"You're going to read what?"

That was a question fielded by more than one participant in this year's Humanities Winter Weekend, dedicated to the 19-year-old Mary Shelley's 1818 novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus. After a series of Very Important Books, what were we doing asking people to read so slight a volume - an early venture in science fiction that might bring to mind Boris Karloff in several hours' worth of monster makeup, or Madeleine Kahn's bursting into "0, Sweet Mystery of Life" in Mel Brooks's classic parody, but which might seem an unlikely candidate for the Western canon?

To start with, the Western canon is no longer quite as predictable as it might seem. For the past 20 years, Shelley's Frankenstein has been taken as seriously in English departments as her husband's "Prometheus Unbound" or their friend Byron's "Manfred," two long poems that share some thematic similarities with Mary Shelley's compelling tale. One purpose in holding Humanities Weekends is to link what is happening in the academy with the reading habits of the general public, and in this sense Frankenstein proved rewarding. And by going beyond the purely literary, to include the history of science and the modern debate over bioethics, this year's program turned out to be, in the opinion of many of its 90 participants, the richest and most stimulating to date.

Actually, monsters have been something of a theme in these winter weekends. We started in 1998 with Odysseus - confronting the Cyclops -and the next year met the denizens of the Inferno with Dante and Virgil. Then came Moby-Dick, and who was the more monstrous, Ahab or the Whale? Last year, in Seamus Heaney's vivid translation of Beowu/f we encountered Grendel, his literally dreadful mother, and the inevitable dragon. Mary Shelley's "creature" was in familiar company.

The beginning of wisdom, in dealing with this surprisingly moving book, is to remind yourself that Victor Frankenstein an idealistic young Swiss medical student - is the creator, not the monster (who goes nameless), and that the stage and movie versions stray far from the original story.

The weekend involved both a close reading of this often underestimated original and some consideration of the powerful myth it has engendered, in pop culture (we watched clips from "Gods and Monsters," among other films) and in everyday speech (how often have we been reminded that the Taliban were our "Frankenstein's monster," turning against the force that helped create them?).

Literary scholar David Collings offered a tour of the horizon of recent Mary Shelley scholarship -from the Lacanian to the literalist - and his Bowdoin colleague Anne Kibbie linked the tale's obsession with the body to the 19th-century discourse on blood transfusion and reanimation. Charles Calhoun sketched a New Historicist portrait of the Byron-Shelley circle, linking its radicalism to the repressive politics of post-Napoleonic Europe (people in English departments should talk with their colleagues in history was the moral). Bowdoin biochemist John Howland traced the historical models - some of them geniuses, some charlatans - for Shelley's fictional scientist.

Psychiatrist Walter Christie, who is on the teaching staff at Maine Medical Center, asked if we will not "create the monster again" because of our society's obsession with quick technological, or even pharmaceutical, solutions to difficult moral and ethical dilemmas. As a case in point, Bates bioethicist Frank Chessa presented the various arguments as to what it means to be "alive," in utero or in vitro, or for that matter in a hospital bed.

In the question time that followed these presentations and in the small group discussions that are an essential part of all of these humanities weekends, participants had the opportunity to offer their own views on Frankenstein as a parable - with its echoes of Milton's Satan and Goethe's Faust - and as a cautionary tale for our own age.

Much of the fascination of Shelley's story - and its claim today to be canonical - arises from the impossibility of assigning to it any one particular meaning. Is it a deeply conservative fable, warning of the evils of upsetting the established order? Or is it a radical critique of that order and its putative "rationality"?

The full impact was felt only at the end. We commissioned Henry Wishcamper, a former Freeport resident now working as a theater director in New York, to dramatize the novel. Working from a script by Scott Blumenthal (who played Victor) and with four other actors, he staged a one-hour play entitled "So Frightful an Event is Single in the History of Man: A Frankenstein Remix." Composer Elliott Schwartz, with keyboard and percussion, volunteered his skills as an improvisor to provide continuo for the whole performance.

It was a remarkable convergence of Shelley's text, Schwartz's music, and the actors' energy -an afternoon which no one who was there is likely to forget. Playing the ostensibly sullen and brutish creature actor Ronobir Lahiri electrified the audience. Looming ape-like over the stage, he wails:

"Everywhere I see bliss, from which I alone am irrevocably excluded. I was benevolent and good; misery made me a fiend. Make me happy, and I shall again be virtuous."

He does not get his request.