Self-Help Supermen: The Politics of Fan Utopias in World War II-Era Science Fiction

2014 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 524
Author(s):  
Andrew Pilsch
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
World War ◽  
Self Help

scholarly journals Towards a Poetics of Strangeness: Experiments in Classifying Language of Technological Novelty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Simeone ◽  
Advaith Gundavajhala Venkata Koundinya ◽  
Anandh Ravi Kumar ◽  
Ed Finn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Bruce Sterling

The trajectory of science fiction since World War II has been defined by its relationship with technoscientific imaginaries. In the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein dreamed of the robots and rocket ships that would preoccupy thousands of engineers a few decades later. In 1980s cyberpunk, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling imagined virtual worlds that informed generations of technology entrepreneurs. When Margaret Atwood was asked what draws her to dystopian visions of the future, she responded, "I read the newspaper." This is not just a reiteration of the truism that science fiction is always about the present as well as the future. In fact, we will argue, science fiction is a genre defined by its special relationship with what we might term "scientific reality," or the set of paradigms, aspirations, and discourses associated with technoscientific research.

“Evidences of Decadent Humanity”: Antianthropocentrism in Early Science Fiction

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan L. Moore
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
World War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Land Community

Early science fiction (SF) is noted for, among other things, its conservatism and lack of interest in ecology. Brian Stableford, a well-known SF writer and critic, writes that "there are very few early stories with ecological themes" (1993, 395). This article shows that, in fact, many early SF works (those written between the Enlightenment and World War II) employ ecological themes, especially as applied to questioning our anthropocentrism. These works suggest that humans are but one species among many, that we are not the end of nature/history, that the natural world may be better off without us, and, in some cases, that humanity is fated to go extinct, the result of its own hubris. Such views are undoubtedly pessimistic, yet these works may also be read as warnings for humans to seek a more humble view of ourselves as members of what Aldo Leopold calls the land community.

scholarly journals Prescribing Sound: Willem Van de Wall and the Carceral Origins of American Music Therapy

2020 ◽  
Vol 3 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 109-132
Author(s):  
J. Martin Vest
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Music Therapy ◽  
Social Control ◽  
Psychiatric Hospitals ◽  
American Music ◽  
World War ◽  
Self Help ◽  
Psychiatric Institutions ◽  
Class Hierarchies ◽  
Bourgeois Modernity

From 1921 until 1936, musician Willem Van de Wall pioneered the modern use of therapeutic music in American prisons and psychiatric institutions. His therapy was steeped in the methods and philosophy of social control, and after World War II, it shaped the professionalizing field of music therapy. Van de Wall's influence reveals an overlooked connection between modern clinical practice and the techniques of control employed in prisons and psychiatric hospitals of the early twentieth century. Given music therapy's broader impact as an element of postwar self-help culture, its relationship to social control practices also disrupts longstanding scholarly ideas about the so-called “therapeutic ethos.” The therapeutic ethos did not originate solely in efforts by the middle classes to adjust to bourgeois modernity. The case of music therapy suggests that some elements of “therapeutic culture” were always coercive and always directed toward the maintenance of race, gender, and class hierarchies.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

scholarly journals Emigration in Estonian Literature: “Self” and “Other” in the Context of European Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Anneli Mihkelev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Common People ◽  
Political Terror ◽  
National Ideology

The experience of emigration generated a new paradigm in Estonian culture and literature. After World War II Sweden became a new homeland for many people. Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in homeland and the national ideology limited literature in the initial years of exile. Both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. It was a traumatic experience for nation and culture where the totalitarian political power and trauma have allied. The normal cultural communication was destroyed. But the most important thing at this time was memory, not just memory but entangled memory, which emigrants carried with them to the new homeland and which influenced people in Estonia. The act of remembering becomes crucial in the exile cultures.Estonian literature in exile and in the homeland presents the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. Surrealism as well as fantasy and science fiction as the literary styles reveal what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French surrealism, it is a uniquely Estonian surrealism. At the same time Estonia was already a new homeland for many refugees from Russia who had escaped during the Revolution of 1917 and World War I. August Gailit and Oskar Luts wrote about that issue in different literary works. Luts entangled different memories in his novel Tagahoovis (In the Backyard, 1933): the memories of Estonians and the memories of Russian emigrants. He also entangled historical narratives about World War I, the Russian revolution and the young Estonian state in the 1920s. Luts wrote about common people who interpret historical narratives. The novel was also published in exile in 1969 in Toronto.

scholarly journals Time Travel in Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse- Five

2018 ◽  
Vol 224 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-100
Author(s):  
Intisar Rashid Khaleel(M.A)
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Time Travel ◽  
Stream Of Consciousness ◽  
World War ◽  
Kurt Vonnegut ◽  
Prisoner Of War ◽  
The Third ◽  
Literary Context ◽  
Slaughter House

            For many years, time travel was the stuff of science fiction. This was all just part of the world's imagination until recently. Science authors, among them, Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) post-modern American writer, believe that one can travel through time forward or backward asking his memories and stream of consciousness to give sensory impressions of his thoughts and actions, that what Billy did in Vonnegut's Slaughter house- Five (1969). The protagonist Billy Pilgrim finds himself "unstuck in time" jumping between several periods of his life. Travelling between his experiences as a prisoner of war in World War II to his family life in 1950s, and 1960s  and his time on Tralfmadorian Planet, Billy has the freedom and ability to travel; he has no control over these transitions. The present study falls into three sections plus a conclusion. The first section deals with the concept of time travel in literature and fiction. Section two presents historical and literary context to Vonnegut's novel. The treatment of time travel concept will be discussed in the third section. Then, the conclusions which sum up the findings of the research.

Space Cadets and Rocket Boys

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rebecca Onion
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Young Adult ◽  
Young People ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Middle Grade ◽  
World War ◽  
Juvenile Fiction

After World War II, science-fiction authors found lucrative side gigs in writing fiction for young people. Before “young adult” books were a fixed category, authors like Robert Heinlein wrote stories about space for middle-grade readers, most of whom were male. This chapter looks at Heinlein’s juvenile fiction published by Scribner’s, and shows how his work reinforced a vision of scientific masculinity.

Introduction

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
J.P. Telotte
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Film Industry ◽  
The Body ◽  
The Self ◽  
Space Vehicles ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
World War ◽  
Wide Audience ◽  
The World

This chapter surveys the body of science fiction cartoons that appeared in approximate parallel to a burgeoning SF literature during the first years of film and continuing to World War II. It situates this material within the production and exhibition practices of the film industry and links it to modernist aesthetics, emphasizing modernism’s primary concerns with revisioning both the world and the self. It then describes the key memes typically found in these films—space vehicles and space travel, robots and mechanical figures, aliens and alien worlds, and inventions and inventors—while also suggesting the broader impact of the cartoons. Through the comic treatment of these memes, it argues, animation helped to make the SF genre both more familiar and less threatening to a wide audience.

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