PCC INSCAPE MAGAZINE
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Frankenstein Now

From our guest editor, Dr. Robert Oventile
​The English writer Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797–1851) published her novel Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus in 1818, two hundred years ago. Soon after publication, Frankenstein began to spawn literary offspring, with the first stage adaptation, Richard Brinsley Peake’s Presumption; or, The Fate of Frankenstein, appearing in 1823. Since then, the plays, novels, films, comics, and poems adapting, rewriting, revising, and responding to Frankenstein have multiplied and mutated.
 
In her introduction to the 1831 edition of the novel, Shelley writes, “And now, once again, I bid my hideous progeny go forth and prosper” (xii). Shelley is referring to her novel, and to Victor Frankenstein’s creature within it, but the novel’s “hideous progeny” of literary, artistic, and cinematic offspring continues to proliferate as well.
 
Why “hideous”? The philosopher Jacques Derrida hints toward an answer: “A future that would not be monstrous would not be a future” (Points 387). The future “breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can therefore only announce itself, present itself, in the species of monstrosity” (Of Grammatology 5). In Frankenstein, the creature arrives to humans and human communities “in the species of monstrosity,” as inassimilable to “constituted normality” and bearing futures the novel’s other characters seem never to have anticipated. Of course, as the novel unfolds, the more the humans reject and turn away from the creature, the more monstrous the future becomes. However inherently monstrous futurity is, there may be different degrees and types of monstrosity worth fighting for or against. This is one of the novel’s striking implications for contemporary readers.
 
To celebrate Frankenstein’s bicentennial, Inscape invited authors and artists to multiply further the novel’s progeny. Among the resulting works are poems, essays, photographs, and digital art. Each engaging Frankenstein in a unique way, each iterating and revising tropes and topics from the novel, these works variously wrestle to welcome the monstrous, to welcome the future.
 
Works Cited
Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Translated by Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, Johns
            Hopkins UP, 2016.
---. Points … Interviews, 1974–1994. Edited by Elisabeth Weber, translated by Peggy
            Kamuf, et al., Stanford UP, 1995.
Shelley, Mary. Introduction. Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus, by Shelley,
Signet, 1965, pp. vii–xii.
 
 
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  • Folio No.8 Fall 2022 Love Letters
  • About
    • PCC Inscape Instagram
  • SUBMISSIONS
  • ISSUE ARCHIVE
    • PRINT Chapbook No.6 Healing Arts
    • Online Issue No.9
    • Online Issue No.1 Fall 2016
    • Online Issue No.2 Spring 2017
    • ONLINE Issue No.3 Fall 2017
    • PRINT Vol 72 No 2 Fall 2017
    • PRINT Vol 73 No.1 Fall 2018
    • ONLINE Issue No. 4 Fall 2018
    • Online Issue No.5 Summer 2018
    • FOLIO No.1 Fall 2018 VOTE
    • ONLINE Issue No.6 Fall 2018 Fall Spirituality
    • FOLIO 2 Fall 2019 Celebrating Dia De Los Muertos
    • ONLINE Issue No.7 Spring 2019 >
      • Issue Intro
    • FOLIO No.3 -- Moon Moon Spring 2019
    • FOLIO No.4 Celebrating New PCC Writers
    • FOLIO No.5 City of Redemption
    • FOLIO No.6 Spring 2020
    • FOLIO No. 7 - Winter 2021 Into the Forest
  • Feral Parrot : The Blog
  • 2022 Handley Awards
  • INTERVIEWS
  • Inscape Alumni Board