A tale within a tale within a tale.
While reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein I was asked to participate in Emily Williams’ project, The Object Lag, so I spontaneously proposed a lecture with this book as key stone.
I have started researching why the metaphor of the monster raises complex philosophical and political issues and how we can link these with historical and contemporary factors.
I have also approached Shelley’s chaology and compared it to contemporary modes of artistic processes aiming at disorganizing rather than systemizing knowledge (“Invention, it must be humbly admitted, does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos” –in Mary Shelley’s Introduction to Frankenstein).
This has of course led to an intertextual reading of Frankenstein and to a different experience of the book. Then such questions could be raised: Isn’t the book object in itself monstrous? And if so, is there an aesthetic of monstrosity? What is the function of this fiction?