Frankenreads Q&A: The University of Haifa
Our Frankenreads Q&A series continues with commentary from Zoe Beenstock from the University of Haifa. Ahead of another exciting Frankenreads event taking place on 31 October 2018, we caught up with Zoe - who is working with Yosefa Raz to organize the event - to hear about their plans. See below to discover what is set to be an engaging and collaborative event that will invite participants to share their musings on the novel and the creature in particular.
Frankenreads is an international celebration of the 200th anniversary of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein for Halloween 2018 organized by the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Are you part of a Frankenreads event, and do you want to participate in a Q&A? Contact Anna Mercer (mercerannam@gmail.com).There's also still time to register a new Frankenreads event! See the Frankenreads website for more information.
What made you want to participate in Frankenreads, and what do you think is the relevance of Mary Shelley's iconic novel today?Frankenstein is one of the most significant novels that I've written about and taught. I love discussing it with students and always learn new perspectives to this Rashomon-like palimpsest. I see Shelley's novel as a watershed that looks back in anger on the legacy of Enlightenment, lamenting its exclusion of women, its rampant individualism, its unguided approach to pedagogy, and its glaring lack of any social vision, anticipating a bleak future to come. The latter is prophesized by the monster and his unrealizable female counterpart, who herald the posthumanist crisis raging in contemporary bio-ethical and environmental debate. The monster finds echoes in the dilemma of whether replicants are human in Blade Runner, and in questions of whether we can eat android sheep in an age of cloning.What are you doing for Frankenreads, who is involved, and what makes your Frankenreads event unique?The Frankenreads event will provide a unique opportunity for our department to gather as a community, in Mary Shelley's spirit. After a brief introduction and some background on the summer of 1816, undergraduates, graduate students and faculty members will break up into small groups to analyze the opening of Vol. 1, Chap. IV - 'It was a dreary night of November' - through to Victor's dream about his mother. After the analysis we will compare notes as a large group and sum up our main observations. We will then hold screenings of cinema adaptations of Frankenstein, facilitated by Dr. Alex Feldman, to be followed by a creative writing reading session on monsters. Dr. Yosefa Raz will issue a call for creative writing and poems or excerpts from literary texts around the theme of monsters, inviting students, faculty members and members of the community at Haifa to ponder monstrosity and share their work. The evening will conclude with a prize for the best monster poem and a raffle of monster swag. 