Entertainment / Literature / Frankenstein Motif: A motif in which a created being turns upon its creator in what seems to be an inevitable fashion. The term comes from Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a nineteenth-century novel in which Victor Frankenstein stiches together the body parts of condemned criminals and then reanimates the resulting patchwork creature using electricity. However, the motif itself dates back much earlier to medieval legends of the Golem, an animated clay figure controlled by Hebrew kabbalists. The Frankenstein motif warns against hubris in human creators. This admonishment occasionally appears in thoughtful science fiction exploring the ethical responsibility of creating new life, but it even more frequently appears in anti-intellectual diatribes against knowledge 'mankind was not meant to know.' In the later case, the Frankenstein motif expresses general anxieties about the rapidity of technological change. Examples of the Frankenstein motif appear in H. G. Wells' The Island of Doctor Moreau, Crichton's Jurassic Park, and Greg Bear's novella Blood Music.
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Motif Verb Synonyms: theme, idea, topic, subject, concept, leitmotif, pattern, figure, refrain, device, ornament, decoration, element, convention
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Entertainment / Literature / Temptation Motif: A motif in which one of the protagonist's primary struggles is the conflict between his or her sense of (1) personal honor and ethics and (2) his or her personal desires, ambitions, or wickedness. Bib MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Ubi Sunt Motif: A literary motif dealing with the transience of life. The name comes from a longer Latin phrase, 'Ubi sunt qui ante nos fuerent?' [Where are those who were before us?], a phrase that begins several me MORE