Honors 495-51: The Legacies of Frankenstein

This was my last Honors course, taken Spring 2018, 200 years after the publication of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.  The course examined the text as well as the legacy of science fiction left behind by Shelley’s work.  While some of the newer subject matter we discussed, such as Artificial Intelligence and humanoid robots, seemed like a reach to compare to Shelley’s original intentions, much of what we studied correlated almost exactly to the original work.

One of the projects we worked on in this class involved identifying a piece of literature, film, etc. and analyzing it compared to Frankenstein.  A lot of my classmates had really cool ideas, like Iron Man, Breaking Bad, or genetically modified foods.  I did mine on Tim Burton’s Frankenweenie, which is an adaptation of the film for children.  I enjoyed the movie when it came out, and I thought the lighthearted nature of the film would be fun to discuss.

Our final paper required us to consider the impact on either our majors or our lives as citizen leaders with regards to Frankenstein or another text we had read/film we had seen.  I chose to analyze the ways in which Stephen Crane’s The Monster carries uniquely American racial themes that are still prevalent today.