Launching Frankenreads: Interview with Neil Fraistat, Beth Dolan, and Amanda French
As the website for Frankenreads launches this week, the creators of the project--Neil Fraistat, Beth Dolan, and Amanda French--tell us what the project entails and how you can get involved. Visit frankenreads.org to find out more!
1. How did you come up with the idea of Frankenreads? What specific experiences led each of you to pursue the project?
Beth: At a 2016 board meeting, the K-SAA board of directors were brainstorming ideas for celebrating the many forthcoming Romantic Bicentennials when I came up with the idea for Frankenreads. Since Frankenstein is perhaps the most popular work that we’ll be celebrating in 2018, it occurred to me that a Bloomsday-like public event would work well. Every June 16, the day the entire action of James Joyce’s Ulysses takes place, scholars and enthusiasts all around the world stage full readings of the novel; usually with students, scholars, community members, and even celebrities taking turns reading Joyce’s performative prose. As Frankenstein is so concerned with the dangers of isolation, and the value of community, a global effort to support local, community-based readings of the novel seemed a poignant (and fun) way to celebrate the 200th anniversary of this influential, thought-provoking, and relevant novel. I proposed the idea to the board, and Neil dubbed it "Frankenreads," identifying Halloween as the ideal date and securing NEH funding.
Neil: I was so taken with Beth’s suggestion because of the sheer amount of interest in the novel worldwide. In the United States, it is one of the most read novels in both high school and college curricula and remains a cultural touchstone because of its rich cinematic history. I have always thought of Frankenstein as a crucial means of communicating Romanticism to the world, which is a key mission of the Keats-Shelley Association of America.
Amanda: Neil generously invited me to be a part of Frankenreads because I had done similar work managing large-scale distributed communities for the THATCamp project. (See http://thatcamp.org.)
2. How did you go about finding organizations to build the project? What specific organizations are signed on, and what are some of the interesting ways they will be participating?
Neil: In applying for the NEH grant, I contacted a few major libraries and institutions, all of whom expressed interest in participating. Among them: the Bodleian Library (Oxford), Houghton Library (Harvard), Huntington Library, New York Public Library, National Taiwan University, and Princeton University. Each of these institutions has expressed excitement about Frankenreads. Libraries will be hosting public readings of the novel, related exhibitions, and speakers on all things Frankenstein. Universities and high schools are also welcome to host readings, colloquia, screening of films, and other related events. Princeton, for instance, is planning a three-day event, with a public reading of the novel taking place in a Gothic dining hall on campus. We believe that Frankenreads will spur much creative activity across the globe as our list of participating institutions rapidly expands. Indeed, to foster such creativity, we are planning communal quarterly brainstorming conference calls with our various constituencies. Our chief goal, however, will be to make participation in Frankenreads easy for any interested organization or individual. We want to allow people to read or watch centrally developed content. For example, we will be livestreaming a Frankenstein reading at NEH, alongside virtual talks and discussions. We also want organizations to feel able to create and contribute content themselves. Such content might involve hosting local readings of part or all of Frankenstein, volunteering to write for the centrally-edited multi-authored Frankenreads blog, or participating in social media activity. What we hope is that a multitude of perspectives from around the globe will be brought together in dialogue: scientists, literary scholars, filmmakers, horror fans, AI and robotics engineers, and many more.
Amanda and Beth: Alongside Neil’s extensive network of Romantic scholars, the following organizations have also expressed a desire to participate: Kids Need to Read, British Library, Lehigh University, and Arizona State University's Center for Science and the Imagination.
3. How can people get involved with Frankenreads, and how can you help them to create and set up an event?
Beth: We have developed a digital “toolbox” to provide key information about the novel itself, how to organize the readings, and how to publicize the events.
Neil: Our Frankenreads website (http://frankenreads.org) provides all the information necessary for getting involved, including various bibliographical resources for reading, interpreting, and teaching the novel. We’ll be adding tips for setting up an event, along with branding swag available, in the near future, as part of what we’re calling “Frankenreads in a Box.”
4. The novel remains important to many different groups of people. Why? And what do you think we might learn about Frankenstein through the project?
Beth: I am most excited to learn what Frankenstein means to various communities of people—whether in person through local events, or via global online communities. Mary Shelley’s first novel continues to speak to us in so many ways. The novel understands the challenges of parenthood (Victor blames his father for all his troubles at one point), or to put it broadly, the challenge of raising creative rather than destructive children, helping them to choose community instead of isolation. Victor’s flawed decision-making resonates with the current misdirected desire for fame and belonging that seems to drive young men’s embrace of terrorism. Through the Creature’s story, we are able to talk about being different, and experiencing rejection based on external factors at the very moment when one wants more than anything to be seen and loved. The Creature’s moving and eloquent story reminds us not to judge one another based on superficial categories such as appearance, nationality, incarceration, citizenship status, gender, class, race, sexuality. This is something we still struggle with as a society, and a desire to overcome this limit on our capacity as humans underlies the success of popular media like “Humans of New York,” and movements like Black Lives Matter, or PRIDE celebrations around the world. I also find the novel’s portrayal of loss to be moving. When I teach the novel, we keep a “body count”— either deaths we witness or deaths that the narrator describes in the past. Victor’s father fell in love with his mother as she mourned her father. What is it about the vulnerability associated with loss that makes one person attractively vulnerable and another, such as Victor, to act negatively to fill the void? The sanitizing of death (how many of us have seen a dead body?), current anti-aging products, and other cultural factors, turn our attention away from the certainty of our mortality; we don’t necessarily know how to talk about death and loss effectively. Frankenstein provides a “third stage” through which we can talk about that issue. I could go on and on, but I’ll add, finally, that because Mary Shelley was a teenager when she wrote the novel, it is a great example of “girl power” in action for the current generation, so many of whom have stories that equally need telling.
Neil: I’d simply add to Beth’s excellent points two other well-known and extraordinarily resonant aspects of the novel: the questions it raises about the ethical limits of technoscience and the deadly logic of patriarchy. Through Frankenreads, I think we’ll learn something important about Frankenstein as a global phenomenon; about what it has come to mean in different places and spaces across the globe. When we initially published the Frankenstein manuscripts on the Shelley-Godwin Archive, some 60,000 unique visitors came to see them; a disproportionate number of whom were from Latin America and Eastern Europe. It made me curious about the reasons for that interest: how and through what media had Frankenstein taken hold in those parts of the world? I hope we will be able to add to the Frankenreads website a list of Frankenstein translations and films assembled by our participants worldwide, as well as criticism and popular culture remediations in languages beyond English.