Reading Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Last Man with Vivian Papp | Virtual Course

Date / Time

  • February 11, 2025
    7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
  • February 25, 2025
    7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
  • March 11, 2025
    7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
  • March 25, 2025
    7:30 pm - 9:00 pm
  • April 8, 2025
    7:30 pm - 9:00 pm

Location

  • Tuition for this course is $250. Members receive exclusive discounts on our programs and courses. Not a member? Learn more.
  • Please check your spam folder for your email confirmation. If you have questions, please call (215) 732-1600 or email [email protected].
  • A welcome email from the instructor three weeks before the course begins. Zoom links will be sent for the course one week before the first meeting.
  • All online courses are recorded and these recordings are available to watch up to thirty days after the entire course has ended.
  • Registration opens for Delancey Society members on Friday, December 6th, for Rosenbach members on Friday, December 20th, and for the general public on Friday, January 3rd. Registration opens at 12:00 p.m. ET. 

Register

Description 

The Last Man’s Lionel Verney stares forlornly at us from the solitude of his cave in Naples, warning us of the dangers of complacency, “To survive is not enough, we must rebuild and reinvent ourselves.” Haunting the murky perimeters of modern society since 1818, Shelley’s much more well-known Monster laments, “I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall be virtuous again.” What can these two solitary humans teach us about what it means to be alive, to live, to be a person, or merely to just be? How do we navigate ever-evolving modes of existence, modes which blur the constantly shifting lines which tenuously separate humanity from technology? These are only a few of the questions posed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818) and The Last Man (1826) that remain unanswered. In this class we will map a chronological route through these two texts from 1818 to today. Shelley will have us rethinking our positions as human beings in a world where the giddy rate of technological advancement far exceeds our potential to maintain even the slightest semblance of balance. 

Frankenstein Last Man syllabus

About the Instructor

Dr. Vivian Zuluaga Papp is a Doctoral Lecturer in the English Department at the New York City College of Technology CUNY in Brooklyn, NY. She is known to quote from Frankenstein with little to no provocation. A scholar of the epistemology of vision, her work focuses on science writing and the early novel, with a special interest in the field of visual technology. Her chapter “Picturing Air: The Rhetoric of ‘Nondescription’ in Robert Boyle’s New Experiments Physico-mechanical and Daniel Defoe’s A Journal of the Plague Year” will be included in an upcoming anthology on the history of science. She recently gave a talk at a conference at the University of Kent in Cambridge, UK entitled, “Seeing Things: A.I., Deepfakes, Optics, and Vision: or How Did the Enlightenment Predict our Dilemma?” She is currently working on a book project about A.I., epistemology, and fiction. She received her BA from Columbia University in New York, her MA from Hunter College CUNY, and her PhD from Fordham University in Bronx, NY. 

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