Texts and Ideas: Frankenstein and His Progeny - Midterm Review

Vocabulary review cards defining key terms, historical contexts, theoretical models, and literary concepts from the Fall 2026 course Texts and Ideas: Frankenstein and His Progeny.

Course Conceptual Framework

The four foundational, interlocking concepts of the course: culture, cosmopolitanism, intertextuality, and artificial intelligence.

Synecdoche

A rhetorical trope in which a part is made to substitute for the whole (e.g., 'all hands on deck,' 'boots on the ground,' or 'mouths to feed').

Kosmou politēs

A Greek phrase meaning 'citizen of the world,' coined by Diogenes the Cynic and expanded by the Stoics to describe human allegiance to a universal moral community rather than a local birthplace.

Diogenes of Sinope (Diogenes the Cynic)

Classical philosopher (c. 412/404–323 BCE) who proclaimed himself a kosmou politēs, refusing to be defined by local origins, conventional civic roles, or patriotic allegiances.

The School of Athens

A 1509–1510 fresco by Raphael in the Vatican's Stanza della Segnatura depicting ancient philosophers, prominently contrasting Plato's idealism with Aristotle's materialism.

Philosophical Idealism (Plato)

A philosophical perspective centered on the noumenal realm, abstract 'forms,' and transcendent reality, visually symbolized in Raphael's fresco by Plato pointing upward.

Philosophical Materialism / Empiricism (Aristotle)

A philosophical approach emphasizing observation, empirical study, and the tangible physical world, visually symbolized in Raphael's fresco by Aristotle gesturing toward the earth.

Panegyric

A formal text or rhetorical structure that delivers public praise, contrasted with satire within Stephen Greenblatt's model of cultural circulation.

Satire

A literary or rhetorical mode designed to express blame, censure, or critique, paired with panegyric as one of culture's primary regulatory structures.

Constraint vs. Mobility

Stephen Greenblatt's model of culture, wherein social institutions establish regulatory limits and boundaries (constraints) while simultaneously enabling movement, circulation, and boundary-crossing (mobility).

Contamination

A concept reappropriated by Kwame Anthony Appiah from a negative term into a positive ideal describing the vital, inevitable blending, cross-cultural influence, and fluidity of living cultures.

Cultural Purity

The ideology that seeks to preserve cultural practices and identities in static isolation, treated by Kwame Anthony Appiah as an artificial and destructive counterideal.

Cosmopolitanism

An ethical and intellectual stance that combines universal human concern with an active exploration and eager acceptance of human diversity, treating differences as facts and opportunities rather than problems.

Universalism

A philosophical focus on human commonality and shared traits; as noted by David Hollinger, universalism tends to view human difference as a potential obstacle or problem to be managed.

Fallibilism

The philosophical principle that human knowledge, moral judgments, and beliefs are provisional, imperfect, and subject to revision in the presence of new evidence and cosmopolitan dialogue.

Cosmopolitan Irony (Socratic Irony)

As defined by Bryan S. Turner, an intellectual and reflexive detachment from one's own national or local culture that allows one to examine native values disinterestedly as objects of inquiry.

Horizon of Expectations

Hans Robert Jauss's concept from reception aesthetics describing the shared web of textual conventions, genres, and allusions that predisposes an audience to interpret and evaluate a new literary work.

Interpretive Community

A collective of readers or viewers who share common interpretive assumptions, strategies, and cultural conventions for producing meaning from a text.

The Symbolic Era (of AI)

The historical era of artificial intelligence identified by Toby Walsh, marked by searching for answers, making the best move, and following symbolic rules to manipulate representations.

The Imitation Game

Alan Turing's behavioral formulation (the Turing test) that evaluates whether a machine possesses intelligence by asking if its conversational responses can be distinguished from those of a human.

Ada Lovelace's Objection

The philosophical claim that computing machines cannot genuinely originate ideas or think creatively, because they are limited strictly to carrying out what humans program them to perform.

The Enlightenment

An intellectual movement (roughly 1630s–1815) that shifted thought from theocentrism to anthropocentrism, emphasizing rationalism, science, universal liberty, and human perfectibility over Calvinist total depravity.

Romanticism

An intellectual and literary movement (1790s–1850) that challenged Enlightenment rationalism by elevating subjective experience, the creative imagination ('fancy'), and the aesthetic power of the sublime.

The Sublime

An aesthetic category analyzed by Edmund Burke in 1757, defined as whatever produces feelings of terror, pain, or danger, evoking the strongest emotions the mind is capable of experiencing.

Terror vs. Horror

Ann Radcliffe's 1826 distinction: terror expands the soul and awakens faculties to a high degree of life (forming a source of the sublime), whereas horror contracts, freezes, and nearly annihilates them.

Epistolary Novel

A narrative genre composed entirely of written letters or documents, enabling intimate, inward, and subjective access to characters' private thoughts and sentiments.

Supernatural Gothic

A Gothic literary subgenre represented by Horace Walpole (The Castle of Otranto) and Matthew Lewis (The Monk) that directly challenges Enlightenment rationalism through genuine supernatural events.

Rationalist Gothic

A Gothic subgenre exemplified by Ann Radcliffe (The Mysteries of Udolpho) where terrifying, seemingly supernatural occurrences are ultimately unmasked and explained through natural causes, mechanics, or human deceit.

Luddite Rebellion

A protest movement in England (1811–1816), beginning in Nottinghamshire, in which artisanal workers destroyed mechanized industrial looms in resistance to the erosion of labor by industrialization.

The Year without a Summer (1816)

The abnormally cold, wet year resulting from volcanic activity, during which eighteen-year-old Mary Shelley stayed near Lake Geneva and conceived the story of Frankenstein.

Doppelgänger

A psychological double or uncanny mirror figure in literature, exemplified in Frankenstein by the parallels linking Victor to Walton, Victor to the Creature, and the Creature to Walton.

Hamartia

A term from Aristotle's Poetics signifying a tragic flaw, severe miscalculation, or critical error in judgment made by a noble protagonist that brings about their downfall.

Katharsis

Aristotle's term for the purgation or purification of the specific emotions of pity and fear produced in the audience through the dramatic structure of tragedy.

Reversal (Peripeteia)

A pivotal structural element in Aristotle's Poetics in which the trajectory of dramatic action shifts swiftly to its exact opposite according to necessity or probability.

Recognition (Anagnorisis)

In Aristotle's Poetics, a character's sudden transition from ignorance to knowledge regarding identity, enmity, or close bonds, ideally occurring simultaneously with reversal.

Six Elements of Tragedy

Aristotle's ranked components of tragic drama in order of importance: plot (the most important), character, reasoning (thought), diction, lyric poetry (melody), and spectacle.

Disgust

An immediate, visceral, and irrational emotional aversion; in Frankenstein, disgust toward others operates as an obstacle to empathy, while self-disgust may trigger moral awakening.

Sympathy

An affective faculty of mutual fellow-feeling, emotional resonance, and benevolent connection, the total denial of which drives the Creature's alienation and descent into violence.

The Creature's Intertexts

The three foundational literary works discovered and studied by the Creature—Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, Plutarch's Lives, and Milton's Paradise Lost—which shape his understanding of human society and morality.