All Stitched Up: The Final Frankenpost

In reflecting upon the work we’ve done in this course, I thought about the process I followed for each blog post and how I approached the task of bringing Frankenstein and the secondary texts into dialogue with each other. The first and most surprising observation here was that I had spent very little time in my primary text. I suppose that is the genius of the “choose a text that you are very comfortable with” directive: because I know the text so well, I didn’t really need to consult it very often in order to effectively position it in those dialogues. Still, what surprised me about this is the extent to which it violated my usual mode—which is to say, forcing myself to investigate the reasons for my surprise resulted in the revelation that I had what could be considered a “usual mode.” In retrospect, I have realized that my default approach to primary texts has been strongly centered around very close readings and attention to the smallest, word-level details; in my work, secondary texts have most often served as a way to expand upon and contextualize my readings of those moments. The assignments for this class encouraged a reversal of that mode: thinking about Frankenstein through the critical lenses we explored in the secondary readings required a broader, stepped-back approach that was novel for me but happily not uncomfortable. In that sense, I not only identified an area of weakness but also gained quite a bit of confidence in my ability to overcome it with practice.

Another area of growth for me during this course came about through the collaborative work. As obvious as this seems, the task served as a timely reminder that “obvious” is a very subjective term. In my writing I am often anxious about appearing to over-explain or give too much tedious detail in explicating something that is “obvious” to me. The experience of working with bright, articulate people whose initial readings, interpretations, and ‘aha’ moments differed wildly from my own underscored how unlikely it is for any two people to read something and find the exact same takeaways to be “obvious” and unnecessary to unpack. This is such an easy thing to forget, and failing to account for those differences can be disastrous for literary scholarship, so I appreciated the illustrative reminder.

As to the question of how my views on Frankenstein have changed over the course of the quarter, I think that the “stepping back” approach forced by the arbitrary pairing of critical and theoretical material with this particular text made the novel feel significantly less fixed as an object of study. Especially given the number of articles we read that sought to un-fix various taxonomic boundaries of literature, the juxtaposition of all of these texts highlighted the idea that Frankenstein is not essentially a Romantic novel, a British novel, a Gothic novel, fiction, speculative fiction, etc.; rather, the ways in which it functions in those modes within those historical contexts can inform our understanding of those modes and historical contexts as well as the text itself. More than anything, I think this has implications for my ability to teach literature effectively—and I mean “literature” both in the sense of individual works and as a powerfully constitutive, interpretive, and quintessentially human endeavor.