Starboard Vineyard Tours 6: Four Pieces on Frankenstein
Description
In this episode, join us as we read a selection of short pieces on Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and discuss that epochal novel's place in science fiction and in discourse - only one of our four pieces is strictly a work of science fiction studies, but all four help us grapple with the discussion around Frankenstein and how attitudes towards the novel have changed. Join us and get mad at outdated scholarship, think about the change in reception SF and Shelley have seen, and hear our own strongly held opinions about The Modern Prometheus. The four pieces are:
“Horror’s Twin: Mary Shelley’s Monstrous Eve”, chapter 7 of The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination, Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar (1979)
“Mary Shelley's Monster: Politics and Psyche in Frankenstein”, Lee Sterrenburg, collected in The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel, ed. George Levine and U.C. Knoepflmacher (1979)
“My Words to Victor Frankenstein above the Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”, Susan Stryker (1994)
“The Frankenstein Barrier”, George Slusser, collected in Fiction 2000: Cyberpunk and the Future of Narrative, ed. George Slusser and Tom Shippey (1992)
Topics: Feminism, transfeminism, Romanticism, speculation, biography, psychoanalysis
CONTENT WARNING: "My Words to Victor Frankenstein" contains mention of a trans woman's suicide, which we discuss briefly between 1:21:26 - 1:22:02 , and again 1:28:35 - 1:29:52 .
Next episode, we read Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction (2008), by John Rieder.
Also, Ben continues to have released Detect Or Die, a tabletop RPG of neo-noir empiricism, unstable detectives, and total ego death & resurrection. Heavily inspired by Disco Elysium and designed after Bluebeard’s Bride, you can find it here!
United States
