Only sources that should be used is the book Frankenstein and the Other source (Frankenstein and the State of Nature) that I

Prompt for Information Fluency Paper

120 Points

For this paper, be sure to articulate a clear claim as a thesis, suggest what is at stake in your thesis, offer supporting claims in each supporting paragraph and support those claims with specific evidence from the text that you analyze in detail, showing how the evidence bears out your claim and, ultimately, your thesis. You will also be asked to integrate a secondary or additional primary source from our edition of Frankenstein (Context source chosen: Frankenstein and the State of Nature by Jonathan Bate)

. Please use MLA formatting. This paper should be at least 3 pages long.

For this assignment, you will be writing a "lens" essay using Frankenstein and the State of Nature by Jonathan Bate from our edition of Frankenstein. Read your selection with an eye to the idea, fact, concept, or other information that will help us to understand the novel (Frankenstein) better or in a new light. Then, apply that idea, fact, concept, or information to a reading of a specific passage or two from the novel. How do we see the passage(s) differently or better, thanks to the lens source (Frankenstein and the state of nature)?

Start here for an overview of what goes into a "lens" essay. You might think of the advice given here as guidance for formulating your thesis, introductory paragraph, and structure of the paper: https://harvardwritingcenter.wordpress.com/2010/03/30/the-four-parts-of-a-lens-essay-argument/

EXAMPLE FROM PROFESSOR

You can use whichever of the "Contexts and Criticism" readings you would like, but I'm going to use ParadiseLost as examples here to illustrate what you should be doing in this assignment.

So, if you choose Paradise Lost, for your paper, you might remember the passage on pgs. 90-92 of the novel, where the monster describes his reading of Paradise Lost and the effect it had on him. You could then read the selections from Paradise Lost on pgs. 290-295 with an eye to how Shelley uses them. Having read some of the relevant passages from Paradise Lost, what can you now say about the monster's reference to it? What can you tell your reader about the passages in the novel that you couldn't before? How does an understanding of these passages from Paradise Lost affect your understanding of the monster? THIS IS JUST AN EXAMPLE FROM PROFESSOR.. I AM NOT USING PARADISE LOST. I AM USING FRANKENSTEIN AND THE STATE OF NATURE BY JONATHAN BATE.

When you write the paper, you should devote one or two of the early supporting paragraphs to giving a concise account of the source you've selected as the lens and of the claim, concept, fact, interpretation, or context it provides to your argument. Be sure to quote and cite as necessary, even with this material. Then, use the rest of the paper to apply that claim, concept, etc. to specific passages from the novel (Frankenstein), showing how the lens helps us to understand those passages better or differently. Remember to keep the big picture in mind: don't get lost in reinterpreting a random assortment of passages, but instead be working towards supporting a thesis claim about the ways in which the lens helps us to understand some aspect of the novel, such as the monster's character, the role of women, ideas about science, etc.

Guidance for Works Cited for Information Fluency Paper—Frankenstein

Your finished paper should include in-text citations and a works cited list. Please use MLA formatting. Your works cite should look something like this (I'm using Mellor as an example; just slot in your author and page numbers as relevant):

Mellor, Anne K. "Possessing Nature: The Female in Frankenstein," in Shelley, Frankenstein, pgs. 355-368.

Only References that should be used for my paper

Bate, Jonathan. “Frankenstein and the State of Nature,” in Shelley, Frankenstein, pgs.508-511.

Shelley, Mary. Frankenstein, J. Paul Hunter, ed., 2nd ed. W. W. Norton: 2012.

In text citations should look like this (Shelley 43) or (Mellor 356). The works cited should be alphabetized.

If you have any questions, please let me know!

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Introduction

I

It is almost two hundred years since Frankenstein was first published, and it has now become a standard text in the literary canon, one of the world’s most popular, widely read, and celebrated novels. It is also one of the most thoroughly studied and analyzed texts, making it ideal for the college or university classroom in which critical reading, cultural analysis, or literary history are at stake. Its history as a text is, however, more complicated than most, in part because its central narrative of creative overreaching and bitter disillusionment in a sense outgrew the novel itself and became a kind of independent trope or “myth” that invaded other art forms—plays, cartoons, advertisements, comic books, conversations, films. Frankenstein (the name) became a kind of all-purpose watchword for creativity gone wrong and monstrosity gone wild. Just about everyone, even people who do not read at all, knows the basic plot situation and its grotesque outcome: an ambitious and talented young scientist seeks and finds the secret of life itself, and he creates from assorted excavated body parts a giant adult being who turns out to be an ugly and savage (although sensitive) monster. And it is perhaps significant that, as often as not, casual observers confuse the creator with the created: in the novel, the scientist is named Frankenstein and his monster is nameless, but in popular lore the creature often takes on the name of the creator, as if there were no differences in the monstrosity of outcomes. In one sense, then, the story of Frankenstein now transcends the novel it came from—but only because its origins in the novel itself are so richly suggestive and evocative of larger issues and so resonant about the ambition and fallings-short of the human condition. Frankenstein is, in one way of putting it, larger than itself, a text that prompts not just close reading but the pursuit of extended intellectual and cultural implication.

How this novel (and this story) came to be is a complex tale in itself, and it can be very briefly or quite lengthily told: there are many subtleties and ambiguities in the process of its creation. The brief version, incomplete and imperfect but suggestive of both the popular, potboiler appeal and the larger seriousness of major scientific, social, literary, and philosophical issues, involves the occasion and moment of the novel’s origin. According to its author and to anecdotes from her companions at the time of initial conception, (see pp. 165–70) it sprang from a proposal to engage in a story-writing contest. The situation was this. The author—later to be known as Mary Shelley but then just eighteen years old, already the mother of two children (one of whom had died in infancy), unmarried and still known by her maiden name, Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin—was traveling in the Swiss alps. Her companions were her lover and soon-to-be husband (the already celebrated poet, Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was still married to someone else), her infant son William, and her troubled and impulsive stepsister, Claire Clairmont. In the late spring of 1816, they settled into a modest house in the mountains near Geneva—and also near the villa where an even more famous (though just as controversial) poet, Lord Byron, had settled more luxuriously with his personal physician and companion, Dr. John William Polidori. The two groups quickly merged and for weeks spent nearly all their waking hours together, often sailing on Lake Geneva (see map, p. 2) by day, and reading and conversing together in the evenings and on days when the weather was unsettled. And it was often unsettled that summer, the coldest and most consistently stormy European summer on record. Later, when annual charts could be compared, 1816 became famous as “the year without a summer.” Those conversations were apparently animated and often informed by wide and adventurous reading—of English and ancient classics, of scientific discovery and speculation, of British and European social politics. Byron and Percy Shelley were the acknowledged leaders in the conversations; they were both bold in their ideas and manner, and they were newly friends and getting to know each other’s interests and range. Mary—younger, rather quiet, and natively less assertive and argumentative—could nevertheless hold her own on most topics: she was a voracious and retentive reader. The conversations seem to have ranged widely, often guided by individual reading and the kinds of popular topics taken up in current periodicals. We don’t know in detail what they talked about day by day; but there are indications that they may have debated the nature and origins of life itself and perhaps discussed the myth of Prometheus in its several forms—years before Percy would interpret it lengthily in Prometheus Unbound and some while before it left its imprint as subtitle and suggestive allusion on Mary’s first significant work.

On some of those inclement nights, they read German ghost stories. One night in late May or early June, someone (perhaps Byron) suggested that they engage in a ghost-story-writing contest—in competition with the stories they were reading and with each other. The rules were loose, but the stories were to involve the supernatural in some way. As a contest, it wasn’t much of a success. Percy apparently lost interest quickly and Byron not long after, though a fragment of what he wrote became attached later to one of his poems, Mazeppa. Polidori seems to have conceived at first a strange Gothic tale that Mary found ludicrous, though his own accounts differ from Mary’s (see p. 169 [Polidori] and pp. 165–69 [Mary]), but then, characteristically, he piggybacked on a Byron idea and went on to publish a vampire story under Byron’s name. Claire Claremont seems never even to have begun her story. The only significant result was Frankenstein, published nineteen months later anonymously, but with broad hints that it might be by Percy Shelley or Byron. Early reviewers assumed that it was written by a man.

Besides the competition, conversation, and human stimulation of that summer of origins, there is also a set of creative issues involving place, setting, and tone, a question of the influence of surroundings, location, visual spectacle, and atmosphere. Mary seems to have been acutely responsive to visual stimuli and especially to the influence of scenery, place-sensitivity, climate, nature’s moods, and the breathtaking vistas of remote natural scenery that find their way into the brooding landscapes and Gothic tones the novel pursues and projects in its Scots and Arctic scenes as well as its more dominant continental ones. To be sure, Mary meticulously casts these actual settings in historical terms—she is very careful, for example, to project Victor Frankenstein’s scientific training at Ingolstadt back into the eighteenth century, repeatedly dating letters “17—” so as to place the action of the novel at a time when that university not only still existed but operated as one of the major European symbols of radical experimental science. (The university was in fact closed by the authorities in 1800 because of its associations with the new science and related radical ideas.) But the larger question of mood and spectacle has less to do with probability and representation than with projecting a sense of wonder and sometimes of impending doom. We now know, thanks to climate scientists of the early twentieth century, what the assembled party shivering in Switzerland could not have then even wildly suspected—that the cold and gloomy summer of 1816 was part of a global phenomenon, the spreading of a cloud of volcanic ash over much of Europe and North America from a volcanic eruption in Indonesia half a year earlier—a phenomenon that meant that significant parts of the earth were deprived of sunshine for very long periods, so that the spectacular, sublime craggy beauties of the lightning-illuminated Al

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