How Mary Shelley’s ’Frankenstein’ took on a life of its own

Subscribe to Berkeley Talks, a Berkeley News podcast that features lectures and conversations at UC Berkeley. Manual Cinema presents Frankenstein as part of Cal Performances at Home . (Photo by Drew Dir) In this special Halloween-inspired episode of Berkeley Talks , UC Berkeley Chancellor Carol Christ joins Manual Cinema's co-artistic director Drew Dir to discuss the collective's presentation of Frankenstein, a Cal Performances co-commission, in a talk moderated by Cal Performances' executive and artistic director Jeremy Geffen. "Frankenstein has proven to be an enormously resonant text today,” said Christ, a Victorian literature scholar who is teaching a freshman seminar - Frankenstein and Its Rewritings - this semester. "There are a number of contemporary writers who have been rewriting Frankenstein: Ian McEwan in Machines Like Me or Jeanette Winterson in Frankissstein, which is a double narrative - one of Mary Shelley writing Frankenstein , the other of a kind of parallel story of artificial intelligence. There was even a Frankenstein in Baghdad , which was a really chilling book. So, I think it's a narrative for our time with the incredible capability through genetic technology, through artificial intelligence that mankind has obtained.