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Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal”: Humanity and Meaning

January 11, 2021

academia, death, frankenstein, humanity, immortality, life, meaning

Note: the following article on Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal” is a modified excerpt (pp. 74-76) from my doctoral dissertation, “Time is Everything with Him”: The Concept of the Eternal Now in Nineteenth-Century Gothic, which is available for free from the repository of the Tampere University Press. For a list of my other academic publications, presentations, etc. feel free to visit the main Home for Fiction website and the relevant page there.

In Mary Shelley’s “The Mortal Immortal”, the sociocultural as much as existential aspects of immortality play a central part, as the title emphasizes.

In the story, one of the students of Cornelius Agrippa gets his inexperienced hands on his master’s elixir of eternal life. It is interesting to note that Agrippa is one of the masters whom Victor Frankenstein studies during his attempt to create his monster. Winzy, the young apprentice, unwisely unleashes a curse of similar proportionsWinze means curse (OED, “winze, n.2”), a very relevant name for the main character of this story. upon himself.

He witnesses his young wife becoming old while he remains the same, with the abnormal situation having terrible repercussions, as he assumes the role of the caregiver, while she becomes jealous and grumpy.

Much like in Frankenstein, the kind of immortality offered in “The Mortal Immortal” is a fake one. The source of anguish for Winzy (and of course the reader) arises from the unsolvable conflict between past and future, between life and death.

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Finding Connections in Writing Fiction: Why It Is Important

November 2, 2020

Fiction Writing Tips, Writing

affect, connections, fiction, meaning, symbolism, writing

4 comments

The title of this post claims finding connections in your writing is important. Actually, it’s more than that: It’s crucial. Indeed, I’d go as far as calling it critical. If you can’t find connections in your writing, you’re in serious trouble.

I’ve mentioned this before, in my post on imagination and creativity: “Creative writing is a connection game, and that’s where imagination plays a major part; in helping you see the connections”, I then said.

In today’s post we will expand on this concept. I will show you

why finding connections in your fiction is crucial
how to find such connections
what to do with them

As a sneak preview I could mention that finding connections in your writing has to do with the bigger picture and the affective power of your novel.

finding connections in writing — Finding connections in your writing is the foundation of affect

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A JavaScript Poem Shuffler

July 18, 2020

Programming

creativity, defamiliarization, javascript, meaning, poetry, programming

0 comments

As I’ve mentioned many times on the blog, meaning is a very fluid concept in literature. This fact inspired me to see what happens when we completely distort the author’s original intention, while still maintaining some minimal cohesion. This JavaScript poem shuffler was the result.

As the name perhaps implies, my JavaScript poem shuffler takes a poem and randomly reorganizes its lines.

Now, you might have two questions about this:

Doesn’t that render the poem meaningless?
Why should we care?

Amazingly, both these questions have the same answer, as we’ll see in more detail. Briefly, let me just say that this little coding exercise also provides us with excellent teaching material in terms of affective power and, indeed, the creation of meaning in literature.

JavaScript Poem Shuffler — Apparently chaotic patterns can still hold meaning – if they are predicated on **affect**. This JavaScript poem shuffler is a good example of this

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