The Meaning of Monsters: Frankenstein and Literary Theory

This course provides students with a grounding in some of the major theoretical approaches in literary studies. It does this through detailed study of a single text, Frankenstein (1818), as well as a selection of film interpretations. The story of Mary Shelley’s eloquent monster, his suffering and his thirst for revenge, has been interpreted in many diverse and conflicting ways. Is it about a young mother’s anguish over the trauma of childbirth? Is it a Romantic or proto-feminist cautionary tale about rationalist masculine science and its desire to master nature? Is it a colonial fable about slavery and racism, or a political fable about the working class? Is it an uncanny expression of unconscious psychic conflicts? Or is it a prescient fable of the advent of AI, and the possibility of humans being mastered by their own creations? Students will consider Frankenstein and Frankenstein films through a range of theoretical lenses: historicism; feminist, gender and queer theory; structuralism, post-structuralism and deconstruction; Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis; Marxism and postcolonialism; disability studies and posthumanism. This course is strongly recommended to students considering undertaking an Honours year.