scholarly journals Dialectic of Myth and Enlightenment: Rethinking Scientific Progress and Humanity through The Shape of Water

Lexicon ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Mala Hernawati
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Government ◽  
Historical Fantasy ◽  
The Cold War

Since the Scientific Revolution, the clash between myths, science, and humanity has been a recurring theme found in literary works. In the midst of today’s rapid, massive, and disruptive technological development, Guillermo del Torro and Daniel Kraus collaboratively present a historical fantasy novel, The Shape of Water, which features the issues of scientific progress and humanity in a romance between a mute lower-class woman Elisa Esposito and a mystical amphibian creature from South America, Deus Brânquia. The novel portrays Deus Brânquia as an experimental asset of the American government to be studied for the Cold War military advancement. This study aims to analyze the representation of destructive science in the novel and examine the demythologization of Deus Brânquia as a depiction of Enlightenment's impact on the modern worldview. Using critical theory on the dialectic of myth and enlightenment proposed by Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, this study finds that The Shape of Water articulates a cynical notion to Enlightenment’s legacy as it portrays how the progress of modern science can lead to horrific domination upon the marginalized human and nonhuman creature.

scholarly journals Dr. Strangelove or How I Should Stop Worrying and Love Fascism

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 15
Author(s):  
Andre Dias
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Cold War ◽  
The United States ◽  
The Novel ◽  
The Third ◽  
Form Of Government ◽  
Democratic System ◽  
The Will ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Do So

This paper presents a Foucauldian discourse analysis of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb. The analysis examines linguistic and extralinguistic aspects of both the film and the novel. It is composed of three parts: the first is an analysis of the Manichaeism during the Cold War period and how it turned the Soviets into mortal enemies of the United States; the second is how the nuclear threat and the Cold War paranoia could destroy the democratic system in the United States; and the third analysis explain how Fascistic relations could be cultivated through the discipline of bodies. It has been concluded that the movie is presenting a concept, here referred to as Strangelove’s Hypothesis, that a Strangelovian scenario (i.e., a nuclear holocaust, usually caused by incompetence or without the will to do so) could lead to the emergence of a Fascistic-like form of government in order to restore security. The solution presented to avoid such scenario is a sociopsychological change in order to pursue more peaceful relations.

The Relevance of Ancient Science to the Survival of Secularism

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
pp. 58-76
Author(s):  
Richard Carrier
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Historical Development ◽  
Scientific Revolution ◽  
Scientific Progress ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
The United States ◽  
United States Constitution ◽  
Christian Theology ◽  
Ancient Science

Abstract To oppose Secularism modern Christians depend on myths about the historical development of civilization. Such as the myth of a Christian America, imagining such things as that the United States Constitution was based on Biblical Christian principles. Parallel to this myth is another about science: that the Scientific Revolution, and therefore modern science, was based on Biblical Christian principles and could not have occurred (and therefore cannot continue) without them. Necessary to this are several false claims, most particularly that ancient pagans never did and never could have made any significant scientific progress, and that Christian theology was essential to doing so. These myths are here dispelled with recourse to a survey of the actual facts of the matter.

Confronting the Monolith: Authority and the Cold War in Gravity's Rainbow

1999 ◽  
Vol 33 (3) ◽  
pp. 417-436 ◽  
Author(s):  
JOHN HAMILL
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Historical Novel ◽  
Special Kind ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Gravity’S Rainbow ◽  
Gravity's Rainbow ◽  
Historical Figure ◽  
The Individual ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Military

One of the notable aspects of Gravity's Rainbow, if we consider it as an historical novel of a special kind, is the way in which “great” political leaders are barely mentioned. The carnival lacks the mock king, and the historical novel lacks the leader who embodies history. The explanation here is paradoxically historicist. Gravity's Rainbow explicitly addresses a constructed audience (in the Orpheus Theatre) in the Cold War and is about the formation of the Cold War in its techno-bureaucratic context. The realpolitik of authority in the Cold War context has changed. Bureaucratic constructions of System operate as the modus operandi for authority in the novel and they parallel the historical formation of Systems theory and analysis with such US organizations as RAND. This development represents, in the technologies and the discourses of the military and political strategists, a response to Hitler and the supposed tyranny and threat of Communism. The series of characters we encounter within the novel reflects different forms of entrapment and/or lines of flight in response to the authority of the System in what John Johnston has called an assemblage, or postmodern multiplicity. Containment and counterforce become metaphors which Pynchon scurrilously uses to subvert the moral righteousness of the Western Cold Warriors in their defense of a “free world” (paradoxically) under siege from an ever threatening Communism. Pynchon is interested not in the great historical figure, but in the relation of the individual to the System, militarily, scientifically, socially, and sexually.

Science between freedom and responsibility

2003 ◽  
Vol 11 (3) ◽  
pp. 407-416
Author(s):  
JENS ERIK FENSTAD
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Security ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Good Time ◽  
Problem Solver ◽  
World War ◽  
Postwar Reconstruction ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Second World

The post Second World War period was a good time for modern science-driven technology; it had played a decisive part in the allied victory and now it was to be harnessed to the task of postwar reconstruction, promoting increased welfare, better health and improved security. But there were also misgivings related to the freedom in the conduct of science. Could science be freely pursued under the terms of a social contract so inextricably intertwined with national security concerns? After the end of the Cold War, new concerns emerged. The security element in the old contract had acquired a new meaning and was now understood in the sense of a protected environment, safe living conditions and future sustainability. Previously, science was the problem solver. Now science came to be seen as a major source of the problems. We have seen a shift from issues of freedom and trust to questions of responsibility and accountability. How should science respond?

The Three Worlds, or the Division of Social Scientific Labor, circa 1950–1975

1981 ◽  
Vol 23 (4) ◽  
pp. 565-590 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl E. Pletsch
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Scientific Discourse ◽  
Modernization Theory ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Scientific Labor ◽  
The Social ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
Social Scientific ◽  
The Cold War

Our ideas of tradition, culture, and ideology found their places in the social scientific discourse of the 1950s and 1960s as part of modernization theory. This supposed theory was heir to ancient occidental habits of mythological thinking about history, as is well known.1 But the reorientation of these ideas in the postwar years was guided more specifically by the novel division of the globe into three conceptual “worlds” in response to the Cold War.

Borders and Go-Betweens

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 223-253 ◽  
Author(s):  
Emiliya Karaboeva
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Road Network ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
Truck Drivers ◽  
Everyday Experience ◽  
The Road ◽  
Liminal Spaces ◽  
Archival Documents ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Ritual Context

This chapter aims at discussing the socialist international truck drivers during the Cold War as a liminal group, stemming from two basic considerations: The first one is that roads and borders, which constitute the essence of the international truck drivers’ identity, practices and status, should be considered as classical liminal spaces; and the second is that the notion of liminality should be used as an independent analytical concept, not directly related to the ritual context. Drawing on state archival documents and interviews with former Bulgarian international truck drivers, the chapter conceptualizes the road system as a liminal space, then outlines the Bulgarian policies and practices governing border activity during the Cold War, within which Bulgarian international truck drivers emerged as a group. Further, the truckers are presented as crossing state and ideological borders, as oscillating between different official and non-official practices related to the ambivalent characteristics of Cold War relations, as possessing boundary and thus contradicting identities, and as existing in between different social statuses. This analysis of the liminal status and activities of the truck drivers allows for the grasping of the ambivalence of the Cold War as simultaneously a global conflict and an everyday experience, as a time of seclusion and intensive contacts, and allows us to look at the Cold War processes not just from below, from the standpoint of people of a lower-class position, such as the truckers, but from inside—from the interstitial space of the transnational road network, which both epitomized the ambivalence of the Cold War, but also was shaped by it.

scholarly journals Et Tu, Atticus!: The Hero of "To Kill a Mockingbird" and the Cold War

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Akiyoshi Suzuki
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
American South ◽  
Social Attitudes ◽  
The Novel ◽  
New Yorker ◽  
The Poor ◽  
To Kill A Mockingbird ◽  
Poor White ◽  
The American South ◽  
The Cold War

Against the background of the Cold War, this article rethinks the novel (1960) and film (1962) To Kill a Mockingbird, more specifically Atticus Finch’s characterization as the courageous, unblemished defender of an unjustly accused black man in the American South. Because of Atticus’s unrelenting efforts to exonerate Tom Robinson, he has been proclaimed the 20th century’s greatest American movie hero. At a closer look, however, it turns out that, while Atticus fights hard for Tom, he nevertheless, and as a matter of course, abandons the investigation into the stabbing death of Bob Ewell, a poor white man and Tom’s accuser. The New Yorker magazine noted this conflict in the movie. So, it begs the question: from what social attitudes does this broad-spectrum admiration for Atticus emerge? This article proposes an answer: it originates in identity-centrism, an attitude that underlies United States ideology during the Cold War era and results, specifically, in a total disregard for the poor. In other words, To Kill a Mockingbird is not a closed-ended novel of good versus evil, but an open-ended work that raises a troubling question about diversity.

The Sound of Life in Marcel Beyer’s Flughunde (The Karnau Tapes)

2021 ◽  
Vol 57 (4) ◽  
pp. 360-381
Author(s):  
Arina Rotaru
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
National Socialism ◽  
Close Connection ◽  
The Novel ◽  
National Socialist ◽  
Mechanical Destruction ◽  
The Pacific ◽  
Strong Resemblance ◽  
The Cold War

In Marcel Beyer’s celebrated Flughunde (1995), the discovery of an underground archive of sound in the aftermath of the Cold War—preserved despite strategies apparently calling for its mechanical destruction—reassigns agency and voice to instrumentalized victims of National Socialism. By highlighting the close connection between an alleged security custodian of the archive, the actual National Socialist sound cartographer Hermann Karnau, and Moreau, a character bearing a strong resemblance to the protagonist of H. G. Wells’s 1896 novel The Island of Doctor Moreau, Beyer’s novel draws attention to a utopian experiment with life that was carried out in the wake of the colonial enterprise in the Pacific and posits additional historical undertones manifested in Karnau’s National Socialist experiments with sound. Karnau’s attempt to master vocal timbre in particular foregrounds technologies that make it possible to manipulate voice and memory in the post-Fascist and post-Communist present. In spite of technological alteration, archived voices of colonial and National Socialist subjects manifest a vitalist aesthetic. With its concern for race, sound, and memory, the novel breaks new ground in telling the story of the National Socialist and colonial past in the aftermath of the Cold War.

scholarly journals Doing Diaries: David Martin, the Royal Society and scientific London, 1947–1950

2012 ◽  
Vol 66 (3) ◽  
pp. 273-294 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jeff Hughes
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Royal Society ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
External Relations ◽  
Executive Secretary ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Research Councils ◽  
International Aspects ◽  
Significant Point

David Christie Martin (1914–76) was the Assistant Secretary (1947–62) and Executive Secretary (1962–76) of the Royal Society. During his long tenure he oversaw the modernization and expansion of the Society's administration, finances, publications and premises, and worked closely with the Officers, Council and the Society's many subcommittees. He was closely involved with the national and international aspects of the Society's work, and with the Fellows, visitors and external relations at all levels. The key link between the Royal Society and Whitehall, he developed strong informal contacts with civil servants in the Treasury, other government departments and the research councils, which greatly facilitated the Society's work. He was a significant point of continuity in the administration and governance of the Society over this long period, yet it is remarkable that we know little of Martin's work. Drawing on Martin's diary for 1947–49, recently unearthed at the Royal Society Library, this paper gives an account of his activities in the Royal Society and in postwar scientific London in this period. In so doing it sheds new light on British science at the beginning of the Cold War, and on the key role of the ‘invisible administrator’ in modern science.

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