frankenstein's siblings

Frankenstein’s Siblings was the major project of my PhD and postdoctoral years. I set out in 2014 to discover what it meant to ‘lack a self’ in Romantic literature.

It took me many years to develop the language to even describe this research question. In my thesis (Falk, 2018), I used the concept of ‘self-deformation’ to organise my argument. I showed how in a range of Romantic texts, the self loses—or fails ever to acquire—a coherent ‘form’. I claimed that this ‘deformation’ of the self could be correlated with the ‘deformation’ of the text. A novel about a ‘deformed’ protagonist is inevitably a ‘deformed’ narrative. A sonnet describing a ‘deformed’ mental state is inevitably a ‘deformed’ poem, and so on.

This concept worked well enough, until a friend pointed out a fundamental flaw. The concept of ‘deformation’ presupposes that there is something to deform. I had set out to prove that there is a kind of Romantic literature in which the ‘central self’ does not exist. I wanted to vindicate those scholars who have claimed that there are ‘varieties of subjectivity’ in Romantic literature, that Romantic texts can be ‘anonymous’ or ‘vacant’. But the very concept of ‘self-deformation’ requires that there is already something called ‘self’ that can be ‘deformed’.

I was stumped for several years, until I finally developed the distinction between ‘necessary’ and ‘contingent’ selfhood that underlies my book (Falk, 2024). I trace this distinction back through eighteenth-century philosophy. It was Immanuel Kant who first clearly applied the terms ‘contingent’ and ‘necessary’ to the concept of ‘self’, and his related concept of Nötigung (necessitation) plays an important role in my argument.

To explore the nonexistence of the self, I use a range of digital techniques. If you don’t fancy reading the book, you can find a taste of some of these techniques in the ancillary publications of the project: (Falk, 2020); (Falk, 2017); (Falk, 2016).

I find in 2024 that I am once again dissatisfied. I found, upon reading Jay Garfield’s Losing Ourselves, that there is a more profitable distinction to be made between the ‘self’ and the ‘person’, and that my own distinction between contingent and necessary selfhood may have upended the whole question in precisely the manner I hoped to avoid.

We learn. At least, I hope that I do.

References

2024

Romanticism and the Contingent Self: The Challenge of Representation

Michael Falk

May 2024

doi:10.1007/978-3-031-49959-3

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This book offers a new critique of selfhood in Romantic literature. In the past, Romanticism has been seen as an individualistic movement, with writers believing in the ‘centrality’ of the self. Challenging this prevailing view of Romanticism and the modern self, this study unveils an alternative tradition of Romantic writing in which the self is fragile, degenerate, non-existent – or in a word, contingent. It combines philosophy, intellectual history, literary studies and digital humanities and takes a transnational approach both in its coverage of philosophical thought and literature, including case studies from England, Ireland, Scotland and colonial Australia, with examples from American and European works as well. The book also uses innovative digital techniques such as text analysis, sentiment mining and network analysis to enrich the exploration of text and context. It covers all major genres of Romantic writing: fiction (realist novels), poetry (the sonnet), non-fiction prose (biography) and drama (gothic tragedy). Providing a new framework for understanding the contingent self, this book is of interest to scholars and students of Romantic literature, philosophy of the self and digital humanities.

2020

Sad Realities: The Romantic Tragedies of Charles Harpur

Michael Falk

Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840, Aug 2020

Number: 23 Publisher: Cardiff University Press

doi:10.18573/romtext.65

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Romantic Textualities: Literature and Print Culture, 1780–1840 is an open-access journal committed to foregrounding innovative Romantic-studies research into bibliography, book history, intertextuality and textual studies.We publish material in a number of formats: peer-reviewed articles, reports on individual/collaborative research projects, bibliographical checklists and biographical profiles of overlooked Romantic writers. Romantic Textualities also carries book reviews and a regularly updated blog and Twitter feed. The journal was relaunched in 2017.

2018

Frankenstein’s Siblings: Self-Deformation in Romantic Literature

Michael Falk

University of Kent , Aug 2018

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2017

The Nightjar’s Shriek: Nature’s Variety in the Sonnets of John Clare and Charlotte Smith

Michael Falk

John Clare Society Journal, Aug 2017

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2016

Making Connections: Network Analysis, the Bildungsroman, and the World of The Absentee

Michael Falk

Journal of Language, Literature and Culture, Aug 2016

doi:10.1080/20512856.2016.1244909