• Abstract and Figures
• Public Full-text

Frankenstei*n Bladerunner (Director's Cut) MODULE A: Comparative Study of Texts and Context This module requires students to compare texts in order to explore them in relation to their contexts. It develops students' understanding of the effects of context and questions of value. Each elective in this module requires the study of groups of texts which are to be selected from a prescribed text list. These texts may be in different forms or media. Students examine ways in which social, cultural and historical context influences aspects of texts, or the ways in which changes in context lead to changed values being reflected in texts. This includes study and use of the language of texts, consideration of purposes and audiences, and analysis of the content, values and attitudes conveyed through a range of readings. Students develop a range of imaginative, interpretive and analytical compositions that relate to the comparative study of texts and context. These compositions may be realised in a variety of forms and media. Elective 2: Texts in Time In this elective students compare how the treatment of similar content in a pair of texts composed in different times and contexts may reflect changing values and perspectives. By considering the texts in their contexts and comparing values, ideas and language forms and features, students come to a heightened understanding of the meaning and significance of each text. Parramatta Marist High School -Resources compiled by Mrs. S. D'Souza text is emphasised by the absence of any of Alice's responses. This one-sided Elective 2 - Texts in Time correspondence foregrounds Fay's outlook. Vanessa Manhire, a New Zealand Texts can mirror or challenge the prevailing values and perspectives of academic, supports this by saying that typically the, "epistolary form avoids their era of composition. This elective focus compares how texts composed the use of a single, explicitly didactic, authorial voice, but each letter can be in different times and context reflect changing values, ideas or styles. used to highlight a single opinion. In a letter, no opportunity is allowed for Examination of the paired texts includes a comparison of how similar simultaneous discussion." content is treated by the different composers in terms of how values, ideas The letters are pegged onto a family narrative hinting at estrangement and language forms and features are communicated. and false perceptions. The correspondence with Alice becomes a conduit for reconciliation as well as literary elucidation. This is seen in the last letter, "And I have been asked to tea at your house by your mother, and your father has consented to be there too, so long as I don't talk about novels, writing, Frankenstein - feminism, or allied subjects. I shall try to keep the conversation to pets and food, and be very happy." As Hilma Wolitzer commented, "The fictitious The Modern Prometheus Miss Weldon tries to lure Alice into this metropolis, "between the Road to Heaven and the Road to Hell," acknowledging the competition of the local McDonald's, of certain books with empty calories and even of Alice's own "nervous dread of literature." At times, Aunt Fay becomes colloquially blunt Mary Shelley (1797-1851) in the advice she gives, "Or, as your father would say, "for God's sake, Alice, stop mooning around And get on with your work." Alice's rebellious spirit Mary Shelley had to circumvent patriarchal prejudices against female writers is not stifled by what her aunt has to say about a range of subjects, including by having her book published anonymously through a firm specialising in feminist issues, "It has come to my notice, Alice, that in the real world the so-called "shilling shockers". Both her parents were radical intellectuals; her worse women behave, the better they get on." While we tacitly accept the mother, Mary Wollstonecraft a feminist scholar, her father, William Godwin aunt's observations, Alice still chooses not to read Jane Austen and defies a philosopher and political theoretician. Their relationship challenged expectations by writing a best-selling debut novel. the social expectations of the era and although her mother died as a result Wolitzer asserts that Weldon "approaches the city as both a builder and of childbirth complications, Mary grew up within a highly educated a visitor, with appropriate measures of awe and trepidation." The epistolary environment. Controversially, while still an adolescent, she herself formed 61 format she adopts here proves effective for the informality of the style helps a controversial and adulterous relationship with Percy Shelley. Regimented personalise the topics discussed, inviting the reader into a companionable social codes led to ostracism and financial hardship. relationship with the writer. We also learn that it was once a popular V literary style, "not so bad a way of telling a story... Jane Austen, even at the age of fourteen, could do these things wonderfully well. The pattern of her Historical and Literary Context storytelling is the same as TV dramatists use today; each letter a new scene, to 0 move the action on, each taking a different viewpoint." In this way, Weldon The early nineteenth century was a period of great technological and is able to highlight a literary device that Austen shows an amazing talent scientific change. Discoveries were being made in all fields of research in using, while using it herself to reach a modern audience. In a very real including the evolutionary theories of Erasmus Darwin and various branches sense, she is targeting the vernacular exposed contemporary reader, as if of medicine, including the potential for electricity or'galvanism' to restore a they were the green haired, rebellious Alice. We must be yoked in some way life to dead bodies. Many critics see Mary Shelley as being a visionary in the s to stop our meandering amongst the backstreets of the "City of Invention" way she uses scientific endeavour to drive her narrative, her own scientist, a a and begin seeking out the better edifices of Literature. The result is newfound Victor Frankenstein learning about such controversial scientific theories -o appreciation for Jane Austen on both a contextual and literary level. in his university studies. She mirrored the scientific advances of her day by replacing the "heavenly fire" of the Promethean myth to electrically spark the i animation of Frankenstein's monster. u Frankenstein exhibited popular, Romanticist and Gothic elements. It ' a W met with mixed reviews, some condemning it as, "a tissue of horrible and disgusting absurdity" while others described it as being, "very bold fiction" with the author demonstrating, "the power of both conception and language". d Described by Walton as "the strangest tale that ever imagination formed", the novel has become an iconic horror text, considered by many critics as the a precursor to the genre of Science Fiction. Her novel presents science as a powerful force that can be used for good v and evil. This shows her recognition of its potential to fundamentally a challenge mankind's attitudes to God and to existence itself. The dictionary Shelley's preface states that one of her purposes was to, "exercise untried aptly defines Frankenstein as, "One who creates a monster or destructive resources of mind". Frankenstein clearly fits the definition of the Gothic novel agency that he cannot control or that brings about his own ruin." This that is given in Webster's Dictionary, as being a type of fiction, "characterized reflects the way in which the name of the scientist has been transferred to by picturesque settings; an atmosphere of mystery, gloom, and terror; that of his nameless creation. The novel's didactic strength lays with the sub- supernatural or fantastic occurrences; and violent and macabre events." Her title's inherent warning about the evils that can be set loose if man plays God novel's "wild and mysterious regions" are the icy wastes of the North; a bleak shown in Victor's obsessive quest to bestow life. In one sense, he becomes and forbidding Artic landscape that reinforces the emotional and intellectual representative of the archetypal `mad scientist'. isolation of the two protagonists. Bitter enmity casts these gothic outsiders The Romantic period ended with the coronation of Queen Victoria in from the, "communal warmth of the hearth of society". Windswept glacial 3.837, and the beginning of the Victorian Period. It challenged the ideas of fields as well as mountainous peaks provide a suitably desolate backdrop that logic and fact espoused by the previous 'Age of Reason' by promoting the is beyond the bounds of normal existence. Both are alienated, representative virtues of emotion, free thought, nature, the mind and the imagination. Its of the warring sides of human nature, love/hate, justice/injustice, good/evil literary themes also explored ideas of isolation, social disillusionment and and man/monster. Walton's ice-locked ship provides a claustrophobic setting the tragedy of loss as well as the otherworldly, imperfect and inexplicable. for the grippingly interwoven narratives. As the Webster's Encyclopedic Dictionary of the English Language, states, Romanticist reactions to science and rationality are evident in Shelley's Romanticism focused more on the subject matter rather than conventional depiction of Frankenstein's hideous nightmares and the inference of forms and as a result encouraged, "freedom of treatment," "introspection," his almost magical powers in harnessing life and death, the normal and and celebrated "nature, the common man, and freedom of the spirit." the abnormal. This couched in a tempestuous atmosphere of heightened A second wave of Romanticists saw the negative connotations surrounding emotions. Another genre trope is the novel's focus on decomposition and the sweeping social and economic changes being brought about by Industrial degradation and death.

Load more

  29

Copy Link