** Homework Questions **
General:

• Who is Lipking's audience?
• What is his main argument?
• How well does Lipking practice what he preaches? Explain.
• How well does Lipking use quotes to support his argument?  Provide an example.

• Why is Frankenstein suited for a "free-for-all" of interpretations in which "Anything goes"(314)?
• How does Frankenstein bend the traditional canon? What does that mean?

• Explain:  "Understanding a plot precedes interpretation, rather than being itself an interpretive construction of the text" (316).

• What work does Lipking suggest has the greatest influence on Frankenstein?
• What does "adumbrate" mean?
• What, according to Lipking, are the two most powerful feats of the novel?

• Explain:  "If poststructuralist theory has taught us any lesson, it is that convictions about the indeterminacy and undecidability of all texts do nothing to stem the effort to find unique and compelling readings" (315).

• Explain:  "The object of the debate is not to prove or refute or win but only to take part, translating the novel into one's own discourse" (316).
• Explain:  "On this level of insight, contraries can be equally true, and fierce debate need not exclude consensus" (316).

318:

• Explain:  "Despite the consensus of sophisticated critics, ordinary readers keep looking at the wrong evidence and coming to the wrong conclusions" (318).  What is the "wrong" evidence?

319:

• Explain what Lipking says about Sesame Street and the Special Olympics. Why does it "not have much to do with the novel that Mary Shelley wrote" (319)?

• Explain:  "Frankenstein does not admit a resolution" (320).
• Explain:  "Love of the Other and fear of the Other, however logically incompatible, can be equally well motivated, and . . . idealism can be selfish and destructive as well as altruistic and creative" (320).

• Explain:  "But what many critics define as an attack on the assumptions of Romanticism might equally be defined as the Romantics mainstream" (321).

• Explain:  "What nature creates, and civilization deforms, a renewed attention to nature can restore" (323).
• How is Frankenstein a "thought-experiment" ?

• Explain:  "Shelley herself was obsessed by the need to repair her own lack of instruction" (324).
• How, according to Lipking, have Walton, Victor, and the Creature each been mis-educated?

• Explain:  "Put simply, the Creature is just too good" (325).  How is this so?

• Explain:  Frankenstein "shows us that everything has gone wrong, and leaves us to search for reasons" (326).
• What is a "self-deconstructing author" (326)?

• Explain:  "Idealism destroys content" (327).
• How does the Creature resemble Rousseau?
• Explain:   "Much as I might like to, I cannot . . . tell you what has gone wrong with life, and neither can the novel" (327).

• Explain:  "The identification of the Creature with the spirit of the mountain, as well as the Creature's mastery of the landscape where mere human beings cannot survive, underlines the futility of trying to draw comfort or companionship from something as cold and indifferent as nature" (329).
• Explain:  "Frankenstein's fault was not ambition but his failure to look on his work and find it good" (329).  Does Lipking believe this?

• Explain:  "Indeed the capacity for arguing both sides of a question, or for providing material to undermine its own first premises, accounts for much of the fascination--as well as the terror--of Frankenstein" (330).
• Explain:  "I hope that you will not agree with me too much" (330).