Mary Shelley's Frankenstein Cultural Criticism Perspective

• What is the difference between high and low forms of culture?

What is the literary canon?  How have cultural critics revised the notion of what constitutes the canon?

Explain:  "They seem to be more descriptive and less evaluative, more interested in relating than in rating" (483).

Explain:  "Rather than being static or monolithic, culture is really a set of interactive cultures, alive and changing, and cultural critics should be present- and even future-oriented" (483).

• Explain:  "The object of cultural study . . . . should be the human consciousness, and the goal of that critical analysis should be to understand and show how that consciousness is itself forged and formed, to a great extent, by cultural forces" (484-85).

485:

• What is semiology?
• Explain: "Lacan also argued that the ego, subject, or self that we think of as being natural (our individual human nature) is in fact a product of the social order and its symbolic systems (especially, but not exclusively, language) (485).

• Explain:  "There is nothing outside the text" (qtd. in Murfin 486).
• What is deconstruction?
• How is Foucault different from the Marxists?
• What are discourses?

• What are "radically organic" intellectuals (488)?

489:

• How does Gramsci define ideologies? How does this conception differ from Williams's?
• Explain:  "The main function of ideology is to reproduce the society's existing relations of production, and that . . . function is even carried out in literary texts" (489).
• Explain:  "Popular fictions . . . were mere packhorses designed (however unconsciously) to carry the baggage of a culture's ideology, or mere brood mares destined to reproduce it" (489).

• Explain: "By maintaining artificial boundaries, universities have tended to reassert the high/low culture distinction, implying that all the latter subjects [e.g. television, film, current affairs, and gossip] are best left to historians, sociologists, anthropologists, and communication theorists" (484).
• What does Murfin mean by "true culture" (484)?

• How does Williams define ideologies?

• What are "dialogues between discourses" (488)?
• What are "polyphonic" novels (488)?
• Explain Bakhtin's concept of the carnivalesque.
  

• Explain Homi Babha's concept of hybridity.
  
• Why, according to Murfin, will the future of literary criticism "owe a great deal indeed" to early cultural critics?

• What is ecocriticism?