason alone…..”
Frankenstein’s ,
“ Language of racism- the
dark side of imperials Understood as social mission combines with
the Hysteria of macule into the idiom of sexual Reproduction rather than
subject constitution”
The novel is “ written from the perspective of a narrator from below”
C) From Natural Philosophy
to cyborg
Today , in an age of genetic engineering , biotechnology , and cloning the most
far reaching industrialization of life forms to date Frankenstein is more
relevant than ever.
Development in science were increasingly critical to study during the romantic
period , when a paradigm shift occurred from science as natural philosophy to
science as biology , a crucial distinction in Frankenstein . as described in
Frankenstein : penetrating the secrets of nature , an exhibit mounted in 2002
by the national library of medicine , mary Shelley attended public
demonstrations of the effect of electricity on animal and human bodies , living
and dead.
The experiment of Luigi Galvani (1737 – 98) , an Italian physicist and
physician who discovered that he could use electricity to include muscle
contractions , were among the scientific topics discussed in the Geneva Villa
by Percy Shelly , Byron and Polidori.
According to cultural critic Laura Kranzler , victor’s creation of life
and modern sperm banks and artifial wombs show a “ masculine desire to
claim female reproductively”.
Frankenstein and its warnings about the hubris of science will be with us in
the farture as science continues to question the borders between
life and death between “viability” and “selective reduction” between
living and life support.
2} The Frankenstein in
popular culture : Fiction , Drama , Film , Television
Broadly defined frankenphenes demonstrate the extent of the novel’s
presence in worlds cultures, as the encoding of race and class in the
1824 canning speech in parliament in today’s global debates about such things
as genetically engineered foods , and of course in fiction and other media.
We end with a quick look at some of the thousands of retellings , parodies
, and other selected frankenphenes as they have appeared in popular
fiction , drama , film , and television.
A ) The Greatest Horror
Story novel written
Frankenstein’s fictions peter hailing , editor of the indispensable
Frankenstein omnibus has called Frankenstein ,
“ the single greatest
horror story novel ever written and the most widely influential in its genre”
In renaissance Italy , a scientist constructs a mechanical man to ring the
hours on a bell in a tall tower , but it turns instead upon its creator.
American writer W.C.Morrow published “ The Surgeon’s experiment “ in the
Argonaut in 1887 , in which an experimenter revives a headless
corpse by attaching a mental head ; there was a large cancellation of
subscriptions in response . Frankenstein inspired the set of tales published in
home brew magazine called “ the reanimator” (1921-22) by H.P.Lovercraft which
later became a cult classic movie “ Herbert West : Reanimator”(1986) the saga
of a young experimenter barred from medical school , who practices unholy
arts on the corpses of human beings and reptiles.
There is surprisingly amount of Frankenstein inspired erotica , especially gay
– and lesbian – oriented. Finally , there are the unclassifiable , such as
Theodore Leberthon’s “ Demons of the film colony “, a strange reminiscence
of afternoon the Hollywood journalist spent with Boris Karloff and bela
Lugosi published in Weird Tales in 1932.
B) Frankenstein on the
stage
From his debut on the stage , the creature has generally been made more
horrific , and victor has been assigned less blame most stage and screen
versions are quite melodramatic , tending to eliminate minor characters
and the entire frame structure in order to focus upon murder and mayhem.
On the 19th century stage the creature was composite of frightening
makeup and human qualities . he could even appear clownish , recalling
Shakespeare’s caliban .
Mary Shelly herself attended the play and pronounced it authentic . but this
‘serious’ drama immediately inspired parodies first with Frankenstein in
1823 a burlesque featuring a tailor , who as the “needle Prometheus”, sews a
body out of nine corpses.
A play called the man in the moon was very popular in London during 1847
; its script was hamlet with the addition of a new act in which the creature
arises from hell through a trap door and signs and drinks with the ghost
. in more modern times Frankenstein has been a staple of many stages.
Frankenstein and his bride was performed at a club called strip city in los
angels in the late 1950s.
It included songs such as “oh what a beautiful mourning” and “ ohoul of
my dream”. And the rocky horror show with Richard O’Brien , first performed at
the royal court theatre upstairs in London in 1973, the revived far too many
times and filmed as the rocky horror picture show directed by Jim Sharman
(1975).
In it brad and janet have pledged their love but most encounter the rapacious
frank-n-furter . a transvestite from the planet transsexual in the galaxy
Transylvania , who has created a perfect male lover rocky horror ,
to replace his former lover Eddie . After numerous seduction .
frank-n-furter is eventually killed when the servants revolted by the
hunchback Riff Raff. If it were not for VH1 I love the to s series we might all
be able to forget wichiepoo and frank-n-furter .
C) Film Adaptations
In the Frankenstein omnibus the 1931 James Whale film Frankenstein . the most
famous of all adaptation . it was loosely based on the novel with the addition
of new element including the placing of a criminal brain into the monster’s
body.
The 1st film version of Frankenstein . however, was produced by Thomas Edison
in 1910 , a one-reel tinted silent. Albert Lavalley explain ,
“ the blindness of the
range expressed toward the Monster and his half human incomprehension of It
thus recaptures much of the bleak horror of the Book . its indictment of
society , and its picture of Man’s troubled consciousness”
Though Branagh tries to stick to Mary Shelley’s plot , tree-fourth of the way
through , the film diverges widely from the novel and seems most interested in
the love affair between victor and Elizabeth.
And
now, just for fun we offer a quick survey of a few other film version of Mary
Shelly’s classic.
·
I was a teenage Frankenstein – U.S.A directed by Herbert l.stock 1957. A
British doctor descended from Frankenstein visits the united states
as a university lecture and lives in a house with labs and alligators for organ
disposal ; he uses young men far parts . the creature kills the doctor’s
mistress and other on campus.
·
Torticola Contre frankensburg – France directed by Paul Paviot 1952 Lorelei , a
girl forced by poverty to live with her uncle at todenwald castle meets a
talking cat , a man with a cat’s brain , and a monster called Torticola whom
the doctor has made from corpses.
D)Television Adaptations
Frankenstein has surfaced in hundreds of television adaptations including night
gallery , the Addams family , the monsters , star trek : the next generation ,
Scooby-doo , Frankenstein and the impossible Alvin and the chipmunks , the
Simpsons wishbone , and so on notable television creatures have included
bosvenson , randy quaid , david warner and Ian Holm . perhaps the most
authentic television version was Frankenstein : the true story ,
with script writing by Christopher Isherwood and acting by James Mason , Jane
Seymour , Micheal Sarrazin and Tom Baker.ein – U.S.A directed by Herbert
l.stock 1957. A British doctor descended from Frankenstein visits
the united states as a university lecture and lives in a house with labs and alligators
for organ disposal ; he uses young men far parts . the creature kills the
doctor’s mistress and other on campus. (nayar,
Paperback – April 20, 2011)
The Frankenstein in Popular Culture:
• Fiction,Drama,Film,Television ,games,comic book ,magazine,
act…
• Cultural sign in Frankenstein made
to be a Frankentheme and the heart of the novel irony. How the Victor creates a
way of live, and how the Frankenstein throws any as a orphan and suffering from
society’s cruelness. Even Victor’s reliance upon defensive idealization
represents one the major narcissistic feature of his. He repeatedly makes one
statement about his childhood that; • “No human being could have childhood
passed a happier than me”
The First Theatrical Presentation based on Frankenstein was Presumption
or The Fate of Frankenstein by Richard Brinsley Peake, Performed at the English
Opera House in London in the Summer of 1823. In Drama Creature has generally
been made Horrific, and Victor has been assigned less blame. On 19th Century
Stage, the Creature was a composite of frightening makeup and human qualities.
Films ….In Frankenstein Omnibus, reader can study the screenplay for the
1931 by James Whale film Frankenstein, the most famous of all adaption.
The genesis of Frankenstein
is well known, thank to the author’s introduction published in the third
edition (1831) when Mary Shelley revealed to be the ‘creator’ of this
extraordinary novel. Therefore, I am not lingering on details about Frankenstein’s
birth. Instead, I would like to draw attention to the frontispiece of the 1831
edition published by H. Colburn and R. Bentley, the first being illustrated and
the first giving a visual representation of the creature and its creator. It is
an engraving which depicts the moment the creature becomes conscious and Victor
Frankenstein escapes from it, as the excerpt beneath reads: “By the glimmer of
the half-extinguished light, I saw the dull, yellow eye of the creature open;
it breathed hard, and a convulsive motion agitated its limbs … I rushed out of
the room” (M. Shelley, 56).
Von Holst, Theodor. Frontispiece to Frankenstein 1831. Digital image. Wikimedia
Commons. Web. 24 Apr. 2016.
The author of the engraving is
Theodor Von Holst, a British painter who studied at the Royal Academy of Arts
and gained a reputation as illustrator of the supernatural, above all for
illustrating Goethe’s Faust. The engraving shows a mighty body in
close-up, with proportioned limbs but a hideous look, the right arm and the
left leg whose “skin scarcely covered the work of muscles and arteries beneath”
(Shelley, 56), and a dislocated head. Next to him a skull, other human bones
and an open book. In the background, a man in the dark with a frightened face
in the act of leaving the room. The room contains scientific equipment, such as
electric terminals and a bell jar, and some skulls on the library in the
background. The scene is a faithful reproduction of the ‘animation’ moment of
the creature described in the fifth chapter of Shelley’s novel.
According
to Scott J. Juengel, Shelley’s
masterpiece is a novel permeated with representation-recognition matters. In
his Face, Figure, Physiognomics: Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”
and the Moving Image, Juengel offers an in depth analysis that may suggest
interesting connections among the frontispiece, its author and the historical
background. Juengel states that the visual element is the most relevant aspect
to delineate the relationship between the creator and his creature “[Shelley’s
work] being consumed with problems of representation, recognition and
resemblance” (357). Indeed, the moment that Juengel names as “moment of
recognition, of revulsion” (356) is the episode which originated Shelley’s
novel and through which the whole narration develops; the same one illustrated
in the frontispiece. The creature is seen as “an object of representation”
(367) and recognition which is not only individual: it is a process of
recognition-representation that involves the anxieties of an era. At the
beginning of the nineteenth century the progress of science was a pivotal
topic: we get to know this from Mary Shelley’s introduction, when she tells us
of her lover’s and friend’s interest and discussions about scientific matters.
Man questioned and investigated the mysteries of life and death; Galvanism
seemed to reveal the possibility to infuse life in dead bodies through ‘animal
electricity’; physiognomy studied the proportions of the human body – and of
face traits in particular – stating that external physical features reflected,
and somehow predetermined, man’s personality. Juengel
underlines how physiognomy influenced Victor’s delineation of the Creature: the
encounter of Victor Frankenstein with the creature is defined as an “encounter
with the radically other” (Juengel, 356) which is strongly based on a
physiognomic determinism. Physiognomy is, indeed, central in Mary Shelley’s
novel and in her life as well. As far as the
frontispiece is concerned, while on the one hand it was a common practice –
until mid-nineteenth century – to commission book illustration to engravers, or
artists in general, on the other hand there may be something interesting about
the identity of the man who made that very engraving.
From natural
philosophy to cyber..
Today , in 21 century an age of genetic engireeing
,biotechnology, and cloning , the most far –fatched industrialization of life
forms to date , Frankenstein is more relevant than ever. Result of genetic
engeering is that like . … surrogate mother, tes-tube baby, cloning.
Conclusion……..
• Mary Shelley’s Sci-Fi adventure, thriller
and dramatize the novel in that one can do the thing which challenging the
God’s creation, the cultural sign and its major aspects. In this novel we come
across with mythical story or we can say culture tale like “Prometheus”,
“Narcissus” and “Paradise lost”. Mary Shelley has presented very fruitfully and
with appropriate facts. Her novel has morphed into countless forms in both
height brow and popular culture. Her creation teaches us not to underestimate
the power of youth culture. It is truly captivating powerful novel that
analyzes ‘Monstrosity’ with regard to ‘humanity’. However without a sound
understanding of the context, in which the text was written one couldn’t
completely comprehend the themes, ideas and references did not present nor can
the apparent link between monstrosity and humanity be completely.
To evaluate my assignment click here
Works Cited
wikipedia. (2018, march 30). frankenstein. (W.
contributors, Ed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein .
nayar, p. k. (Paperback – April 20, 2011). Introduction
To Cultural Studies. Paperback.
wikipedia. (2018,
march 30). frankenstein. (W. contributors, Ed.) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frankenstein
.
http://ranjanvelari201416.blogspot.in/2015/03/study-of-frankenstein-in-light-of.htmlhttps://frankensteinandthefantastic.blogspot.in/
