"Proposal for English I," Skim - 1940

small groups in the course of the workshop

Digital History & Argument White Paper

funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation

Stephen Robertson and Lincoln Mullen of George Mason University

The result was a document that aims to help bridge the argumentative practices of digital history and the broader historical profession. On the one hand, it aims to demonstrate to the wider historical discipline how digital history is already making arguments in different forms than analog scholarship. On the other hand, it aims to help digital historians weave the scholarship they produce into historiographical conversations in the discipline.

Edward Ayers, University of Richmond Edward Baptist, Cornell University Cameron Blevins, Northeastern University Diane Harris Cline, George Washington University Ryan Cordell, Northeastern University Kalani Craig, Indiana University—Bloomington Gabrielle Foreman, University of Delaware Kim Gallon, Purdue University Fred Gibbs, University of New Mexico Jennifer Giuliano, Indiana University–Purdue University Indianapolis Jo Guldi, Southern Methodist University Jason Heppler, University of Nebraska at Omaha Michael Jarvis, University of Rochester Micki Kaufman, City University of New York Sharon Leon, George Mason University Matthew Lincoln, Getty Research Institute Austin Mason, Carleton College Michelle Moravec, Rosemont College Scott Nesbit, University of Georgia Angel Nieves, Hamilton College Miriam Posner, University of California, Los Angeles Janneken Smucker, West Chester University William Thomas III, University of Nebraska—Lincoln Lauren Tilton, University of Richmond

Arguing with Digital History: A Workshop on Using Digital History to Make Arguments for Academic Audiences

Workshop participants

epistemic

the Creature’s phrase is his own invention, a simile likening himself to Satan. Frankenstein’s appropriation of the phrase indicates the signal rhetorical influence of the Creature’s text on his own narrative—that this outset narrative has been enabled by the inset, preceding narrative frame.

These identifications—the Creature’s consistent appropriation of Paradise Lost as a metaphor for self, other, and world—determine which elements of his experience he will narrate; his perception of experience is shaped by the degree to which that experience can be given context by Paradise Lost. This is not to say (necessarily) that the Creature consciously acts out scenes from Milton’s epic, but rather (at least) that he views his past experience through the frame that Paradise Lost provides. Though his earlier experiences occur long before his exposure to Milton, his narrative act takes place after adopting Paradise Lost as his context, and thus even those early experiences are defined, selected, and narrated by reference to Milton’s enabling text.

this text becomes the Creature’s defining frame of reference, as it comprises both self and other and extends those Ur-frames outward (to a cosmic level) and inward (to a psychic level).

Narrative refiguring—rhetorical, elemental, and intentional—is the process by which the core of significant structure in Frankenstein strains outward and reshapes itself toward the perceiver through a sequence of framing narratives, moving from interior alterity (the Creature’s narrative) to exterior familiarity (Walton’s letters).11The narrative sequence of Frankenstein begins with the Creature’s adoption of Paradise Lost as his essential frame of reference

the embedded narrative influences the superior narrator’s decisions about which story elements to include in his own narrative; that is, what events make the superior narrator’s story significant as a narrative. Intentional refiguring occurs as a superior narrator derives his purpose—the intended effect of his narrative act—from influential aspects of the embedded narrative. In the presence of such narrative refiguring, embedded narratives assume a crucial position: they become enabling texts

Frankenstein’s narrative architecture comprises three separate frame sequences, each enabled and directed by a different narrator: the reading sequence provided by Robert Walton, the action sequence constructed by Victor Frankenstein, and, of greatest concern because it ultimately allows the other sequences, the narrative sequence initiated by Frankenstein’s Creature.

In short, conceiving the frame as a distinguishing, facilitating, or liminal device does not go very far toward clarifying the narrative construct, nor toward explaining the existence of the frames themselves.

The frame-work metaphor re-orders our common conception of the literary work’s diegetic levels. Here we begin at the inner-most level and conceive each narrative layer not as a distinguishing or liminal device—not as a container or delimiter of what is within—but as a determining matrix, creating and giving form to what is without.

This is to say more than that Paradise Lost is a constant source of Shelley’s allusion and imagery, or that Shelley re-enacts fundamental Miltonic themes of creation, duty, prohibition, and transgression; these points seem plain, and we need only consult Shelley’s epigraph for evidence of thematic connection.[7] Rather, I want to suggest that while Paradise Lost is certainly a powerful external influence on Shelley’s formulation and our reading of Frankenstein, it is also situated as a catalytic influence on the internal world of the tale, as that tale determines and shapes itself through a series of enabling and activating narratives. In short, Paradise Lost is the matrix (or “frame-work”) upon which Shelley builds (or “frames”) the characters, motivations, actions, and readings of Frankenstein (its “frames of reference”) and which enables the concentric structure (or “framing”) of the narratives.

The frame narrative metaphor therefore implies that the outermost narrative occupies this marginal space, and that its purpose is both distinctive and transitional: to distinguish our own experience in the world of real things from that represented in the framed narrative, and to move us toward that framed, (hypo)diegetic experience through a narrative space that is neither the reader’s world nor the world of the framed story.