| dc.description.abstract | Seeking to understand terror as an under-theorized educational problem with critical implications for contemporary schools and societies, this dissertation is an inquiry into the life, work, and influence of Mary Shelley (1797-1851) (Seymour 2000, Marshall 2000, Sunstein 1989, Mellor 1988). It takes up Susan Laird’s proposition that as a “philosophical fiction of education,” Frankenstein “merits serious study” (Laird 2008, 158). The educational thought of her anarchist father William Godwin (1756-1836) (McLaughlin 2007, St. Clair 1989) and feminist mother Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) (Laird 2008, Martin 1985) are formative for her as is her husband Percy Bysshe Shelley’s (1792-1822) literary milieu, English Romanticism.
As its grounding premise, this study theorizes literature as a genre of educational thought in the vein of the cave myth and the Pygmalion myth (Martin 2011, 2006). It formulates monstrous miseducation, a species of “cultural miseducation” (Martin 2000) and its terror curriculum (the bildung and genius ideals) from Mary Shelley’s lived experience and her Frankenstein myth. It identifies the core features of monstrous miseducation as: Miltonic identity politics, Godwinian perfectibility, and abandonment to “multiple educational agency” (Martin 2002). This dissertation claims that the core features of monstrous miseducation are matched by critical absences of maternal teaching and teachings (Laird 2013, 1994, 1988) and cyborg affinity politics (Haraway 1991). Through the case studies of Columbine (Cullen 2009) and the Freedom Writers (Freedom Writers and Gruwell 1999) the study tests monstrous miseducation’s pragmatic utility toward understanding contemporary terror and terrorism. | en_US |
