Frankenstein

-

Frankenstein, Gothic Literature, and SciFi

Marry Shelley’s Frankenstein is probably the most referenced novel when it comes to gothic literature. Gothic novels are less about the story being supernatural, and more about the fact that they make you feel uneasy and Shelley portrays that very well.
I wanted to reference this video that I watched while I was reading this story because she makes a good point about how Frankenstein is indeed gothic literature, but it is also the first example of science fiction as well. Science fiction is defined to be a story trying to predict a dystopian or more advanced future.
Throughout the first part of the story, Vincent is explained to be studying and experimenting on reviving the dead, which seems to the characters in the story to be impossible. The fact that this is not even possible now in 2015, goes to show that Shelley had a very advanced mindset to how she viewed her character Victor. He not only brings a creature to life, but he assembles it as well.
Victor is not having a good time dealing with the fact that he basically played god and brought something back to life which may be an unpopular opinion, but I think is pretty accurate. He wasn’t expecting his experiment to fail when in actuality, it was a huge success. In literature and film today, there’s a lot of imbalance to “playing god” or just by summoning something you’re not supposed to. This could end in a lot of things, in Victors case, deceased loved ones.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

J-Horror and Vengeful Spirits

-
J-Horror and Vengeful Spirits After finishing Haruki Murakami's  A Wild Sheep Chas e, it makes me realize how different our western horror culture is. I feel like because we’re so exposed to western horror stereotypes of slashers, monsters, etc, we always assume that the spirit is evil. There just always seems to be bad blood with ghosts and humans. I think this is due to our lack of culture with the passed compared to Asian culture. Western culture is all about shock value. They don’t normally leave you feeling dread or a huge disturbance. Most of the time it’s high descriptions of how someone is tortured, or how detailed the killer looks. J-horror contrasts this by making contemplate the story and the reality all together. In the story of Yuki-onna, she is seeming to be a very dangerous spirit but then spares the life of the younger lumberjack. Throughout you then wonder if she’s changed and can actually live a human life. However, it is shown that she r
Read more

Space Opera

-
Space Opera             For this week, I read Arthur C. Clarke’s The Star . It’s a story about a priest going on a space journey and discovering something that disproves and questions his faith completely. This story was written in 1959, so space travel was conceived, but the story describes us in the far future where we can travel lightyears and find old planets. Ironic, how you’d think back then we would be able to do that now in 2019.             The real irony of this story, is that the life on the planet they found ended then causing a supernova. This supernova was what the priest discovered to be the star of David when Jesus was born, thus starting a whole life of religious beliefs. The death of a human-like planet was the reason for so much happiness on Earth, and finally putting 2 and 2 together would be hard to handle, especially for a follower of Jesus.
Read more