Ooo! Ooo!
I got this comment from Vanx, and it made me laugh so that I HAD to post it as an entry in and of itself:
[in voice of Horschak, hand flailing in air] "Ooo! Ooo! Miss Chili! I'm finished!" [in voice of Vanx, hands rubbing together like sandpaper] "Adam vs. Satan, you know what I'm sayin'"
So, who else is finished? Who wants to engage Vanx here in a discussion of that he's sayin'?
(Oh, and I didn't realize it until JUST now (seriously, I'm that lame) but the whole Welcome Back Kotter thing may be significant to me - I'm applying to teach in the same high school from which I graduated. Huh.)
posted by Mrs. Chili at 6:15 AM
4 Comments:
Ooo!, Oooo!~,:^0
Yes, you too can have an early issue scientologist slacking off in your class.
Also, since I'm not actually re-reading the book I'm as done as I'll ever be and totally ready for discussion.
In which he unloads:
Mary Shelley is a true Romantic, and her novel is a brilliant castigation of the opposing principles of the Enlightenment. In the broadest terms, it illustrates man’s fall from grace wrought by his own overarching ambition. She lashes this moral tale to the two greatest examples in the literary tradition—Adam and Eve’s ouster from the Garden of Eden and Satan’s fall from the rank’s of the archangels. Both are referred to repeatedly—Frankenstein is associated with Adam and the Monster with Satan. The characters and their trajectories are almost custom fit to these models.
In each of the two key sources, the fallen are cut off from their natural state, from nature itself, through their defiance of God. This is illustrated through nature imagery throughout. Just as some of the characters, such as Elizabeth, are types, certain settings and aspects of nature—mountains, lakes, the moon--repeat with clear cut meaning, usually juxtaposed to similar icons of opposite meaning.
At the most subjective level, I saw this book as an indictment of a purely scientific regard for nature, an approach that is all about conquest as opposed to the artist’s surrender to nature. The book is prescient in that our society has almost entirely given itself over to “better living through chemistry” and the overall lie of progress, largely to deleterious effect. This book was, in fact, published at about the time Western society abandoned its balance of reason and faith, the balanced state essential to progress in any human society (not that the pendulum hasn’t swung too far in the other direction at times with similar bad results).
Since the 18th Century, we have moved in the direction that Shelley must have feared—to the present time when science is considered the highest professional calling and science itself has become a religious belief system.
Well, there’s the genome, folks. What’re ya gonna do with it?
I thoroughly enjoyed the humanist perspective of this novel and I am left somewhat staggered by Mary Shelley’s vision.
Selah,
Vanxicus
Ooo! Ooo! Mrs. Chili! Did I file this comment in the right place? If not, you can move it, I guess. And there is always that little garbage can!~,:^)
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