Frankenstein & Blade Runner: The Responsibilities of Creators

Describes how Mary Shelley analyzes the ethical nature of male poetics of her time through her work `Frankenstein'. Parallelism in the creation of the monster in `Frankenstein' and an artist's creation of art; Emphasis on ethical implications of representation in society; Influence that Mary Shelley received from her husband.

The article presents a literary criticism of the novel "Frankenstein," by Mary Shelley, particularly the characters' inability to be successfully sympathetic with one another, but the author argues that the book "relies on compensatory sympathy." The grotesqueness of Frankenstein's body and the story of Safie and the De Laceys are considered as are the frames in which the novel is layered, particularly in that it uses written, spoken, narrative, and epistolary means of conveying the story.

"The original 1818 text of Mary Shelley's classic novel, with annotations and essays highlighting its scientific, ethical, and cautionary aspects ... Victor, “the modern Prometheus,” tried to do what he perhaps should have left to Nature: create life. Although the novel is most often discussed in literary-historical terms—as a seminal example of romanticism or as a groundbreaking early work of science fiction—Mary Shelley was keenly aware of contemporary scientific developments and incorporated them into her story ...This edition of Frankenstein pairs the original 1818 version of the manuscript—meticulously line-edited and amended by Charles E. Robinson, one of the world's preeminent authorities on the text—with annotations and essays by leading scholars exploring the social and ethical aspects of scientific creativity raised by this remarkable story."

"... Scientist Victor Frankenstein creates a large and powerful creature in the likeness of man, but is disgusted by his own creation and he abandons the being to fend for itself. Spawning generations of horror stories in the genre, Frankenstein is a gruesome warning against playing God and attempting the engineering of life ... "

" ... the real lesson of the novel is that “we must care for our technologies as we do our children.” According to Latour, “Dr. Frankenstein’s crime was not that he invented a creature through some combination of hubris and high technology, but rather that he abandoned the creature to itself ... "

"Much in Frankenstein suggests that the novel and classical psychoanalysis are meant for each other. The creation becomes a significant act, at once paradigmatic and intensely human, when viewed as a repetition of Frankenstein's primal-scene trauma, with the Creature emerging as a representation of the scene and the related oedipal complex ... "

"A rich theme running through Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is responsibility. In a straightforward—even didactic—way, the novel chronicles the devastating consequences for an inventor and those he loves of his utter failure to anticipate the harm that can result from raw, unchecked scientific curiosity ... "

BBC Bitesize presents their analysis of Frankenstein which includes plot, characters, themes and more.

"When Victor Frankenstein created his monster he never named it, yet its complex personality and struggle for identity and acceptance provides a profound insight to the human condition. This clip examines the troubled relationship between Frankenstein and the monster, and the role of other characters in the novel, including William, Dr Clerval, Elizabeth, and Captain Walton. It is an ideal resource for English literature students."

"Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is one of the most widely read novels of all time. Its two central characters, the scientist Victor Frankenstein and the being he creates, have gained mythic status in their own right. Engaging with the novel's characterization is crucial to gaining a real understanding of its themes and contexts, including education, gender difference, imperialism, personal identity, revolutionary politics, and science ... "

" At its core ... Shelley's Frankenstein is a contemplation on what it means to be human, what it means to chase perfection, and what it means to fear things such things as ugliness, loneliness, and rejection ... "

"This article proposes that the most important element in the motion picture "Blade Runner" is the chaotic confusion of boundaries within the film. This confusion of boundaries serves as a reminder that chaos is the site of creative possibility; just as is illustrated in Ancient Near Eastern mythology and the Hebrew Bible. As spectators are engaged in a constant process of redefinition, "Blade Runner" insists on active spectator participation in the double-movement of dividuation and dissolve ... "

"Examines the treatment of cybernetics in the motion picture `Blade Runner' directed by Ridley Scott. Plot of the motion picture; Comparison of the film to the novel from which it was based; Depiction of human civilization in the film; Characteristics of the so-called replicants in the film; Differences between the replicants and the humans ... "

" ... Replicants were built to be human in almost every way, yet they are denied human status, like many of the others who cannot qualify for off-world placement. "Blade Runner" is in essence about the desperate struggle to survive, whether one is a genetic human or a genetically produced human ... "

"... The most intelligent critique of the film ... places Blade Runner within a cycle of science fiction films intimately involved in exploring "the problematic nature of the human being and the difficult task of being human" ... "

"Examines the religious subtext in Ridley Scott's film `Blade Runner.' Film's emphasis on the Biblical story of the creation and fall of man; Exemplification of the film's central strategy of doubleness; Importance of the sibling rivalry recounted in the book of Genesis in the film; Parallelism between Jacob and the film character Deckard ... "

"Dystopic works, cinematic and literary, often project onto an idealized past or imaginary future some spatio-temporal possibilities, which human intellectual and physical dynamics can explore and realize. Blade Runner (1982) by Ridley Scott inverts, in science-fiction style, the exalted aspirations of humankind for scientific and technological progress, and attacks the morality of futuristic capitalism ... "

"The aim of this paper is to analyse Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) as a postmodern film which foregrounds and questions the problematic concept of creation in cinema, and in art generally, from a double perspective. On the one hand, the diegetic process of creation, the genetic design of replicants, introduces the doubling motif, that of simulacra, a result of nostalgia for the past invariably accompanied by a preoccupation with authenticity ... "