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 “horrific whiteness”
- The University of Florida’s African American Studies course includes a module on horror in literature entitled: ‘Black Horror, White Terror’
- The course explores ‘the relationship between horror and black literary modes and traditions that focus on key moments that depict the fear 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 invited to study horror in literature and film through a racial lens, with the professor asking how works like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein deal with “racial identity and oppression.”
The course is taught as part of the African American Studies program.
It is titled ‘Black Horror, White Terror’ and is taught by Professor Julia Mollenthiel, whose dissertation dealt with the same theme. Mollenthiel is also writing a book on this 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 “influenced racial discourses.”
The course explores “the relationship between horror and black literary modes and traditions, focusing on key moments that depict the fear of blackness and/or the terror associated with being black in America,” according to a Spring 2023 syllabus .
Frankenstein, featured in the 1931 film classic, is accused by a Florida professor of being a character who “parallels the racial stereotypes of the time”
Professor Julia Mollenthiel teaches the course on racism in the horror genre
Students will also read an essay titled “The Power and Horror of Whiteness,” which claims that Poe was “haunted” by black people based on his fiction books, notes The College Fix.
They study “the Marxist and the feminist location” of Frankenstein, seen “in the social and psychological context of the time.”
Students will consider claims that Shelley’s famous monster “parallels the racial stereotypes of the time.”
The course also explores how black authors have “used the horror aesthetic as a means of countering white constructs of blackness in the horror/goth genre.”
The syllabus emphasizes, “No lesson is intended to embrace, promote, foster, inculcate, or enforce any particular feeling, perception, point of view, or belief.”
The Fix speculates that the disclaimer was added to avoid trouble in the state that has positioned itself as an “anti-wake” nirvana.
Florida governor Ron DeSantis stated that the state was “where wake up to die.”
Mollenthiel has not commented on the course.