Media

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. (1818). Frankenstein; or, The Modern Prometheus. New York: Simon & Brown.

Geek of the Week

  • Kate Danessa
    • Automated Valor by August Cole
      • AV is a short story about the future of AI, robotics, and cybernetics in warfare. It centralizes a few distinct POVs, notably the AI commander Churchill, whose artificial but genuine existence challenges what it means to be ‘human’ in the future. The story also raises interesting questions about the changing nature of conflict, human connectivity, and human augmentation, while weaving in socio-economic elements of citizenship.
    • Triadic Ballet by Oskar Schlemmer (video, images, and related text below)
      • Gabrielle Brandstetter. “Kinetic Explorations. Oskar Schlemmer- Gerhard Bohner- Dieter Baumann,” in human- space- machine. Stage Experiments at the Bauhaus.
      • This piece is all about the physical elements of humanity. How does a body and its movements take up space? The triadic Ballet represents humans as fragmented, and by their ‘kinetic breakdown’. The performance and concepts are, of course, rooted in Bauhaus design principles and aesthetics, which we could weave into the conversation . . It’s also just fun to watch and is an interesting abstraction of human!

Theory and Commentary

Hayles, Katherine. 1999. Chapter 10 (247-82) in How We Became Posthuman. Chicago, Ill. : University of Chicago Press.

Significantly, all of these texts are obsessed in various ways, with the dynamics of evolution and devolution. Underlying their obsessions is a momentous question: when human meets the posthuman, will the encounter be for better of for worse? Will the posthuman preserve what we continue to value in the liberal subject? Will free will and individual agency still be possible in a posthuman future? Will we be able to recognize ourselves after the change? Will there still be a self to recognize and be recognized? (Hayles, 281)

or

Gormel, Elana. 2011. Science (Fiction) and Posthuman Ethics: Redefining the Human. The European Legacy 16(3): 339-54.

Additional Materials

Want to explore the genre of Romance literature more broadly? Romantic Circles is an online scholarly community that focuses on discussions about Gothic novels, early works of horror, and proto-science fiction, among other treasures.

The Fear Now podcast by XE Thesis Award Winner Ben Montoya

Here is a post from the awesome blog Open Culture about Reading Frankenstein on its 200th Anniversary.

Frankenbook

Below is Thomas Edison’s Frankenstein from 1910