So Lawrence Lipking wrote this really funny essay about many Frankenstein-related things, most specifically the consensus among readers and teachers about the text that exists simultaneously with completely polarized opinions of the novel and its meaning. Various didactic methods are also explored in general, in relation to the text, and in accordance with Rousseau's Emile. Actually, he talks about Rousseau a lot.
*Lipking's all like "there is no one way to interpret Frankenstein! And that's the beauty of it!" "Just kidding! I'm going to subscribe to the methodology I indict and tell you about one particular way of reading it!" At least he's self aware.
*Turns out the reading of Frankenstein Lipking suggests is one that draws much from the work of Genevan philosopher Jean Jacques Rousseau, who essentially says that nature is good and all that nature creates is good, but man and society corrupt. Also his book Emile is about teaching, and Shelley's own shortcomings as a student (she never had a tutor, and, much like Walton, was largely self-taught. She found in her husband the much-needed tutor that Walton found in Victor. Emile is about the necessity of treating pupils like humans, not children or buckets into which "knowledge" can simply be poured. The importance of proper education is such that lacking it can lead to ruin (as it did with Victor, who claims that "It is even possible, that the train of my ideas would never have received the fatal impulse that led to my ruin." - because he had access to the likes of Cornelius Agrippa and a thirst for knowledge, but alas no instructor in the modern sciences, he became obsessed with an undertaking which might have been avoided))
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