HUM 3905: Junior Seminar in the Humanities
Dr. Perdigao
Spring 2014
Response #1
DUE: Wednesday, February 5th
in hard copy and to www.turnitin.com
Choose one of the following questions and construct a 2-3 page (500-750 word) typed
response. It is not a formal essay but it should demonstrate your knowledge of the
works as well as their historical and cultural contexts. Your task is to situate your
analysis in a larger conversation that the creative texts (novels, short stories,
television episodes, and films) and critical texts are engaged in.
1. Literary theory encompasses a wide range of approaches to textual analysis.
Schools included within the field are formalism/New Criticism, biographical
criticism, reader response theory, structuralism, mythological
criticism/archetypal criticism, New Historicism, Marxist theory, feminist
criticism, gender studies, queer theory, critical race theory, postcolonial theory,
poststructuralist theory, psychoanalytic theory, and Deconstruction. Choose a
specific theoretical approach from the list included above to analyze the effects
of science and/or technology on society and the individual in one or more of
the following texts: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, Michael Bay’s The Island, and
Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go. These approaches should lead you to
consider the texts contexts—the writer’s life, its historical moment, cultural
constructions of identity (race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and class), and
ideas about language and meaning.
2. Construct an argument about how the Prometheus story has been adapted in
Shelley’s Frankenstein, Bay’s The Island, and/or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go.
Hesiod and Ovid present two versions of the myth—one emphasizing the
punishment for Prometheus’ transgression and the other celebrating his
creative act. How do these works reflect those ideas? Do they favor a version?
Do the works criticize the creators’ experiments, showing the limits of science
and technology? Are the resolutions of the narratives contingent upon punitive
acts for the “transgression” or open to the possibilities of and for science and
technology?
3. What are the limits and possibilities of science and technology in Shelley’s
Frankenstein, Bay’s The Island, and/or Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go? Both
evidence disasters caused by experimentation, but is this a problematic
formula? What is the treatment of science and/or technology in the works?
Situate your approach in a larger conversation by drawing on critical texts,
engaging that discussion in your response.