Fred Botting "Reflections of Excess: Frankenstein, the French Revolution, and Monstrosity"

Discussion Questions:
432:

• How, according to Botting, is Shelley's novel monstrous? (see also 436)

433:

• How, according to Botting, is his own essay monstrous? (see also 437-38)
• What is the new historicist's position on histories?

434:

• What are deconstructive readings?
• What are "'totalizing' ideologies" (434)?

435:

• Explain: "Produced by positions that can't contain them, monsters activate an excessive force which continually poses a challenge to unity, singularity, and stability, a threat that demands repeated attempts to reconstitute boundaries from within" (435).

438:

• Explain: "Identifying with its specular image in the mirror, identifying with the Other of language, the subject exists only in relations of difference and desire"(438).

438-39:

• How has the French Revolution been seen as monstrous?

440:

• Explain: "From radical perspectives, it is the social system that bears the responsibility for creating monsters" (440).

441:

• Explain:  "Monster-makers become monstrous in the very act of creating monsters or in the resistance of the monsters they create"(441).
• What evidence does Botting provide to support his claims about Sterrenburg and Paulson?

442:

• Explain:  "Frankenstein's heterogeneous assembly of political positions makes many identifications possible, but refuses to specify a single, recognizable and dominant viewpoint" (442).

443:

• What is the function of the quote from Shelley on this page?

444:

• What example(s) of reversal does Botting include on this page?

445:

• Explain:  "The confessor's actions reflect less on Justine than the clerical institutions that make her a monster" (445).
• Explain: "Inside and outside, center and margin, have their distinctions subverted by a novel in which different speakers and writers also occupy the positions of readers and listeners" (445).

447:

• How, according to Botting, is Frankenstein like Burke and Walpole?

448:

• Explain:  "The possibility of adopting different positions, always available in the frictions of textual oppositions and differences, is the partial and yet powerful prerogative of that figure of potential excess, the reader" (448).
• Explain: "Reading always involves some differences and thus entails the possibility of monstrous literary and political transgressions" (448).