New interpretations positioning _Frankenstein_ in conversation with earlier political thinking and within the dawning human rights discourse have opened up a new and inspirational critical path. This is in dialogue with the more extensive scholarly work that over the last twenty-five or thirty years has fruitfully situated _Frankenstein_ within contemporary racial and colonial discourses, highlighting the various forms of reverberation of the Creature’s alienated status with that of the colonial subject. In this article, I take up the issue of the Creature’s process of language acquisition (II. iv), which powerfully points to his possessing full human potentiality, and read it in relation to the Creature’s positioning at the margins of articulate (political) life, which makes him a powerful figure for all the dispossessed who, as Hannah Arendt suggests in relation to post-war stateless people and refugees, cannot access «the right to have rights».
"_Frankenstein_, Language Learning, and the 'Perplexities of the Rights of Man'"
Franca Dellarosa
2022-01-01
Abstract
New interpretations positioning _Frankenstein_ in conversation with earlier political thinking and within the dawning human rights discourse have opened up a new and inspirational critical path. This is in dialogue with the more extensive scholarly work that over the last twenty-five or thirty years has fruitfully situated _Frankenstein_ within contemporary racial and colonial discourses, highlighting the various forms of reverberation of the Creature’s alienated status with that of the colonial subject. In this article, I take up the issue of the Creature’s process of language acquisition (II. iv), which powerfully points to his possessing full human potentiality, and read it in relation to the Creature’s positioning at the margins of articulate (political) life, which makes him a powerful figure for all the dispossessed who, as Hannah Arendt suggests in relation to post-war stateless people and refugees, cannot access «the right to have rights».I documenti in IRIS sono protetti da copyright e tutti i diritti sono riservati, salvo diversa indicazione.
