Garrett Stewart "In the Absence of Audience: Of Reading and
Dread in Mary Shelley"
** Homework Questions ** 435:
Explain: "Shelley's stress is laid on credibility and
dissemination as much as on rhetorical heightening and the
necessities of resolution" (435).
436:
Explain: "Shelley's [texts] are embroiled in the
psychosocial protocols of literary acculturation" (436).
437:
Is Stewart accurate in identifying Victor Frankenstein as
"the dying last of his family line" (437). Explain.
Explain: "In Frankenstein, . . . the reader
receives the narrative of deviant creation as the event's only
legacy" (437).
438:
Explain: "[T]he completed story never arrives at a narrated
destination" (438).
439:
Explain: "When, in the reading of Frankenstein,
fiction structures desire in the form of its secondary
processing as story, narrative has overstepped the
bounds of art or commodity to become a prosthesis of social
subjecthood" (439).
440:
According to Stewart, what "two traditions of the British
novel" does Mary Shelley's novel "conflate"(440)? Explain.
Explain Stewart's claim about Victor: "[H]e seeks what
Shelley achieves: the vivification of an inert form" (440).
441:
Explain: "[T]he Creature is humanized by reading"
(441).
443:
What is an "ur-text"? What is the ur-text in Frankenstein?
