On Making Fiction: Frankenstein and the Life of Stories (Literary Theory)

Cover 1 Half title 2 About the Author 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgments 12 Introduction 14 Strange(r) Things: Fiction and Frankenstein 14 “Voodoo Metaphysics”? Towards a New Sense of Make‐Believe 21 Endlessly Transparent? Frankenstein, Literary Criticism, andtheLogic of Reflection 28 The Transformation of Stories: Adaptation,Mediation,andtheReal ofIntertextuality 36 Figures, Repetition, Company: WheretoLookforWhatFrankensteinDoes 44 Part One: Figures 50 Narrative Interest and the Body 58 No Body, no Story… 58 Difficult Material 64 Figures 68 Speak and Be 71 Truth, Judgment, Fiction 79 Physicality and Perspective 86 Narrative Architecture 86 Voices and Images 91 Productive Foldings 98 The Body of Narrative Plot 103 Contingencies, Technological and Organic 106 The Substance of Fiction 111 Part One: Coda 116 Part Two: Repetition 120 Sequels: Going Forward, Looking Back 128 That Was Not the End At All 128 A Resurrection in Three Parts 132 Generation without Origin 136 Traces, Path‐Breakers 138 Begin and End 141 Operation in Two Directions 146 Repeating Repetition: Series and Singularity 152 Series and Adaptations 152 Repetition Unbound 156 Creature No. 3 159 Making Memories 164 Tracing the Individual 168 Repetition, High and Low 173 Being and Being‐About 176 Surfaces and Simulacra 178 Beyond Sovereign Imitation 183 Part Two: Coda 186 Part Three: Company 190 Imperfection and Collaboration 198 You Will Be You Again 198 Double Casting I 203 Ontology of Non‐Self‐Coincidence 211 Existence as Production 214 Collaborative Agency 218 Strange Intimacies: Vulnerability and Liberation 222 Intimacy Inhibited 222 Feral Woman 225 A More Cryptic Feminist Text 235 Vulnerability and Imagination 237 Double Casting II 242 Address and Response 245 Both Strange and Familiar 248 Genuine Transformations 252 Part Three: Coda 256 To Conclude 258 “Love Your Monsters” 260 Works Cited 280 Fiction is generally understood to be a fascinating, yet somehow deficient affair, merely derivative of reality. What if we could, instead, come up with an affirmative approach that takes stories seriously in their capacity to bring forth a substance of their own? Iconic texts such as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and its numerous adaptations stubbornly resist our attempts to classify them as mere representations of reality. Friederike Danebrock shows how these texts insist that we take them seriously as agents and interlocutors in our world- and culture-making activities. Drawing on this analysis, she develops a theory of narrative fiction as a generative practice.