Of Bugs and Masks

differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-125
Author(s):  
Miglena Nikolchina
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Literary Theory ◽  
Social Engagement ◽  
Entertainment Industry ◽  
Popular Entertainment ◽  
Political Implications ◽  
Subjective Agency ◽  
Stanislaw Lem ◽  
Tzvetan Todorov ◽  
Fiction Writer

This essay examines the entanglement of Galin Tihanov’s three regimes of relevance of literature—literature as art, literature as high-minded social engagement, and literature as popular entertainment—in the encounter between a literary theoretician (Tzvetan Todorov) and a science fiction writer (Stanislaw Lem). The overt clash takes place in a polemical article by Lem, in which he attacks Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. Not so obviously, the writer’s revolt against the theoretician imbues Lem’s masterpiece “The Mask.” Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” plays a considerable role in both Lem’s polemic and in his fictional response, raising questions of genre (and its dependence on the market and the entertainment industry), of subjective agency (and its philosophical and political implications), and of artistic ingenuity vis-à-vis despotic power. Although Lem’s reading of Todorov involves considerable misunderstanding, it nevertheless produces fascinating results and exemplifies the impossibility of relegating literary theory to a single regime of relevance.

scholarly journals Gdzie kończy się literatura? Głos Pana i  Golem XIV — Stanisława Lema „resztki po powieści”

2018 ◽  
Vol 23 ◽  
pp. 39-50
Author(s):  
Dariusz Brzostek
Keyword(s):  
Artificial Intelligence ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Creative Process ◽  
Life Form ◽  
Literary Works ◽  
Lacanian Theory ◽  
Stanislaw Lem ◽  
First Contact ◽  
Fiction Writer

Where the literature ends? His Master’s Voice and Golem XIV — Stanisław Lem’s “relics of a  novel”The paper discusses the literary works of Polish science fiction writer — Stanisław Lem, particulary two of his late novels: His Master’s Voice 1968 and Golem XIV 1981. The essay focuses on the relics of a novel in these non-narrative works, including the lectures of an artificial intelligence Golem XIV and scientific essays on the first contact between humans and alien life form His Master’s Voice. A  subject of the paper is the psychoanalysis of the creative process and the reading of the relics of a  novel such as a  description as a  pattern of development or a  found-manuscript device in terms of Lacanian theory of the symptom and the theory of jouissance of the speaking subject parlêtre.

Art, Forward Slash, Science

PMLA ◽  
2004 ◽  
Vol 119 (3) ◽  
pp. 526-529
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Iconic Memory ◽  
National Gallery ◽  
Horse Manure ◽  
Difficult Position ◽  
Internal Stimulus ◽  
First Time ◽  
Fiction Writer

Synesthesia … one day in 1997 (soon after the national gallery acquired the picture), i walked up the familiar marble stairs, crossed the rotunda, and was confronted, for the first time, by George Stubbs's Whistlejacket, the stunning, naked portrait—no groom or rider, no landscape—of a chestnut Arabian stallion. I smelled the stable, horse manure, and leather, and I had the thrill of knowing what was happening inside my skull. How the attention response had sent a cloud of fire leaping through my brain, tugging on associated traces, map on map of firing and partially firing neurons springing back into existence (never the same twice, yet continuous with my earliest childhood and the millions of years before that). Surprise and the power of the artist were making me read internal stimulus as external: recall had become once again perception (McCrone 194-217). This is an iconic memory for me. It holds, packed down and ready to unfold, both the direction my work has taken through my career and the context of that work: my own life and times; the history that made me; the Next Big Thing in science; and my privileged, difficult position as a science fiction writer, an arts graduate, and a woman.

Epilogue

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian Cremins
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Origin Story ◽  
Fiction Writer

The epilogue returns to Captain Marvel’s first appearance and studies the debt it owes to James Hilton’s novel Lost Horizon. This section also examines the hero’s impact on science fiction writer Harlan Ellison, whose story “Paladin of the Lost Hour” offers a variation on both Lost Horizon and Billy Batson’s origin story.

Distortion

Dismantlings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 93-111
Author(s):  
Matt Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Theory And Practice ◽  
Transformative Change ◽  
The Future ◽  
Fiction Writer ◽  
As If

This chapter talks about distortion as a form of dismantling. It describes distortion as the historical and theoretical technique by which readers learn to approach political documents as if they were science fiction. When considered as a vehicle of distortion, literature is measured for its potential to alter exploitative conditions, like those of war, patriarchy, and racism. The science fiction writer Samuel R. Delany insists that transformative change takes shape neither in utopian nor in dystopian visions of the future, but rather in efforts toward significant distortion of the present. This attitude, which is also a theory and practice of literature, is one way to describe the inheritance of cyberculture in the works of writers and activists who employed speculative language to repurpose the thought of Alice Mary Hilton and the Ad Hoc Committee. These writers and activists focused not on the machines that would unveil the myth of scarcity, but instead isolate the forms of human life and relation that would follow the act of unveiling.

Terraforming: Engineering Imaginary Environments

Terraforming ◽  
2016 ◽  
pp. 1-17
Author(s):  
Chris Pak
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Nature Of Science ◽  
Analytical Framework ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Space And Time ◽  
Gaia Hypothesis ◽  
Fictional Narratives ◽  
Human Value ◽  
Environmental Engagement ◽  
Fiction Writer

Beginning with the coining of “terraforming” by science fiction writer Jack Williamson, this chapter explores the boundaries of the term in scientific discourse and in fiction, focusing attention on its significance for stories of interplanetary colonisation. It compares terraforming with its Earthbound counterpart, geoengineering, thus highlighting how science fiction explores modes of relating to Earth’s environment. It introduces James Lovelock’s Gaia hypothesis and explains its significance for terraforming, and explores the nature of science fiction’s environmental engagement and its intersections with ecocritical concerns. It also introduces the concept of nature’s otherness and of landscaping, and connects the latter to Bakhtin’s chronotope, thus delineating an analytical framework for exploring how space and time is invested with human value and meaning in science fictional narratives.

Oberkrainer Communism

2021 ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljiš
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Communist Party ◽  
Small Farms ◽  
The West ◽  
Party Leaders ◽  
British Science ◽  
Fiction Writer

This chapter discusses the Sixth Congress, Comintern, which was run by Soviet bigwigs and a few representative party leaders from the West that sat as its steering Political Secretariat. It highlights the Balkan Bureau that was headed by Bohumír Šmeral, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It also mentions British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, a socialist and communist sympathizer, who visited Moscow in the early 1920s as a guest of Vladimir Lenin and realized that even the highest-ranking officials' clothes were falling apart. The chapter recounts how tried to loosen up the revolutionary course by introducing the NEP, which was supposed to stimulate small farms on private plots to produce basic market supply. It demonstrates how the advance of fascism pushed more parties underground, leading them to become utterly dependent on organizational and material assistance from abroad.

Decreation and the Ethical Bind

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yoon Sook Cha
Keyword(s):  
Literary Theory ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Judith Butler ◽  
Maurice Blanchot ◽  
Ethical Obligation ◽  
Novel Treatment ◽  
Theory And Criticism ◽  
Complex Picture ◽  
Subjective Agency ◽  
Continental Tradition

Decreation and the Ethical Bind identifies a decreative ethics, whereby self-dispossession underwrites an ethical obligation to preserve the other from harm. The author shows how obligation emerges at the conjuncture of competing claims: between the other’s subject affirmation and one’s own dislocation, between what one has and what one has to give, between a demand that asks for too much and the extraordinary demand of asking nothing. In the unfolding and reiteration of themes issuing from the other’s claim upon oneself develops a complex picture of the tensions that sustain the scene of ethical relationality. Just how these tensions both subtend and undercut an other-centered ethics of preservation is the question this book tarries with. By proposing a way to read the distinct ethical charge of the other’s claim not to be harmed, Decreation and the Ethical Bind offers a novel treatment of the concept of decreation in the thought of Simone Weil, putting her work in dialogue with Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot and Judith Butler. In examining themes of ethical obligation, vulnerability and the force of weak speech, the present study places Weil within a continental tradition of literary theory in which writing and speech are bound up with questions of ethical appeal. It contributes a new and critical voice to the current conversation in theory and criticism that addresses a difficult form of ethics that isn’t grounded in subjective agency and narrative fruition, but in the risks taken to fulfill the claims it makes.

scholarly journals France, Germany and Europe

2002 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 301-304
Author(s):  
H. L. Wesseling
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Foreign Affairs ◽  
The Future ◽  
Future War ◽  
Fiction Writer

In 1999, a book appeared in Paris with the rather alarming title De la prochaine guerre avec l'Allemagne (‘On the future war with Germany’). It had not been written by some sensationalist science-fiction writer, but by none other than Philippe Delmas, a former aid to Roland Dumas, who was twice minister of Foreign Affairs under the Mitterrand administration.

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