Category: literary theory

• My Momster/My Self: The Question of Mothering, the Woman Writer, and Autobiography in Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”

  In her essay, “My Monster/My Self,” Barbara Johnson looks at Frankenstein and two unrelated critical texts with an emphasis on the different critiques each offer of the institution of parenthood. Johnson’s goal in the essay is to “read” the three texts “not as mere studies of the monstrousness of selfhood, . . . but as autobiographies…

  F. Scott Evens

  November 7, 2022

  literary theory

  Barbara Johnson, Frankenstein, Jaque Lacan, John Fiske, Lacan, Mary Shelley, Shelley

• Invisibility Embraced: Dissecting Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man

  In “Invisibility Embraced,” Shelly Jarenski looks at Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man and dissects Ellison’s reconceptualization of various matrices of power, out of which comes his narrator’s eventual claiming of invisibility as a site of agency. But while Jarenski examines the work’s interrogations of notions of race, gender, and power, she overlooks the text’s examination of…

  F. Scott Evens

  October 24, 2022

  literary theory

  ellison, literary theory, literature, ralph ellison