Wildermuth AI (2021)
Publication Language: English
Publication Type: Journal article
Publication year: 2021
Book Volume: 69
Pages Range: 331 - 348
Journal Issue: 4
This article considers Mary Shelley’s novel Frankenstein through what
Sara Guyer calls“biopoetics,” hybridizing biopolitical and romantic reading
strategies, and positing that romantic writing arises in temporal, theoretical, and
political parallel with the movement of power from the reign of the sovereign to the
realm of biopower. I focus on how Frankenstein imagines the esh of Victor as
animated and directed forward through biopower, by way of the novel’s juxta-
posed medico-scienti c and romantic discourse of life. Through close readings of
the creation scene and Victor’s nal breaths aboard Walton’s exploratory Arctic
ship, I conclude that Frankenstein at last offers itself both as artifact and archae-
ology of modern power—or what Guyer calls“literature as a form of biopower.”
APA:
Wildermuth, A.I. (2021). Measured Life: Making Live, the“Modern System of Science,” and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein. Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik, 69(4), 331 - 348.
MLA:
Wildermuth, Andrew Isaac. "Measured Life: Making Live, the“Modern System of Science,” and the Animated Bodies of Frankenstein." Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 69.4 (2021): 331 - 348.
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