Resumen de Retrospective Posthumanism: Frankenstein According to Our Vocabulary
Mary Shelley conceived Frankenstein as a Gothic horror story. However, Brian Aldiss claimed in 1973 that her novel is the true originator of science fiction—a 1920s label of which she could not be aware. Also in the 1970s, ‘posthumanism’ emerged as the critical current that might replace humanism. The word ‘posthuman’, though, had first appeared in a 1936 novella by H.P.
Lovecraft. Because of this changing vocabulary Frankenstein must be re-read retrospectively (though not unproblematically) without neglecting its Gothic origins, as pioneering fiction about the creation of a posthuman individual, even of a whole posthuman species. In this article I argue that, nonetheless, the new posthuman re-reading should not obscure Mary Shelley’s intention to characterize her monster as an abject creature intended to produce intense fear and terror in her readers. This is an affect that has been lost in the contemporary academic treatment of the creature as a being dispossessed of his rights as a living individual.
