Since I was an English Lit. and Creative Writing major, the early Frankenstein references in Shelley’s work intrigued me, but it actually led me to recall an old Philosophy course of mine.
The very first day, my professor (who just retired from E&H and had been there for nearly 50 years as the department chair) told a story of his move-in day at William Jewel College, where he did his undergrad. My professor, Dr. Damer, said he walked in with his last load of personal belongings and his new roommate was sitting on his bed with nothing unpacked, staring in wonder at his hands. He slowly moved his thumb up and down, repeatedly, looked at Dr. Damer and said, “Isn’t it incredible? I think to move my thumb and there’s no transfer time at all. My thumb moves simultaneously with my thought of moving it.” And that segued into a very, very, very long, big-picture lecture that blew everyone’s minds and made half the class drop the course, but Shelley’s ‘functioning parts’ bit took me straight to that moment.
More importantly, I took from Shelley her point that “Every crank with a web page can put forward whatever crack-potpourri she pleases,” something I think is very relevant and increasingly the case with the integration of media and the rise of new media. Because of the Internet, there is an infinite number of ways that content can be presented. Material no longer has to be so straight-edged and form-fitting. With blogs, forums, social media platforms, more concrete formats are now subject to being more… well, art-like. While providing the same information, presentation in most cases is more open-ended.
This is very broad and general, but to her point, I think that an emphasis on the encouragement of stream-of-consciousness writing (or any other kind of “creation”) allows us to see and experience more ideas than we did with our formerly more rigid standards, and there’s no possible way that is a bad thing, right?
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