Now FRANKENSTEIN is ‘racist’! University of Florida class claims to show how Mary Shelley’s monster ‘parallels racial stereotypes’ – and is taught by a professor who wrote about ‘horrifying whiteness’
- The University of Florida’s course for African American Studies features a module looking at horror in literature entitled: ‘Black Horror, White Terror’
- The course explores ‘the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness’
- The course is taught by Professor Julia Mollenthiel, whose dissertation was about exploring the horror genre through a racial lens, and is writing a book
Students at the University of Florida are being invited to study horror in literature and film through a racial lens, with the professor asking how works such as Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is about ‘racial identity and oppression’.
The course is provided as part of the African American Studies program.
Entitled ‘Black Horror, White Terror’, it is taught by Professor Julia Mollenthiel, whose dissertation was on the same theme. Mollenthiel is also writing a book on the subject.
Students are asked to read Frankenstein, as well as Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue, according to The College Fix website. They will discuss how the works have ‘affected racialized discourses.’
The course explores ‘the relationship between horror and Black literary modes and traditions focusing on key moments that depict fears of Blackness and/or the terror associated with being Black in America,’ according to a spring 2023 syllabus.
Frankenstein, seen in the 1931 film classic, is accused by a Florida professor of being a character which ‘parallels the racial stereotypes of the age’
Professor Julia Mollenthiel teaches the course exploring racism in the horror genre
Students will also read an essay entitled ‘The Power and Horror of Whiteness,’ which argues that Poe was ‘haunted’ by black people based on his fiction writings, The College Fix notes.
They will study ‘the Marxist and the feminist location’ of Frankenstein, as seen ‘in the social and psychological context of the times’.
Students will consider claims that Shelley’s famous monster ‘parallels the racial stereotypes of the age.’
The course also examines how black authors have ‘used the horror aesthetic as a means of countering white constructions of Blackness in the horror/Gothic genre.’
The syllabus emphasizes: ‘No lesson is intended to espouse, promote, advance, inculcate, or compel a particular feeling, perception, viewpoint, or belief.’
The Fix speculates that the disclaimer was added to avoid issues in the state which has positioned itself as an ‘anti-woke’ nirvana.
Ron DeSantis, governor of Florida, declared that the state was ‘where woke goes to die’.
Mollenthiel has not commented on the course.
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