Living on or Textual Afterlife: "Frankenstein" and "Paradise Lost"

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá; Talita Cassemiro Paiva Alves

doi:10.17851/1982-0739.22.3.263-278

Autores

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)
Talita Cassemiro Paiva Alves Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.17851/1982-0739.22.3.263-278

Palavras-chave:

Adaptation, countersignature, Milton, Shelley

Resumo

We propose to read Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as an adaptation of John Milton’s Paradise Lost. Adaptation, as we assess it, departs from the “palimpsestuous” quality of or supplementary logic inherent in this process of creation, as theorized by Julie Sanders and Linda Hutcheon, and reaches the moment when a text (Frankenstein), in the face of the event of another’s text (Paradise Lost), tries to respond or to countersign it (Jacques Derrida). In this sense, adaptation is neither imitation, nor reproduction, nor metalanguage, but an acknowledgement of the fluidity of texts over time (history, literary history), and space (cultures, different subject positions). Ultimately the question is not how one writer or text influences another or how we can visualize textual trajectories in literary tradition, but the extent to which adaptation becomes a pointed, critical, finite response of one text to another, a kind of reading as countersignature (Derrida).

Downloads

Os dados de download ainda não estão disponíveis.

Biografia do Autor

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Luiz Fernando Ferreira Sá has a PhD in Literary Studies and is a Junior Researcher at CNPq.
Talita Cassemiro Paiva Alves, Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais (UFMG)

Talita Cassemiro Paiva has a Master’s degree in Literary Studies.

Referências

ALBRECHT-CRANE, Christa and CUTCHINS, Dennis. Introduction. In: Adaptation Studies, New Approaches. New Jersey: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 2010. p. 11-24.

BALDICK, Chris. In Frankenstein’s shadow: myth, monstrosity, and nineteenth-century writing. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1987.

BLOOM, Harold. Introduction. In: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Frankenstein. Ed. Harold Bloom. New York: Chelsea House. 2007. p. 1-11.

CANTOR, Paul A. The Nightmare of Romantic Realism. In: Creature and Creator: Myth-Making and English Romanticism. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 1984. p. 103-32.

DERRIDA, Jacques. Countersignature. Trans. Mairéad Hanrahan. Paragraph, v. 27 n. 2, p. 7-42, 2004.

DERRIDA, Jacques. Acts of Literature. New York: Routledge, 1992.

FISH, Stanley. Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1967.

GILBERT, Sandra M., and GUBAR, Susan. The Madwoman in the Attic: the woman writer and the nineteenth-century literary imagination. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1984.

HUTCHEON, Linda. A Theory of Adaptation. New York: Routledge, 2006.

LAMB, John B. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Milton’s Monstrous Myth. Nineteenth-Century Literature, v. 47 n. 3, p. 303-319, 1992.

LEVINE, George. The Ambiguous Heritage of Frankenstein. In: The Endurance of Frankenstein: Essays on Mary Shelley’s Novel. Ed. George Levine and U. C. Knoepflmacher. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1979. p. 3-30.

MIKICS, David. A New Handbook of Literary Terms. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2007.

MILTON, John. Paradise Lost. Ed. William Kerrigan, John Rumrich, and Stephen M. Fallon. New York: Modern Library, 2008.

NEWLYN, Lucy. Paradise Lost and the Romantic Reader. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993.

OATES, Joyce Carol. Frankenstein’s Fallen Angel. Critical Inquiry, v. 10 n. 3, p. 543-554, 1984.

POLLIN, Burton R. Philosophical and Literary Sources of Frankenstein. Comparative Literature, v. 17, n. 2, p. 97-108, 1965.

SANDERS, Julie. Adaptation and Appropriation: The New Critical Idiom. London: Taylor & Francis, 2005.

SHELLEY, Mary. Frankenstein. London: Collector’s Library, 2004. SOYKA, David. Frankenstein and the Miltonic Creation of Evil. Extrapolation, v. 33 n. 2, p. 166-177, 1992.

TROPP, Martin. The Monster. In: Bloom’s Modern Critical Interpretations: Frankenstein. Ed. Harold Bloom. Updated Edition. New York: Chelsea House. 2007. p. 13-27.