scholarly journals Rousseau in a Post-Apocalyptic Context: Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains and Science Fiction

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 142
Author(s):  
Yutaka Okuhata
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Point Of View ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

The present paper discusses Angela Carter’s Heroes and Villains (1969), which parodies both “post-apocalyptic” novels in the Cold War era and Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s theory on civilisation. By analysing this novel in comparison, not only to Rousseau’s On the Origin of Inequality (1755), but also to the works of various science fiction writers in the 1950s and 1960s, the paper aims to examine Carter’s reinterpretation of Rousseau in a post-apocalyptic context. As I will argue, Heroes and Villains criticises Rousseau from a feminist point of view to not only represent the dystopian society as full of inequality and violence, but also to show that human beings, having forgotten the nuclear war as their great “sin” in the past, can no longer create a bright future. Observing the underlying motifs in the novel, the paper will reveal how Carter attempts to portray a world where human history has totally ended, or where people cannot make “history” in spite of the fact that they biologically survived the holocaust. From this perspective, I will clarify the way in which Carter reinterprets Rousseau’s notion of “fallen” civilisation in the new context as a critique of the nuclear issues in the late twentieth century.

Luddism

Dismantlings ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 29-47
Author(s):  
Matt Tierney
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Large Scale ◽  
Specific Form ◽  
Edouard Glissant ◽  
Audre Lorde ◽  
The World ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

This chapter explains why Luddism is a metaphor that threads through the Long Seventies in the work of poets, activists, and thinkers, each of whom applies literature to the task of dismantling the technocentric world. It includes Édouard Glissant who offers an optimistic promise of literature's power to break systems, writing poetry that can “thicken” the “machine that the world is.” Audre Lorde is more skeptical, opening the possibility that even literature may be one among the “master's tools” that are inapposite to the task of dismantling. Joanna Russ is more skeptical still, in her insistence that scholars and science-fiction writers should “give up talking about technology” and W.S. Merwin imagines an intelligent machine that is fated to be relinquished. Such literary and theoretical practices do not oppose technology as such, but instead oppose large-scale forms of exploitation by dismantling the machines at their disposal. The chapter also talks about Epistemological Luddism, a specific form of Luddism that provides a critical defense against late-twentieth century technological politics and a dedramatization of the false choice for or against technology.

scholarly journals Adapting Wives and Daughters for Television: Reimagining Women, Travel, Natural Science, and Race

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African People ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.

‘Time is Over’: Postmodern Times

2018 ◽  
pp. 160-219
Author(s):  
Randall Stevenson
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
International Travel ◽  
Graham Swift ◽  
Malcolm Lowry ◽  
Muriel Spark ◽  
Martin Amis ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
Ian Mcewan ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War

The Cold War and the nuclear threat made it as difficult, after 1945, to look forward affirmatively as to look back. Enlightenment ideas of a ‘project of modernity’ gave way to postmodern scepticism and stasis, reflected by Samuel Beckett and the nouveau roman, and in other ways in the fiction of Malcolm Lowry and Thomas Mann and the repetitive chronologies of Joyce Cary, Lawrence Durrell and others. After the 1960s, authors such as Muriel Spark confronted the Holocaust and recent history more directly, as in later decades did Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, Graham Swift and others. In this fiction, and generally later in the century, concerns with the clock’s constraints were diminished by long familiarity and by several new factors. These included technologies of film, video, globalised media and the internet, along with increased international travel and encounters with less industrialised cultures. Science fiction, too, and imagination of time-travel, was both symptomatic yet partly redemptive of horological stress. There remained, however, numerous (often historical) novels by authors such as Gabriel García Marquéz, Salman Rushdie, Alasdair Gray and Thomas Pynchon – re-examining, in Mason & Dixon, C18th practices of global measurement – still concerned with the stresses clockwork chronology imposed on modern history.

Sakyo Komatsu’s Planetary Imagination

2018 ◽  
pp. 95-106
Author(s):  
Tatsumi Takayuki
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural Disaster ◽  
Full Scale ◽  
Film Adaptation ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Original Publication ◽  
Nuclear War ◽  
Founding Fathers ◽  
Japanese Science ◽  
Eastern Japan

This chapter explores major works of Sakyo Komatsu, one of the Founding Fathers of contemporary Japanese science fiction, with special emphasis on his 1964 novel The Day of Resurrection, along with Fukasaku Kinji's 1980 film adaptation Virus. While his first novel, The Japanese Apache (1964), narrates the way postwar Japanese have reconstructed their identity as cyborgian, this second novel, The Day of Resurrection, dramatizes how full-scale nuclear war is ignited by the possible coincidences between natural disaster and artificial disaster, which we were to witness nearly fifty years after original publication of the novel—in the multiple disasters in eastern Japan on March 11, 2011. The chapter also speculates on the transnational impacts of the novel upon Michael Crichton's The Andromeda Strain (1969) and Junot Díaz’s The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (2008).

Introduction

2020 ◽  
pp. 1-44
Author(s):  
Gavin Miller
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Psychological Knowledge ◽  
Reflexive Function ◽  
And Function ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

For the purposes of this book, science fiction is defined broadly in the terms advanced by Darko Suvin, with a focus on the genre from the late nineteenth century onwards. Psychology is conceived as the modern Western discipline, running from the origins of experimental psychology in the late nineteenth century to the ascendance of neuroscience as a disciplinary rival in the late twentieth century. Five different functions for psychological discourses in science fiction are proposed. The didactic-futurological function educates the non-specialist through extrapolation of psychological technologies, teaching within the context of futurological forecasting. The utopian function anchors in historical possibility the imagining of a currently non-existent society, whether utopian or dystopian. The cognitive-estranging function defamiliarizes and denaturalizes social reality by extrapolating current social tendencies and/or construct unsettling fictional analogues of the reader’s world. The metafictional function self-consciously thematizes within narrative fiction the psychological origins, nature, and function of science fiction as a genre. The reflexive function addresses the construction of individuals and groups who have reflexively adopted the ‘truth’ of psychological knowledge.

Secretions

2021 ◽  
pp. 119-158
Author(s):  
Rex Ferguson
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Genetic Research ◽  
Forensic Analysis ◽  
Dna Profiling ◽  
The Body ◽  
Autobiographical Texts ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Living Organisms ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

DNA profiling, in which individual being is identified by its cellular structures, was first developed by the geneticist Alec Jeffreys in the 1980s. That this source of identity also forms the instructions through which living organisms are generated has complicated profiling’s place in the cultural imaginary of the late twentieth century. So, while profiling actually deals only in non-coding regions of the genome—matter often referred to as ‘junk DNA’—the significance of DNA as a substance of forensic analysis, in the late twentieth century imaginary, is its resonance as the apparent blueprint of existence. The notable features that this blurring of concepts brings about include a conceptualization of identity as a mass of information; notions to do with codes and coding; the presence of the body in the fluids which spill beyond its bounds; and a sense of the body as an archive of heredity and primitivism. In writing specifically about genetic research, Richard Powers’s The Gold Bug Variations (1991) serves a dual function in this chapter, as both an explicatory document and thematic example. But the more substantive analysis is reserved for the work of J. G. Ballard which, from its science fiction origins in novels such as The Drowned World (1962), through the controversial era of Crash (1973), to its trilogy of autobiographical texts (Empire of the Sun (1984), The Kindness of Women (1991), and Miracles of Life (2008)) articulates a form of identity that has close, though often oblique, affinities with all the most prominent features of DNA profiling.

The Sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim

AJS Review ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 44 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-181
Author(s):  
Daniel Reiser
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Oral Culture ◽  
Early Stages ◽  
Vernacular Language ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
The Status ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

AbstractThe sanctification of Yiddish in hasidic society occurred primarily in the first half of the twentieth century and intensified in the wake of the Holocaust. The roots of this phenomenon, however, lie in the beginnings of Hasidism in the eighteenth century. The veneration of Yiddish is linked to the hasidic attitude towards vernacular language and the status of the ẓaddik “speaking Torah.” Hasidism represented—and represents—an oral culture in which the verbal transfer of its sacred content sanctifies the language spoken by its adherents, in this case, Yiddish. This article presents a theological and sociological examination of the various stages of the sanctification of Yiddish among Hasidim from the movement's early stages to the late twentieth century.

John Brunner

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jad Smith
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Major Theme ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Own Name ◽  
John Brunner

Under his own name and numerous pseudonyms, John Brunner (1934–1995) was one of the most prolific and influential science fiction authors of the late twentieth century. During his exemplary career, the British author wrote with a stamina matched by only a few other great science fiction writers and with a literary quality of even fewer, importing modernist techniques into his novels and stories and probing every major theme of his generation: robotics, racism, drugs, space exploration, technological warfare, and ecology. This book, an intensive review of Brunner's life and works, demonstrates how Brunner's much-neglected early fiction laid the foundation for his classic Stand on Zanzibar and other major works such as The Jagged Orbit, The Sheep Look Up, and The Shockwave Rider. Making extensive use of Brunner's letters, columns, speeches, and interviews published in fanzines, the book approaches Brunner in the context of markets and trends that affected many writers of the time, including his uneasy association with the “New Wave” of science fiction in the 1960s and 1970s. This book shows how Brunner's attempts to cross-fertilize the American pulp tradition with British scientific romance complicated the distinctions between genre and mainstream fiction, and between hard and soft science fiction, and helped carve out space for emerging modes such as cyberpunk, slipstream, and biopunk.

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