Menu
AWEJ for Translation & Literary Studies, Volume 5, Number 2. May 2021 Pp.126 -138
This paper demonstrates the appropriation of innocence in Shelley’s Frankenstein, Or the Modern Prometheus (1818) and Frankenstein in Baghdad (2013) by Ahmed Saadawi. These novels are selected because the latter appropriates the creator and creature characters and contextualizes them into the American-Iraq 2005 post-war period. In Shelley’s Frankenstein, Victor Frankenstein, scientifically, gives life to a dead body amalgamated from other body parts, which start murdering and revenging upon his creator. Whereas, in Saadawi’s twenty-first century Frankenstein, a person who is formed from others’ dead bodies by merely a junk dealer, starts murdering and revenging upon other people. On the one hand, Frankenstein, a science student, sought to answer the question of human revival theoretically and practically. Therefore, after he resurrects the dead, it becomes monstrous due to its negligence and physical hideousness by its creator. On the other hand, the Iraqi Frankenstein’s creator, Hadi, celebrates collecting old materials in a non-scientific manner, including humans’ dead body parts, in order to give value to them by offering them worthy of proper burials. The resurrected creatures transform into more powerful beings than their creators as reactions against isolation and injustice. For that, both Frankenstein and Hadi lose control over their creations, who instigate new life cycles. Hence, the ethical responsibility of invention underlies the concept of innocence which this paper intends to analyze vis-à-vis the creators and their creations.
Mahmood, K. A. (2021). The Appropriation of Innocence: from Shelley’s Frankenstein to Ahmed Saadawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 5 (2) 126 -138.
DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.24093/awejtls/vol5no2.10
Allen, G. (2011). Intertextuality: Origins: Saussure, Bakhtin, Kristeva. Routledge.
Al-Mai’dah, Surah 5: 32. n,d. accessed May 17, 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://quran.com/5/32
Ash-Shams, Surah, 91: 7-8. n.d. accessed May 12, 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://quran.com/91/7-8
Bible, gateway. 2011. accessed April 23, 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://www.biblegateway.com/passage/?search=Genesis+1%3A27-30&version=NIV
Bible, hub. n.d. accessed May 19, 2020. [Online]. Available at: https://biblehub.com/genesis/1-9.htm
Burke, E. (1998). A philosophical enquiry into the sublime and beautiful. Penguin UK.
Darwin, C. (2009) The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Fletcher, J. (2013.). Freud and the Scene of Trauma. New York, NY: Fordham University Press.
Franklin, B. (1751). Experiments and Observations on Electricity Made at Philadelphia in America, by Mr. Benjamin Franklin .. London: Printed and sold by E. Cave.
Frosh, S.( 1999) The Politics of Psychoanalysis: an Introduction to Freudian and Post-Freudian Theory. Basingstoke: Macmillan.
Hicks, M. H. R., Dardagan, H., Serdán, G. G., Bagnall, P. M., Sloboda, J. A., & Spagat, M. (2011). Violent deaths of Iraqi civilians, 2003–2008: analysis by perpetrator, weapon, time, and location. PLoS Med, 8(2), e1000415.
Mahmood, k. A. (2021). Evolution of Creation from Mythology to Reality: A Multidisciplinary Study into the Roots of Shelley’s Frankenstein and Ahmed Sa’adawi’s Frankenstein in Baghdad. Arab World English Journal for Translation & Literary Studies 5
Marx, K. (1904.). A Contribution to The Critique of Political Economy. Translated from the 2d German Ed. by N.I. Stone. With an Appendix Containing Marxs Introduction to the Critique Recently Published among His Posthumous Papers. Chicago: C.H. Kerr.
Melchert, C. (2011). God Created Adam in His Image. Journal of Quranic Studies 13, (1): 113–24. https://doi.org/10.3366/jqs.2011.0009.
Noah Surah, 76: 2. n.d. accessed April 28, 2020 https://quran.com/76
Saadawi, A. (2017). Frankenstein in Baghdad. Translated by Jonathan Wright. New York: Penguin books.
Sanders, J. (2015). Adaptation and appropriation. Routledge
Shelley, M. W. & Hindle,M. (1992). Frankenstein, or, The Modern Prometheus. Harmondsworth: Penguin, .
Walter, J. E. (1917). Kant’s Moral Theology. Harvard Theological Review 10, (3): 272–95. https://doi.org/10.1017/s0017816000000870.
Wildman, D. E., M. Uddin, G. Liu, L. I. Grossman, & Goodman, M. (200). Implications of Natural Selection in Shaping 99.4% Nonsynonymous DNA Identity between Humans and Chimpanzees: Enlarging Genus Homo. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 100, (12) (2003): 7181–88.https://www.pnas.org/content/pnas/100/12/7181.full.pdf.
Wittgenstein, L.(1961) Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. The German Text of Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung with a New Translation by D.F. Pears & R.F. McGuinness, and with the Introd. by Bertrand Russell. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul.
Karzan Mahmood obtained B A in Iraq, M A in the U K and is currently a Ph.D. student in Spain, all in English literature. His research interests include Romantic Sublime, Intertextuality, Appropriation, Literary Theory and Criticism, Marxism, and Postmodern Studies. He has been teaching English literature at Komar University of Science and Technology since 2016.
https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8860-5781
Copyright © 2023 AWEJ-tls.org. All rights reserved.