Homework Questions:
280:

• Explain:  Psychoanalytic theory "can at once decipher the significance of the uncanny and clarify the relation between the construction of desire and of modern society, primarily because it conceives of society as the product of a collective fantasy, as a psychoanalytic construct in its own right" (280).
• How does the "domain of rivalry" between Victor and his creature resemble Lacan's Imaginary order (280)?

• How, according to Collings, is Victor's solitude "oedipal" (281)?
• Explain: "The son gives up the physical mother and desires a figurative representation of her, a substitute for her in the realm of language or social relations" (281).
• How is Caroline's death "highly appropriate" (281)?

• Explain: "In effect, all women are for [Victor] the dead mother" (282).
• Explain:  "The turn from erotic ideal to grotesque body horrifies Victor,  and in this respect he is a responsible citizen of the Symbolic realm, longing for Elizabeth rather than the mother"(282).

• How, according to Collings, do windows represent mirrors in Frankenstein ?

• Explain: "The unified self is a fiction" (285).
• Explain: "To become a subject, one must lose an element of the subject forever" (285).

• Explain: "If Victor creates the monster in order to revolt against the Symbolic, the monster protests against being excluded from it" (288).

• Explain:  "If Safie represents woman as she is accepted into language and the family, the monster embodies woman as she is excluded from the world of images and words" (290).

• Explain: "He is thus a figure of monstrous enjoyment only in the eyes of others, just as he is the maternal Thing not to himself but others" (292).
• In what way is the monster "a figure for what Lacan calls jouissance" (292)?

• Explain: "The creature reveals the general structure of ideological projection per se, the abstract category by virtue of which ideology can operate" (294).

• Explain: "Victor circuments normative sexuality with a sexuality of the Imaginary in which the child can re-create the dead mother in a prelinguistic, visual mode" (284).
• Explain: "Literary creation is for [Shelley] a form of matricide" (284).

• Explain: "What precedes language must in some way also precede the ego itself" (285).

• Explain: "We can only recognize ourselves in an image that in fact fails to depict us" (286).
• Explain: "The novel suggests that the symbolic, the Imaginary, and the sense of ordinary reality itself depend on the primordial loss of the maternal body; to revive it is to threaten the order of the world" (286).

• How is the creature, according to Collings, like a woman?
• Explain: "Blindness to the Imaginary may allow some tolerance for a body that travesties it" (289).

• How does ideology operate, according to Zizek?
• What is "a postutopian form of political hope" (294)?