Eve as Cyborg

2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
Author(s):  
Colleen M. Conway
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Common Elements ◽  
Greek Myth ◽  
Garden Of Eden ◽  
Donna Haraway ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Gender Patterns ◽  
Century Science

The essay argues that the figure of the female cyborg introduced by Donna Haraway has yet to live up to its post-gender emancipatory promise. Both Haraway and Jack Halberstam contrast the female cyborg with the biblical Eve and her mythic origins in the garden of Eden. I argue that the figure of Eve is actually an ancient precursor to the female cyborg. Even more than the Greek myth of Pygmalion, the Eden myth shares common elements with later stories of man-made women. Like them, Eve was made to satisfy male desire, but then followed her own desires. Like later stories of female cyborgs, the representation of Eve reflects both male desire and male fear. After analyzing both Ovid’s Pygmalion and Genesis 2-3, I trace common elements through the nineteenth century science fiction novel L’Eve future and the twenty-first century film Ex Machina. Like Eve, the female cyborgs in these works are built in a garden and their “emancipation” occurs only within the confines of androcentric heteronormative gender patterns.

scholarly journals Living with Speculative Infrastructures

2013 ◽  
Vol 3 (4) ◽  
pp. 27-34 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Ziser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Growth And Development ◽  
First Century ◽  
Ray Bradbury ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Century Science

This article looks at the California origins of much of Twentieth Century science fiction. It examines how the exploding growth and development of postwar California informed science fiction writers like Ray Bradbury, Robert Heinlein, and Philip K. Dick, and looks to their books for answers to twenty-first century dilemmas such as the uses of technology, the environment, and infrastructure.

scholarly journals Dystopias Go Global: The Transnational Reorganization of Territories and Societies in Elysium

2018 ◽  
Vol 15 (1) ◽  
pp. 111-125
Author(s):  
Pablo Gómez Muñoz
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
First Century ◽  
Neoliberal Globalization ◽  
Large Numbers ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Century Science

This article argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century science fiction (SF) cinema has begun to show particular interest in transnational interactions and cosmopolitan concerns. The article focuses on one of the most representative groups of this trend: dystopias that explore the transnational systems that shape deeply unequal societies. The first part of the article provides an overview of the different transnational issues that contemporary dystopias deal with. The article then presents the film Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013) as a representative example of this trend. The analysis of Elysium sheds light on several socioeconomic and territorial processes that are shaping the development of neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century: extraterritorial operations, market incorporation, and the reorganization and superposition of borders. The article concludes that Elysium and similar films at first appear to criticize a set of structures and practices that prevent large numbers of people from living in decent conditions, but eventually reproduce the same circumstances and hierarchies that they appear to denounce.

Rethinking Mahler

2017 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Structural Analysis ◽  
First Century ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Temporal Experience ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Literature History ◽  
Historical Past

Gustav Mahler’s anniversary years (2010–11) have provided an opportunity to rethink the composer’s position within the musical, cultural and multi-disciplinary landscapes of the twenty-first century, as well as to reassess his relationship with the historical traditions of his own time. Comprising a collection of essays by leading and emerging scholars in the field, Rethinking Mahler in part counterbalances common scholarly assumptions and preferences which predominantly configure Mahler as proto-modernist, with hitherto somewhat neglected consideration of his debt to, and his re-imagining of, the legacies of his own historical past. It reassesses his engagement both with the immediate creative and cultural present of the late nineteenth century, and with the weight of a creative and cultural past that was the inheritance of artists living and working at that time. From a variety of disciplinary perspectives the contributors pursue ideas of nostalgia, historicism and ‘pastness’ in relation to an emergent pluralist modernity and subsequent musical-cultural developments. Mahler’s relationship with music, media and ideas past, present, and future is explored in three themed sections, addressing among them issues in structural analysis; cultural contexts; aesthetics; reception; performance, genres of stage, screen and literature; history/historiography; and temporal experience.

History of Recording Demotic Epigraphy

2020 ◽  
pp. 491-507
Author(s):  
Jan Moje
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Seventh Century ◽  
First Century ◽  
Third Century ◽  
Late Period ◽  
Greco Roman ◽  
Rosetta Stone ◽  
Roman Egypt ◽  
History Of ◽  
Twenty First Century

This chapter gives an overview of the history of recording and publishing epigraphic sources in Demotic language and script from the Late Period to Greco-Roman Egypt (seventh century bce to third century ce), for example, on stelae, offering tables, coffins, or votive gifts. The history of editing such texts and objects spans over two hundred years. Here, the important steps and pioneering publications on Demotic epigraphy are examined. They start from the beginning of the nineteenth century, when Napoleon’s expedition to Egypt found the Rosetta stone, until the twenty-first century.

American Custom, Ritual, and Holidays

2018 ◽  
pp. 255-276
Author(s):  
Jack Santino
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Life Course ◽  
First Century ◽  
The Political ◽  
Public Events ◽  
Close Study ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
The Life Course ◽  
Comprehensive Study

Since the nineteenth century, attention in folklore and folklife studies has shifted from viewing certain customary symbolic actions such as “calendar customs” and rituals of the life course to a more inclusive performance-oriented perspective on holidays and customs. Folklorists recognize the multiplicity of events that people may consider ritual and festival, and the porous nature of these categories. The concept of the “sacred” has expanded to include realms other than the strictly religious, so as to include the political and other domains, both official and unofficial. A comprehensive study of ritual and festival incorporates a close study of folk and popular actions as well as institutional ceremony. In the twenty-first century, approaching events as both carnivalesque and ritualesque allows folklorists to describe purpose and intention in public events, and to account for political, commemorative, celebratory, and festive elements in any particular event.

scholarly journals Charulata 2011: Dramatizing the Glocal

2020 ◽  
Vol 73 (3) ◽  
pp. 545-557
Author(s):  
Rituparna Roy
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
South Asian ◽  
First Century ◽  
Anna Karenina ◽  
Madame Bovary ◽  
The World ◽  
Twenty First Century ◽  
Satyajit Ray

AbstractA lonely wife in Kolkata and a bachelor in London have a virtual affair, but are forced to re-think their relationship when they discover he is her brother-in-law. Charulata 2011 is an ingenious post-millennial adaptation of Tagore’s novella, Nastanir (The Broken Nest, 1901), already immortalized by Satyajit Ray in his classic Charulata (1964). This intertextuality, especially with Ray, lends an added dimension to the film, allowing Chatterjee to contrast two modernities in Bengal – the colonial and glocal – over the course of a century. Both these women gain temporary respite from their suffocating marriage through an affair, but their circumstances are vastly different. While Tagore/Ray’s heroine (like Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary and Lady Chatterley) could only bond with a man she knew, technology expands Charulata’s choice in 2011. She romances the strange and the unknown – an unseen tall dark stranger with a gift for words. While the nineteenth century Bengali heroine had to reign in her erotic impulse, her twenty-first century counterpart submits to it, though with an overwhelming sense of guilt. But there are similarities too – both are childless homemakers; have a literary sensibility; and though a 100 years apart, in both their cases, the lover eventually departs, and duty ultimately wins over passion, bringing back the duly chastened wife to the wronged husband. Charulata 2011 thus dramatizes a glocalized South Asian narrative, where the protagonist negotiates an uneasy juxtaposition of a globalized outlook on the world with the entrapment of age-old social obligations in her self.

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