Bouriana Zakharieva "Frankenstein of the Nineties"

Discussion Questions:
General:

• Provide one example of a quote from a secondary source. Explain how it supports Zakharieva's argument.
• Provide one example of a quote from a primary source.  Explain how it supports Zakharieva's argument.

416:

• What is Zakharieva's thesis? Where is it located?
• What is actualization?

417:

• Explain:  "This effort of the director to speak through the original artistic codes of the Romantics resembles very much Franknestein's attempt to reproduce the authentic codes and mechanisms of Nature in a perfect artificial man" (417).
• What is significant, according to Zakharieva, about the film versions of the original creation scene in Frankenstein?

418:

• What is a "montage"(418)?
• How does Shelley's story differ from "other folk or Romantic narratives of creation of artificial beings" (418)?
• In what way is "the ideology of Frankenstein closer to the aesthetics of cinema" (418)?

419:

• In what two ways is Whale's version of Frankenstein "politically relevant" (419)?

420:

• What is "the concept of evil as inherent in a misshapen corporality" (420)?

421:

• What is "the reconstitution of the integrity of the communal body through the act of exclusion" (421)?
• What are "discursive paradigms" (421)?

422:

• Explain: "Frankenstein's scientific hubris can be seen  as an expression of a misogynist 'procreation envy'" (422).
• How does the "birth" episode in Branagh's film become "a symbolic representation of human evolution" (422)?
• What do "ontogenesis" and "phylogenesis" mean?

423:

• Explain:  "It is a merger of the given (the organic) and the produced (the mechanical)" (423).

424:

• Explain:  "In this opposition of the organic and the produced, Evil is on the side of the produced, Good is on the side of the natural" (424).
• Explain:  "The excessive is amoral . . . and subversive" (424).
• Explain: "It dominates  through the intensity of unmotivated evil; it operates a primordial force which is only retrospectively rationalized to intensify its daunting potential" (424).

425:

• Explain:  "In times of plague, when the human mind is reduced to hysterical flesh, disruption and chaos reign; and the abject, deformed, and incomplete body signifies this all-encompassing disorder" (425).
• What is the abject?
• What is "corporal  memory"? "hypercorporality"?

426:

• How are modern cyborgs "the effect of a machine" (426)?

427:

• Explain:  "The workings of science are shrouded in mystique" (427).

428:

• What is the difference between the Shelley and Whale versions of romantic relationships? Between the Shelley and Branagh versions?

429:

• How does the "composite" bride in Branagh's version differ from the two women who comprise her?
• Explain:  "The symbol of the virgin female heart (the conventional sign of femininity) seems to be one of the 'eternal' tropes of patriarchal culture" (429).
• Explain:  "'In Frankenstein then, woman's capacity to restore order is precisely what's missing'" (Qtd. in Zakharieva 429).

430:

• Explain:  "Plunged forcefully into the realm of competing males, the artificial female creature annihilates herself only to reinforce through this act the uncontested rule of male power" (430).