ABSTRACT This article considers how we might teach the discourse of ‘race’ in Mary Shelley’s novel. I open by surveying how the language of race that threads through Frankenstein has been treated in the novel’s critical and popular history, from the earliest reviewers who saw in the Creature a version of Shakespeare’s Caliban, to the banning of the text in apartheid-era South Africa, and at last to twenty-first-century critical accounts. In the critical history, one pattern that emerges in treatments of Frankenstein and race is a tendency to attempt to stabilize the precise nature of the Creature’s alterity by pointing to one specific contemporary discourse or another. While this approach has generated much thoughtful and provocative work over the past two decades and more, I consider how we might help students to engage the historical contexts of Shelley’s novel without leading them rush to name a hermeneutic key. I suggest that an overdetermined political allegory like Frankenstein requires us to avoid moving too assuredly either from figure to context or, in the other direction, from ambiguity to indeterminacy: there is a difficult middle ground in between these two interpretive routes that is worth inhabiting in order to guide students more fully to understand just how richly Shelley’s novel engages both Romantic-era and long-historical discourses of race.

中文翻译：

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教弗兰肯斯坦和种族

摘要 本文考虑如何教授玛丽雪莱小说中的“种族”话语。我首先调查了贯穿弗兰肯斯坦的种族语言在小说的批判和流行历史中是如何被处理的，从最早的评论家在生物中看到莎士比亚的卡利班版本，到种族隔离时代南方的文本禁令非洲，最后是二十一世纪的评论。在批判历史中，出现在对弗兰肯斯坦和种族的处理中的一种模式是一种试图通过指向一个或另一个特定的当代话语来稳定生物他异性的确切性质的趋势。虽然这种方法在过去的二十多年里产生了很多深思熟虑和挑衅性的工作，我考虑如何帮助学生了解雪莱小说的历史背景，而不会让他们急于说出一个解释学的关键。我建议像弗兰肯斯坦这样的过度确定的政治寓言要求我们避免过于确定地从人物转向上下文，或者在另一个方向，从模棱两可转向不确定：在这两条解释路线之间有一个艰难的中间地带，值得一试为了引导学生更全面地理解雪莱的小说对浪漫时代和历史悠久的种族话语的丰富程度。