Frankenreads Q&A: Princeton University
We continue the Frankenreads Q&A series today by presenting an interview with Professor Susan Wolfson, organizer of Frankenreads at Princeton University:
2018 marks the 200th anniversary of Frankenstein, a durable novel (never out of print!) with multiple cultural progeny.
A featured event at Princeton is a reading, with performative flair, of the entire (not long) novel, October 31/ November 1/ November 2.
Princeton will be one of the anchor sites of this world-wide event on Halloween.
Don't forget to head to the K-SAA Twitter and Facebook pages where we're sharing K-SAA updates, as well as continuing to celebrate #Romantics200 by including posts detailing what Keats and the Shelleys were doing 200 years ago. In July 1818, Percy Bysshe Shelley and Mary Shelley were often riding out from Bagni di Lucca, as shown in the following extract taken from a letter from P B Shelley to Thomas Love Peacock (25 July):
In the evening, Mary and I often take a ride, for horses are cheap in this country. In the middle of the day, I bathe in a pool or fountain, formed in the middle of the forests by a torrent. It is surrounded on all sides by precipitous rocks [...] My custom is to undress and sit on the rocks, reading Herodotus, until the perspiration has subsided, and then to leap from the edge of the rock into this fountain — a practice in the hot weather exceedingly refreshing. [...] I have lately found myself totally incapable of original composition. I employed my mornings, therefore, in translating the Symposium, which I accomplished in ten days. Mary is now transcribing it, and I am writing a prefatory essay.
The same letter considers the reception of Mary's novel Frankenstein, first published in January 1818. P B Shelley considers:
Frankenstein seems to have been well received; for although the unfriendly criticism of the Quarterly is an evil for it, yet it proves that it is read in some considerable degree.
And 200 years later it will be read aloud at several events around the world as part of the K-SAA's Frankenreads! 
Frankenreads Q&A: Susan Wolfson, Princeton UniversityWhat made you want to participate in Frankenreads, and what do you think is the relevance of Mary Shelley’s iconic novel today?I am a member of the K-SAA Board of Directors, where the idea, on our president Neil Fraistat's initiative, for this global event was hatched. I decided to make Princeton University one of the sites; I also provided a pdf of the novel (from my Longman Cultural Edition), divided into 62 reading units. My experiment with reading some of it out loud convinced me that it would take 9-10 hours to read the whole novel. So I arranged about 20 units per volume.Of course Frankenstein is iconic - the novel has never been out of print, and today is the most widely read, widely taught novel in the world. It also has a durable cultural life - most often as a meme without any particular connection to the original novel, one index of which is the frequency with which the Creature is called 'Frankenstein'. Relatedly, this Creature, which makes a powerful claim to a reader's sympathy for his abjection, his longing to join the human community, the abuse he suffers because of his physical difference from normal human form, is often called a 'Monster' (his creator's tendentious term) and treated as a demon. Yet, the first visual images of this Creature, from the posters for the 1823 play version and the cover of the publication of this play, to subsequent posters for other theatrical interpretations, to the frontispiece for the 1831 version of the novel (shown above), do not show an evidently scary nonhuman. These images are conspicuously human-form, and the one on the playtext quite dishy, even. So the disturbance is the rejection of a creature made by a human being, who is intuitively benevolent towards other human beings. These issues were quite alive in Mary Shelley's day in the institution of slavery (African and Eastern), in which those enslaved, often ethnically or racially different from their enslavers, were deemed subhuman brutes. More subtly, as Shelley knew from reading her mother's works, women could also be deemed, on the accident of a sexual character, subhuman by the ruling male order. These issues are ones we recognize today. But Frankenstein vibrates with more than this relevance. 'Franken-' has become the default prefix of any new development, branded as modernity, progress, and poised for social improvement, but which also bears, genetically, elements of disaster or unforeseen consequence, for the environment, and for human life. The prefix appears in Frankenfoods, Franken-fashion, Franken-economics - but most alarmingly in Franken-science. Our current version of this vivid ambivalence is gene-editing (CRISPR), with the promise of editing out genes that bear horrible, ravaging, fatal diseases, as well as propensities to blindness, cancer, and other debilities - perhaps even mortality itself. What could go wrong? Who would not want to realize young Victor Frankenstein's ideal of creating a perfect human being, immune to death except from horrific annihilation? Yes, the emergence of nuclear science was likened to unleashing a monstrosity on the world. But genetic science? The dark shadow, which scarcely registers in today's popular science discussions of gene therapy but which was very legible 40 years ago when cloning first emerged as a new science, is the unanticipated applications and consequences. What if new, unheard diseases emerge from this tinkering? What if science is taken over for political or economic gain? What would it mean to breed human beings for specific purposes that diminish their humanity? Frankenstein persists for activating these questions, but it is so much more than philosophy rendered into fictional form, so much more than a didactic allegory about humanity and otherness. It is also a vivid work of literary imagination that raises important questions without resolving them, that engages the reader with fascination, horror, excitement and self reflection.The reading of the whole novel foregrounds its literariness, and the way that telling a tale (the novel has multiple tales and tale-tellers) is itself a powerful performance, telling one's story, telling one's story to solicit sympathy, telling one's story in ways that may overproduce against sympathy, and telling one's story in relation to some of culture's most powerful fables - most conspicuously its myths of creation, from Prometheus to the Old Testament to Milton's Paradise Lost, to modern science at the turn of the nineteenth century.What are you doing for Frankenreads, who is involved, and what makes your Frankenreads event unique?
The Princeton event is unique in several ways. I received a grant from the Humanities Center to develop several events over three academic years. I began by teaching an interdisciplinary seminar in Fall 2016 on Frankenstein, Literature, Science, and Popular Culture that proved to be a mini-university, with students from English, History, Art, Comparative Literature, and Science. In Spring 2017, the Princeton University Players staged the 1823 play (based on Richard Brinsley Peake's Presumption; or the Fate of Frankenstein, first staged the Opera House in London): Frankenstein the Musical, with an original scored by a talented undergraduate science major. I've been on leave for most of this year, so have used this for planning for the next year, with a team of graduate students. This will begin with the Frankenread and involve three further events, and a version of my 2016 undergraduate seminar retooled for graduate students.
The Frankenread will not be a one-night marathon, as it is being planned elsewhere. We are going to do this on three consecutive evenings, punctuated with music, food, and a screening of the New Jersey Frankenstein, otherwise known as Thomas Edison's (silent) Frankenstein (1910) - an early event of technological cinematic animation that doubles the tale of animation at the heart of the novel. Though it shows the Creature as a monster (the endpoint of a long process of cultural refashioning in the nineteenth century), it is extremely canny about the configuring of Creature and Creator as doubles, especially in the repressed Victorian anxiety about sexual desire.
We also decided that we wanted this to be a community event, and not a campus-academic event. So in addition to students, faculty and staff at the University, from all kinds of departments in the sciences and humanities, we have readers from the community of arts and writers in our area, from local citizens, high school teachers, as well as participants from nearby New York, Philadelphia, Stevens Institute of Technology. This is one reason I wanted 62 units, to provide slots for everyone who wants to play along - and we hope our wide and various roster will also attract those who just want to come to the show.
There will be 4 followup events:1. 'Frankenstein's Progeny': A panel discussion on November 7, featuring Joyce Carol Oates, Peter Singer, Gunnar Rice, class of 17, and Madelyn Broome, class of 19. The Princeton students both wrote University-prize-winning essays (one since published) developed from their work in the seminar of Fall 16.2. 'Frankenstein, Frankenstein, and the Dreams of Science'. This is a lecture I'll be giving on November 8, at the University's Lewis Library of Science, about the excitements and dark shadows of science in Mary Shelley's day, the concentrated site of this ambivalence in Frankenstein,and the afterlife of Frankenstein in scientific progress today.3. 'Frankenstein, ethics, and Interdisciplinary teaching', a panel discussion, March 27, with John Bugg, Professor at Fordham University (Princeton PhD) and Adam Potkay, Professor at William and Mary, and Visiting Professor at the Center for Human Values at Princeton this academic year.These 3 events are free and open to the public.4. Finally, I shall be offering a graduate seminar, Frankenstein and Its Contexts, for the Spring term, 2019. Though this is limited to graduate students at Princeton and in programs with our consortium universities (pretty much all on the arc from Philadelphia to New Haven), my hope is that the students themselves will generate one or two other events, perhaps a colloquium on their terms paper adventures. 
Links
Local Princeton Frankenreads webpage, still under construction.
Princeton Frankenreads reading text will the Longman Cultural Edition, which is being distributed well ahead of time, so that readers can rehearse. [All readers will be thanked with the gorgeous, informative, award-winning Annotated Frankenstein, ed. Susan Wolfson and her husband Ron Levao (2012)].