Taking the Ball and Running With It- Transforming Texts
As a Final Project for Frankenstein: Monsters of Lit, consider "Transforming the Text." As stated in Nancy Nelson Spivey's essay, Transforming Texts: Constructive Processes in Reading and Writing, "Readers use previously acquired knowledge to operate on textual clues, organizing mental representations that include material they select from the text and connect with material they generate. This constructivist characterization of the reading process extends also to literate acts in which people are writers as well as readers."
There are no limitations in ways to transform the text. Readers could write continuations of the story, write a short story involving a minor character, create drawings or paintings, post a Youtube video, produce a comic strip, the possibilities are endless.
What Ideas Do You Have About Transforming the Text?
Here are some examples of people transforming the Frankenstein text:
Spoken Word Performance Video
Online Frankenstein Comic Book
Frankenstein's Monster A Poem by Randy Johnson
*I built a living creature with every body part that I could find. I had no idea that I was giving him a psychopathic mind. He has a flat head, green skin and bolts in his neck. He escaped from my lab and he's on a violent trek.
He has killed ten men, eight women and even a little boy. The villagers are after my creature because he must be destroyed. When I stitched him together, I didn't know that he would kill. All I wanted to do was create life and now misery is what I feel. My creature will continue his killing spree, there's no doubt. Surprisingly he just returned to my lab and I blew his brains out. It's great that he's dead because his carnage was as deadly as a disease. I'm responsible for my creature's murders and I'll surrender to the authorities.*
Legacy of Frankenstein from American Scientist (excerpt)
What is it that persistently leads the public to equate experimental science, especially in biology or genetics, so automatically with Dr. Frankenstein and his monster? In this thought-provoking treatment, Jon Turney demonstrates that Mary Shelley's classic novel and the myth it spawned have provided images incorporated into popular debates about advances in biology from the early 19th century to the contemporary furor over genetic engineering.
Another example of artwork based on Frankenstein is the painting that appears on the ABOUT page