Ideology and Futurology in Early 20th-Century Britain: Wells, Haldane, Bernal, and Their Critics

2021 ◽  
pp. 38-56
Author(s):  
Peter J. Bowler
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Space Travel ◽  
Human Race ◽  
Spiritual Dimension ◽  
Collective Mentality

This chapter studies the response of rationalist writers to the claims of theologians arguing that their ideology lacked any sense of a wider purpose to human life. It is argued that to replace the spiritual dimension of religion, authors such as H. G. Wells, J. B. S. Haldane, and J. D. Bernal appealed to the possibility that the human race could in future develop a collective mentality and spread this awareness throughout the cosmos by space travel. Their ideas thus anticipated themes developed by later science-fiction authors such as Arthur C. Clarke in his 2001: A Space Odyssey.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL IDEAS OF CARL DU PREL AND ITS RECEPTION BY RUSSIAN SPIRITUALISTS IN THE LATE 19TH - EARLY 20TH CENTURY

2020 ◽  
pp. 58-68
Author(s):  
Tikhon V. Spirin ◽  
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Science And Religion ◽  
The Other ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Perception Threshold ◽  
New Era ◽  
The Core ◽  
The One

The article addresses the core anthropological concepts of Carl Du Prel’s philosophy and explores the significance of those concepts for the Russian spiritualism of the late 19th – early 20th century. The Du Prel’s theory built up upon the concept of Duality of the Human Being. Du Prel insisted on simultaneous co-existence of two subjects – one pertaining to the sensible world and the other related to the extrasensory (‘the transcendental subject’) – that are divided by the ‘perception threshold’. He argued that in dormant and somnambular state the threshold would shift and thus enable the Transcendental Subject to act in the Extrasensory World. Du Prel believed that the human evolution is not over yet. He suggested that one could estimate what the new form of the human life would be judging by the conditions in which the transcendental subject comes out. Like many other spiritualists, Du Prel foretold the upcoming dawn of a new era where the boundary between science and religion on the one part and the Sensible and Extrasensory World on the other part will vanish. Anthropological doctrine of Du Prel correlated well with the views on the future human being held by the Russian spiritualists, and therefore he became one of the most reputable authors for them

scholarly journals Kaleidoscopic Portrayal of Early Twentieth-Century British India: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (7) ◽  
pp. 21-29
Author(s):  
Suresh Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Raja Rao ◽  
Anglo Indian

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) is considered one of the pioneering Indian writers in English of Anglo-Indian fiction who gained international acclaim. Along with R.K. Narayana, and Raja Rao, he is popularly known as the trio of Indian English novelists. He marked his revolutionary appearance by giving voice to the oppressed section of the society with his novel, Untouchable in 1935. In this novel, he takes a day from the life of Bakha, a young sweeper who is an untouchable because of his work of cleaning latrines in the early 20th century British India. Discrimination based on caste and poverty are the two focal points of this novel. This paper aims at portraying a kaleidoscope of socio-cultural, economic and political spheres of life. It aims at painting the unexplored, and less talked vistas of life. Hence while revisiting untouchability and poverty, this paper offers an analysis to a variety of colours or a collage of varied aspects of human life. 

scholarly journals Kaleidoscopic Portrayal of Early Twentieth-Century British India: A Study of Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable

2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (6) ◽  
pp. 45-53
Author(s):  
Suresh Kumar
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Focal Points ◽  
British India ◽  
Indian English ◽  
Cultural Economic ◽  
Raja Rao ◽  
Anglo Indian

Mulk Raj Anand (1905-2004) is considered one of the pioneering Indian writers in English of Anglo-Indian fiction who gained international acclaim. Along with R.K. Narayana, and Raja Rao, he is popularly known as the trio of Indian English novelists. He marked his revolutionary appearance by giving voice to the oppressed section of the society with his novel, Untouchable in 1935. In this novel, he takes a day from the life of Bakha, a young sweeper who is an untouchable because of his work of cleaning latrines in the early 20th century British India. Discrimination based on caste and poverty are the two focal points of this novel. This paper aims at portraying a kaleidoscope of socio-cultural, economic and political spheres of life. It aims at painting the unexplored, and less talked vistas of life. Hence while revisiting untouchability and poverty, this paper offers an analysis to a variety of colours or a collage of varied aspects of human life. 

scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

“In a strange feast hangoverˮ: the drama of the Russian intelligentsia of the early 20th century

2020 ◽  
pp. 21-33
Author(s):  
Farida Akhunzyanova
Keyword(s):  
20Th Century ◽  
Art History ◽  
Spiritual Development ◽  
Human Life ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Cultural Codes ◽  
The World ◽  
The Status ◽  
Russian Intelligentsia ◽  
Methodological Approaches

The Russian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century is characterized by a steady need for unity with the world. This need takes on an intertextual character, flowing into the interaction of ideas and cultural codes leading to the attainment of the status of Homo Cosmicus. One of these codes is a feast. The purpose of the author of the article is to reconstruct the lifecreation of the Russian intelligentsia at the beginning of the 20th century through the prism of an ancient feast. It seems that in the conditions of intense spiritual searches, in the struggle to find wholeness and completeness of human life, turning to antiquity became a truly metaphysical idea, where the feast was a significant cultural constant. In the process of moving to the highest point of spiritual development, the antique feast metaphorically reflects the cosmos of being, just as the violation of the order of the feast reflects the violation of the order of being. This is what happens in Russian reality in the first half of the 20th century, where against the backdrop of tragic historical events, the Platonic “feastˮ turns into the vulgar “feastˮ of Petronius. After the revolution of 1917 the intelligentsia, with its own aspirations, found itself at a feast alien to itself, where it could not find a place, and the “hangover” became too heavy and turned into a real drama. Methodological approaches to the problem under study are based on the theoretical basis of modern scientific knowledge, which includes concepts and methods of philosophy (N. A. Berdyaev, P. A. Florensky, D. S. Merezhkovsky, V. V. Rozanov, Vl. S. Solovyov), cultural studies (I. A. Edoshina, M. S. Kagan, Yu. M. Lotman, N. O. Osipova), art history (I. A. Azizyan, A. Payman, A. A. Rusakova, D. V. Sarabyanov), intelligentsia studies (V. S. Memetov, S. M. Usmanov).

Asians and Asian Americans in Early Science Fiction

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Cheng
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Asian Americans ◽  
Detective Fiction ◽  
Life Forms ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Yellow Peril ◽  
Terrestrial Life ◽  
The Invisible

This essay considers the expressive and figurative dynamics of Asians in science fiction in the early 20th century. Racial sentiment and policy in the era saw and defined Asians as “ineligible aliens” to exclude from immigration and citizenship. Asian figures expressed these dynamics in science fiction, adapting Orientalist tropes and Yellow Peril themes to the imperatives of the emergent genre. The invisible menace of villainous masterminds like Fu Manchu from crime and detective fiction were refigured as visible science fiction foes whose defeat redeemed the power and potential of science from its degenerate and dehumanizing application. Asian racial tropes aligned particularly with science fiction’s concern about extra-terrestrial life forms. While the term “alien” was not used in the period for such creatures, its later prominence expressed valences and associations, particularly with “invasion,” that Asians originally represented in the genre.

Grassic Gibbon, Lewis (1901–1935)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Brian McAllister
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Critical Attention ◽  
Socialist Politics ◽  
Lewis Grassic Gibbon

Lewis Grassic Gibbon, a pseudonym for James Leslie Mitchell, was a key writer of the early 20th-century Scottish Renaissance, most famous for his trilogy A Scots Quair—Sunset Song (1932), Cloud Howe (1933), and Grey Granite (1934). While the majority of critical attention has focused on this trilogy, Mitchell published a wide body of work, ranging from historical fiction to archaeological adventure to science fiction. His work often reflects a leftist, anarcho-socialist politics and a diffusionist worldview, in which modern civilization progressively distances humanity from a primitive, utopian state of being. Mitchell published seventeen books, fifteen between 1931 and 1934, before dying at the age of thirty-four.

scholarly journals Real and Semi-Real – an Architectural Backstory for Flusser’s Dual Scientific Fictions

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 81
Author(s):  
William Hanff
Keyword(s):  
New Media ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
Visual Metaphors ◽  
The Fantastic

Vilém Flusser’s approaches to epistemology and science fiction are explored in connection with the fictionalism of Hans Vaihinger and other late 19th and early 20th century philosophies, as well as using an architectural metaphor of scaffolding and blueprints. From his 1980 essay “Science Fiction” Flusser’s two approaches to science fictions are labeled as 1) a ‘falsification strategy’ and 2) an ‘epistemology of improbability.’ These are further explored as metaphors for architecture and building based on ideas from his “Wittgenstein’s Architecture” in The Shape of Things: a Philosophy of Design and compared and contrasted with visual metaphors of the fantastic in the paper architecture called The Obscure Cities series by François Schuiten and Benoît Peeters. Further reinforcing the connection between Flusser’s and Vaihinger’s philosophies, semi-fictions and real fictions are envisioned as a type of new media architecture.

scholarly journals Facing the Monsters: Otherness in H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos and Guillermo del Toro’s Pacific Rim and Hellboy

Religions ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (2) ◽  
pp. 58
Author(s):  
David McConeghy
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
20Th Century ◽  
Sigmund Freud ◽  
Modern Science ◽  
Pacific Rim ◽  
Early 20Th Century ◽  
The Uncanny ◽  
Rudolf Otto

What happens when we imagine the unimaginable? This article compares recent films inspired by H. P. Lovecraft’s Cthulhu Mythos with that author’s original early 20th century pulp horror stories. In Guillermo del Toro’s films Pacific Rim and Hellboy, monsters that would have been obscured to protect Lovecraft’s readers are now fully revealed for Hollywood audiences. Using the period-appropriate theories of Rudolf Otto on the numinous and Sigmund Freud on the uncanny, that share Lovecraft’s troubled history with racist othering, I show how modern adaptations of Lovecraft’s work invert central features of the mythos in order to turn tragedies into triumphs. The genres of Science Fiction and Horror have deep commitments to the theme of otherness, but in Lovecraft’s works otherness is insurmountable. Today, Hollywood borrows the tropes of Lovecraftian horror but relies on bridging the gap between humanity and its monstrous others to reveal a higher humanity forged through difference and diversity. This suggests that otherness in modern science fiction is a means of reconciliation, a way for the monsters to be defeated rather than the source of terror as they were in Lovecraft’s stories.

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