Eyeing the Abject: Real Science and Fictional Frankensteinian Bodies
Presentation
Paper/Presentation Title | Eyeing the Abject: Real Science and Fictional Frankensteinian Bodies |
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Presentation Type | Presentation |
Authors | |
Author | Bedford, Alison |
Year | 2019 |
Place of Publication | Canberra, Australia |
Conference/Event | Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference: Embodying Romanticism |
Event Details | Romantic Studies Association of Australasia 2019 Conference: Embodying Romanticism Event Date 21 to end of 23 Nov 2019 Event Location Canberra, Australia |
Abstract | Fiction, since Mary’s Shelley’s Frankenstein, has consistently addressed our fear of losing control of our corporeal self, which is ultimately the centre of our sense of identity. As Chris Shilling describes: 'as science facilitates greater degrees of intervention into the body, it destabilises our knowledge of what bodies are, and runs ahead of our ability to make moral judgements about how far science should be allowed to reconstruct the body' (4). This makes the body a key site of anxiety in fiction, particularly the horror and science fiction genres, which have their genesis in Shelley’s novel. Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection gives us an explanation as to why we keep revisiting this anxiety. She asserts, 'the phobic has no other object than the abject…thus, fear having bracketed, discourse will seem tenable only if it ceaselessly confront that otherness, a burden both repellent and repelled, a deep well of memory that is unapproachable and intimate: the abject' (Kristeva 6). The phobic here is not an individual, but the modern world. Our way of ‘ceaselessly confronting that otherness’ is through popular fiction, where the abject is particularly addressed in horror and science fiction. This paper will discuss Shelley’s exploration of the possible regenerative powers of sciences like Galvanism as a means of addressing our fundamental concerns about our power over our own and others bodies. I argue once new ideas, new threats to the body have been explored, particularly that we have envisaged a worst case scenario, the threat to our bodies is reduced, the object of our imagination may no longer be so abject, as we have approached the boundary, peered over and seen less of a threat than what we imagined, or been offered a way to deal with it. As Barbara Creed states, horror provokes 'a confrontation with the abject…in order, finally, to eject the abject and re-draw the boundaries between human and non-human' (53) and so redefine how we perceive our embodied selves. |
Keywords | Frankenstein, abject, bodies, Kristeva, Mary Shelley |
ANZSRC Field of Research 2020 | 470504. British and Irish literature |
470208. Culture, representation and identity | |
Public Notes | File reproduced in accordance with the copyright policy of the publisher/author. |
Byline Affiliations | University of Southern Queensland |
Institution of Origin | University of Southern Queensland |
https://research.usq.edu.au/item/q79q6/eyeing-the-abject-real-science-and-fictional-frankensteinian-bodies
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