Book Club February 7, 2022, at 2-4pm – Fellows & External Fellows Only on Zoom
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February 7, 2022 @ 2:00 pm - 4:00 pm
Book Club February 7, 2022, at 2-4pm – Fellows & External Fellows Only
Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus (1818)
Chair: Mary Jane Ashley
(104 pp, available in e-book and audio-book format)
You’ve seen the movie(s), but have you ever read the book? Medical science (of the 18th century) meets gothic fantasy fiction in a “classic” read about the scientific ethics and responsibility, as a passionate young scientist’s experiment with creating life from non-animate matter (literally) runs amok. It was written by the precocious, imaginative, and well-educated 18-year-old daughter of famous parents (feminist Mary Wollstonecraft and political philosopher William Godwin) who was also the lover of poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Composed as part of a contest (with Shelley, Lord Byron, and Dr. John Polidori) to see who could write the best horror tale to help them pass the time, Frankenstein won.
A warning! Unlike the movie(s), there are many different narrators (and therefore perspectives) in this book: it opens with letters and then a journal written by Robert Walton, an explorer on a North Pole expedition. He then writes down the story told to him by Victor Frankenstein, whom he has rescued from an Arctic ice-flow. This is the frame for Frankenstein’s first-person story of the creation of his monster. But the monster too gets to tell his story. And Frankenstein’s response to it forms the second part of his narrative up to the point of his rescue in the Arctic. The explorer completes the tale. Enjoy!
The link to register is https://forms.office.com/r/mwTPu1ZNcd
The deadline to register is 8:00am on the morning of the event. The Zoom link will be sent to registrants only.
