Sample Assignment 3

Brian Page
220:12 Principles of Literary Study
Fall 2001

Paper 1 - Frankenstein
5 - 7 pages Due Monday, October 15, 2001

Examine some specific aspect of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein in light of M. M. Bakhtin and/or Michel Foucault's comments on discourse and knowledge structures. In what ways do the passages from Bakhtin and/or Foucault in our packet reveal the way that discourses collide and contend for control in this part of the fictional world of Frankenstein? The territories you examine could be restricted to the national, institutional, familial, and especially the subjective territory of the mind as represented in a particular episode or a few passages of the novel. You could address religious discourse, the discourses of science and discovery, the discourse of literary romance, and the feminine and masculine ideals within any of these discourses that are represented in the novel. You should focus on specific sentences from Bakhtin or Foucault as well as from Frankenstein in your analysis in an effort to produce as close a reading of them as possible.

Some of the questions you might address include the following: How well does Bakhtin's notion of the formation of the self fit with Frankenstein? Is the choice of the self of which Bahktin speaks made as one that remains static or constant? Or does that choice need to be renewed in an ongoing morphology, or reconstruction of self as part of the continual subjugation to an array of various competing discourses? One could do this through a discussion of individual characters, doubles (Walton and Frankenstein, for example), and/or complements (Frankenstein and Elizabeth, for example) which structure Shelley's novel. In this regard, you could look at the patterns that any individual discourse sets up for an individual character, or between two characters that are each other's complement. Finally, in Foucault's terms, what are some of the inadequate knowledges that re-emerge in the space of the episode or passages you select and begin to develop a criticism of other discourses and knowledges at work in the structure of Frankenstein?

Again, 5 -7 pages, double-spaced. Please use a standardized font (something like Times New Roman 12 point).