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Do not go gentle into that good night. In fact, if it's past your curfew, don't go at all into that good night. You just stay in your good bed and...
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Written in Anglo-Saxon, or Old English, sometime between the 8th and 11th centuries, Beowulf is an epic poem that reflects the early medieval warri...
ELA 12: 1.18 Monster Mash 114 Views
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Description:
We wonder if Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin knew that her campfire story would still be inspiring fear in the hearts of literature-dreading students hundreds of years later...
Transcript
- 00:04
Frankenstein's monster is one of the most famous monsters out [Frankenstein's monsters face]
- 00:07
there we recognize that green skin bolt neck blunk anywhere but Frankenstein's
- 00:12
monster didn't just pop into existence out of nowhere and that's good because [Frankenstein's monster appears beside a sign of welcome to nowhere]
- 00:15
if that was the case well it'd make showers alot scarier well the story of Frankenstein
- 00:20
starts all the way back in the summer of 1816 Mary Wollstonecraft Goodwin was
Full Transcript
- 00:26
hanging out in a swiss lake house with her lover and future husband Percy [Mary and Percy outside a lake house]
- 00:31
Shelley, Lord Byron John Polidori yeah and some other less famous people
- 00:36
were there too all right well during the vacation Lord Byron challenged everyone
- 00:39
to come up with the scariest freakiest spookiest story they could and since [Lord Byron challenging everyone to come up with a scary story over a campfire]
- 00:43
this was 1816 it couldn't just be a story about a weak Wi-Fi signal that
- 00:47
kept getting lost then mysteriously coming back then even more mysteriously [WiFi losing signal on a macbook screen]
- 00:52
getting lost again ooh.. well Goodwin came up with something even
- 00:57
better than all that the foundations of what would eventually become [Green Frankenstein's monster appears and boy runs out of room]
- 01:00
Frankenstein or the modern prometheus once she had the idea there was still
- 01:06
the matter of writing it like most novels of the era Frankenstein is an
- 01:10
epistle that is a literary work written as a letter or as a series of letters [epistle definition]
- 01:15
and this wasn't exactly revolutionary many early English novels were
- 01:19
epistolary some like Dracula were supposedly a whole bunch of letters [Dracula boook with letters leaking out]
- 01:23
while others had a narrative frame presented as though they were a diary or
- 01:28
journal that someone just happened to stumble upon and then just happened to
- 01:33
send to a publisher so made thousands of copies and a sort of thing anyone with a [Jim's diary sent to a publisher and thousands of books appear]
- 01:37
private diary would be just fine to it yeah anywho Frankenstein is told through
- 01:42
letters and Goodwin was not the least bit afraid of setting up lots and lots
- 01:46
of narrative layers at one point captain Walton records Victor Frankenstein
- 01:51
quoting the monster telling the De Lacey story making for a whopping four [4 layers of narrative layers]
- 01:56
layers of narrative if you need to lie down after that we don't blame you [boy thinking about taking a nap]
- 01:59
Frankenstein's not only epistlary but it also adopted one of the new
- 02:04
novelistic forms that was sweeping the first half of the 19th century the
- 02:08
three-volume novel or triple decker we hope one of those layers has bacon one of the [Three books titled Fran-Ken-Stein]
- 02:14
main structural innovations of the three-volume novel was the cliffhanger
- 02:18
since they always had a couple of volume breaks there was extra reason to amp up [man hanging off the edge of a cliff]
- 02:22
the suspense so there you have it a bit more background information on
- 02:26
Frankenstein's monster and still that doesn't make you want to take a shower with them [Frankenstein's monster chasing a man wearing a towel]
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