Joanna Russ

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
University Teaching ◽  
Literary Scholarship ◽  
Relevant Today ◽  
Joanna Russ ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Experimental Novel ◽  
The Cold War

Joanna Russ (1937-2011) was an outstanding writer, critic, and theorist of science fiction at a time when female writers were marginal to the genre, and very few women, perhaps only Judith Merril and Joanna herself, had significant influence on the field. In her university teaching and in her writing she championed the integration of new social models and higher literary standards into genre works. In her review columns for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction she dissected the masters of the New Wave with appreciation, wit, and incisive intelligence. Her experimental novel The Female Man (1975) is an essential seventies Feminist text, still relevant today; her groundbreaking academic articles are recognized as foundation studies in feminist and science fiction literary scholarship. Drawing on Jeanne Cortiel’s lesbian feminist appraisal of Russ, Demand My Writing (1999), Farah Mendelsohn’s essay collection On Joanna Russ (2009), and a wide range of contemporary sources, this book aims to give context to her career in the America of her times, from the Cold War domestic revival through the 1960s decade of protest and the Second Wave feminism of the 1970s and 1980s, into the twenty-first century, examining her novels, her remarkable short fiction, her critical and autobiographical works, her role in the science fiction community, and her contributions to feminist debate.

Zines, Half-Lives, and Afterlives: On the Temporalities of Social and Political Change

PMLA ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 126 (1) ◽  
pp. 140-150 ◽  
Author(s):  
Janice Radway
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Special Interest ◽  
Political Change ◽  
The United States ◽  
Alternative Press ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Do It Yourself ◽  
Mainstream Society ◽  
The 1960S

The term zine is a recent variant of fanzine, a neologism coined in the 1930s to refer to magazines self-published by Aficionados of science fiction. Until zines emerged as digital forms, they were generally defined as handmade, noncommercial, irregularly issued, small-run, paper publications circulated by individuals participating in alternative, special-interest communities. Zines exploded in popularity during the 1980s when punk music fans adopted the form as part of their do-it-yourself aesthetic and as an outsider way to communicate among themselves about punk's defiant response to the commercialism of mainstream society. In 1990, only a few years after the first punk zines appeared, Mike Gunderloy made a case for the genre's significance in an article published in the Whole Earth Review, one of the few surviving organs of the 1960s alternative press in the United States. He celebrated zines' wide range of interests and the oppositional politics that generated their underground approach to publication.

‘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.

Joanna Russ and the New Wave

Joanna Russ ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 20-38
Author(s):  
Gwyneth Jones
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Star Trek ◽  
New Wave ◽  
Protest Movements ◽  
Joanna Russ ◽  
Modernist Novel ◽  
The 1960S

“Experiment and Experience” covers Joanna’s first years as a reviewer for the Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, under the editorship of Judith Merril, and her first post as a university teacher at Cornell, and discusses modernism in sf, Joanna’s role as interpreter of the British “New Worlds” writers and the American New Wave and her response to the protest movements and cultural revolutions of the 1960s (in the psychedelic “Modernist novel by a Star Trek fan”) And Chaos Died. Essays and stories (1968-1971) examined include the important “The Wearing Out of Genre Materials,” and autobiographical short fictions that foreshadow The Female Man and illuminate And Chaos Died.

The Dialectic of Sex, after the Post-1960s

2019 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 331-342
Author(s):  
Madeline Lane-McKinley
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
Radical Feminism ◽  
Fiction Writing ◽  
Feminist Science ◽  
Feminist Science Fiction ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
A Site ◽  
Second Wave

A key artifact of the political contradictions and utopian problematics of women’s liberation and the tradition of radical feminism at the end of the 1960s, Shulamith Firestone’s Dialectic of Sex remains a site of controversies, misinterpretations, and unmet challenges. This essay considers the critical capacity of this text at the present juncture, strongly characterized by the reactionary resurgence of second-wave feminism and a trans-exclusionary brand of radical feminism. While both illuminating and symptomatizing many of the contradictions and failures of radical feminism, Firestone’s text also strongly resonates with the critical utopian interventions of queer-feminist science fiction writing in the early 1970s. This critique of The Dialectic of Sex seeks to rearticulate some of Firestone’s key concepts within a critical utopian framework and to reconceptualize the text’s contributions to radical feminism in relation to a contemporary project of revolutionary feminism. To do this, the author suggests, requires a more nuanced approach to historicizing and engaging with political confusion—marking a matter of great urgency for the current cultural landscape.

scholarly journals The «Long 1960s» in a Global Arena of Contention: Re-defining Assumptions of Self, Morality, Race, Gender and Justice, and Questioning Education

2019 ◽  
Vol 6 (1) ◽  
pp. 5-27 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rosa Bruno-Jofré
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Civil Rights Movement ◽  
Vatican Ii ◽  
New Left ◽  
Ethical Framework ◽  
The Social ◽  
Second Wave Feminism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
Global Arena

I argue that the global dissent of the 1960s is part of a political cultural constellation with many fronts, political conjonctures and religious intersections, in addition to a new sense of being that informed subjectivities and desires. The configurational components examined in this article include secularization, Vatican II, and the emergence of liberation theology in Latin America, as well as the New Left, the Cuban Revolution and the context of the Cold War; the legacy of the civil rights movement and its impact; second wave feminism and a new understanding of gender relations; art as a vehicle for ideas and agendas; the global dissension conveyed in the students’ insurrection and repercussions; and education as a tool for change. The article identifies relevant connections between the events and processes that challenged the social and political order across space, and explores the emergence of a contesting ethical framework.

Short Films from a Small Nation

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
C. Claire Thomson
Keyword(s):  
Public Information ◽  
Industrial Process ◽  
Actor Network Theory ◽  
Documentary Films ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Short Films ◽  
Post War ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
Art And Architecture

The first book-length study in English of a national corpus of state-sponsored informational film, this book traces how Danish shorts on topics including social welfare, industry, art and architecture were commissioned, funded, produced and reviewed from the inter-war period to the 1960s. For three decades, state-sponsored short filmmaking educated Danish citizens, promoted Denmark to the world, and shaped the careers of renowned directors like Carl Th. Dreyer. Examining the life cycle of a representative selection of films, and discussing their preservation and mediation in the digital age, this book presents a detailed case study of how informational cinema is shaped by, and indeed shapes, its cultural, political and technological contexts.The book combines close textual analysis of a broad range of films with detailed accounts of their commissioning, production, distribution and reception in Denmark and abroad, drawing on Actor-Network Theory to emphasise the role of a wide range of entities in these processes. It considers a broad range of genres and sub-genres, including industrial process films, public information films, art films, the city symphony, the essay film, and many more. It also maps international networks of informational and documentary films in the post-war period, and explores the role of informational film in Danish cultural and political history.

Mind Bending, Mental Seduction and Menticide: Brainwashing in British Spy Dramas of the 1960s

2013 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 27-48 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alan Burton
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Thought Control ◽  
Cultural Contexts ◽  
Scientific Background ◽  
Mind Control ◽  
1960S And 1970S ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Mind ◽  
Cultural Fantasy

Brainwashing assumed the proportions of a cultural fantasy during the Cold War period. The article examines the various political, scientific and cultural contexts of brainwashing, and proceeds to a consideration of the place of mind control in British spy dramas made for cinema and television in the 1960s and 1970s. Particular attention is given to the films The Mind Benders (1963) and The Ipcress File (1965), and to the television dramas Man in a Suitcase (1967–8), The Prisoner (1967–8) and Callan (1967–81), which gave expression to the anxieties surrounding thought-control. Attention is given to the scientific background to the representations of brainwashing, and the significance of spy scandals, treasons and treacheries as a distinct context to the appearance of brainwashing on British screens.

Music after the Fall

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tim Rutherford-Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Contemporary Music ◽  
The United States ◽  
Art Music ◽  
Sound Art ◽  
Musical Composition ◽  
Western Art ◽  
Wide Range ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The Cold War

By the start of the 21st century many of the foundations of postwar culture had disappeared: Europe had been rebuilt and, as the EU, had become one of the world’s largest economies; the United States’ claim to global dominance was threatened; and the postwar social democratic consensus was being replaced by market-led neoliberalism. Most importantly of all, the Cold War was over, and the World Wide Web had been born. Music After The Fall considers contemporary musical composition against this changed backdrop, placing it in the context of globalization, digitization, and new media. Drawing on theories from the other arts, in particular art and architecture, it expands the definition of Western art music to include forms of composition, experimental music, sound art, and crossover work from across the spectrum, inside and beyond the concert hall. Each chapter considers a wide range of composers, performers, works, and institutions are considered critically to build up a broad and rich picture of the new music ecosystem, from North American string quartets to Lebanese improvisers, from South American electroacoustic studios to pianos in the Australian outback. A new approach to the study of contemporary music is developed that relies less on taxonomies of style and technique, and more on the comparison of different responses to common themes, among them permission, fluidity, excess, and loss.

Nasser's Gamble

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jesse Ferris
Keyword(s):  
Cold War ◽  
Middle East ◽  
Arab World ◽  
Decisive Role ◽  
Original Material ◽  
Egyptian Revolution ◽  
Arab Nationalism ◽  
The 1960S ◽  
The Cold War ◽  
The Arab Spring

This book draws on declassified documents from six countries and original material in Arabic, German, Hebrew, and Russian to present a new understanding of Egypt's disastrous five-year intervention in Yemen, which Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser later referred to as “my Vietnam.” The book argues that Nasser's attempt to export the Egyptian revolution to Yemen played a decisive role in destabilizing Egypt's relations with the Cold War powers, tarnishing its image in the Arab world, ruining its economy, and driving its rulers to instigate the fatal series of missteps that led to war with Israel in 1967. Viewing the Six Day War as an unintended consequence of the Saudi–Egyptian struggle over Yemen, the book demonstrates that the most important Cold War conflict in the Middle East was not the clash between Israel and its neighbors. It was the inter-Arab struggle between monarchies and republics over power and legitimacy. Egypt's defeat in the “Arab Cold War” set the stage for the rise of Saudi Arabia and political Islam. Bold and provocative, this book brings to life a critical phase in the modern history of the Middle East. Its compelling analysis of Egypt's fall from power in the 1960s offers new insights into the decline of Arab nationalism, exposing the deep historical roots of the Arab Spring of 2011.

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