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2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (4) ◽  
Author(s):  
Rusty Barrett ◽  
Robin Queen

This tribute considers the work of linguist and novelist, Anna Livia (1955–2007). Anna was a noted fiction writer before becoming a linguist and much of her work considered language play in literature. Anna brought her experience as a lesbian activist to queer linguistics, where she played an important role in establishing the field. Her work continues to be an important example of linguistic research on lesbians, an area that continues to be underrepresented in the field.


2021 ◽  
Vol 37 (1) ◽  
pp. 85-104
Author(s):  
INDRAJIT PATRA

Abstract The present essay seeks to analyze Scottish science fiction writer Ken MacLeod’s The Corporation Wars trilogy (2016-2017) as an amalgam of politico-philosophical ideas set against the background of posthumanism. MacLeod’s far-future posthuman world-building relies on the conventional tropes of science fiction (man-machine hybrids, brain uploading, digital resurrection, and the agency of sentient machines) to engage with pressing ideologies (the master-slave dialectics, the historical perpetuation of age-old conflict between progressive and reactionary forces, the ethics of machinic consciousness). MacLeod’s novels project a postbinarist worldview where outmoded binary oppositions between life and death, the real and the virtual, the human and the machinic are constantly abolished, but which still preserves persistent ideological divisions.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Rose

<p>In this account of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's work, the aim has been to describe the involvement of assumptions inherited from philosophical and scientific discourse in both the understanding and experience of subjectivity. It is argued that Dick's representations of identity both picture the tensions engendered by the prevalent reality standard with which he had to deal and, in their development, come to articulate a path beyond the impasse this standard presents. The fundamental insufficiency of the world view Dick's fiction both encounters and embodies is epitomised by the twin questions with which he characterised his work: 'what is human?' and 'what is real?' In coming to terms with the significance of these questions the work of the Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner has been engaged as a critical foil to Dick's fictionalising. Special attention is given to the epistemological basis of Steiner's anthroposophy and its account of the world and our peculiar situation in it that, far from asserting any external and unvarying standard of truth, describes a process essentially evolutionary and unfixed. It is claimed that in Steiner, as in Dick, the human contribution to both identity and reality constitutes the validity of each, a matrix of subject and object from which one's self is delivered, in each instance a new beginning.</p>


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Bradley Rose

<p>In this account of American science fiction writer Philip K. Dick's work, the aim has been to describe the involvement of assumptions inherited from philosophical and scientific discourse in both the understanding and experience of subjectivity. It is argued that Dick's representations of identity both picture the tensions engendered by the prevalent reality standard with which he had to deal and, in their development, come to articulate a path beyond the impasse this standard presents. The fundamental insufficiency of the world view Dick's fiction both encounters and embodies is epitomised by the twin questions with which he characterised his work: 'what is human?' and 'what is real?' In coming to terms with the significance of these questions the work of the Austrian philosopher and scientist Rudolf Steiner has been engaged as a critical foil to Dick's fictionalising. Special attention is given to the epistemological basis of Steiner's anthroposophy and its account of the world and our peculiar situation in it that, far from asserting any external and unvarying standard of truth, describes a process essentially evolutionary and unfixed. It is claimed that in Steiner, as in Dick, the human contribution to both identity and reality constitutes the validity of each, a matrix of subject and object from which one's self is delivered, in each instance a new beginning.</p>


2021 ◽  
pp. 34-58
Author(s):  
Nicholas Grene

The Congested Districts Board was set up in 1891 to ameliorate the living conditions of some of the poorest people in Ireland living on the western seaboard. A remarkable number of writers emerged from these areas to create first-hand accounts of life on the margins. The fiction of Patrick McGill, Seamus Ó Grianna, and Peadar O’Donnell graphically evokes the politics of poverty in Donegal. The romantic image of the Aran Islands, cultivated by Synge, is somewhat surprisingly echoed by the Irish language poet Máirtín Ó Direáin and the fiction writer Liam O’Flaherty, both of whom came from Aran. The life of fishing and farming just above subsistence level is graphically evoked in the Blasket Island autobiographers, Tomás O’Crohan, Maurice O’Sullivan, and Peig Sayers.


2021 ◽  
pp. 51-56
Author(s):  
William Klinger ◽  
Denis Kuljiš

This chapter discusses the Sixth Congress, Comintern, which was run by Soviet bigwigs and a few representative party leaders from the West that sat as its steering Political Secretariat. It highlights the Balkan Bureau that was headed by Bohumír Šmeral, one of the founders of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia. It also mentions British science-fiction writer H. G. Wells, a socialist and communist sympathizer, who visited Moscow in the early 1920s as a guest of Vladimir Lenin and realized that even the highest-ranking officials' clothes were falling apart. The chapter recounts how tried to loosen up the revolutionary course by introducing the NEP, which was supposed to stimulate small farms on private plots to produce basic market supply. It demonstrates how the advance of fascism pushed more parties underground, leading them to become utterly dependent on organizational and material assistance from abroad.


2021 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 72-84
Author(s):  
Elke D'hoker

This essay looks at Elizabeth Bowen's presence in The Bell during the war years. She contributed an essay, a short story, two pieces of memoir, two obituaries, and a few other, smaller pieces to the magazine, but also featured in an interview, several reviews, and O'Faoláin's editorials and critical essays. Yet, as a Protestant, Anglo-Irish woman writer living in England, Bowen was in many ways an odd presence in The Bell, which squarely focused on Irish life and Irish writing. While O'Faoláin's mission to present an inclusive view of Ireland may explain his publication of Bowen's autobiographical essays, her prominence as a fiction writer can better be accounted for through her achievements in the modern short story, the genre O'Faoláin sought to promote as a central Irish literary form in The Bell. Indeed, although Bowen's short stories have been classified as ‘modernist’ and O'Faoláin's as ‘realist’, their aesthetics of the short story are remarkably similar. Still, The Bell’s championing of Bowen's short fiction as a model to follow was undermined by its framing of Bowen as an ‘aristocratic’ writer whose literary snapshots of Irish life had a peculiarly dated and blinkered quality.


differences ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 32 (1) ◽  
pp. 97-125
Author(s):  
Miglena Nikolchina

This essay examines the entanglement of Galin Tihanov’s three regimes of relevance of literature—literature as art, literature as high-minded social engagement, and literature as popular entertainment—in the encounter between a literary theoretician (Tzvetan Todorov) and a science fiction writer (Stanislaw Lem). The overt clash takes place in a polemical article by Lem, in which he attacks Todorov’s theory of the fantastic. Not so obviously, the writer’s revolt against the theoretician imbues Lem’s masterpiece “The Mask.” Kafka’s novella “The Metamorphosis” plays a considerable role in both Lem’s polemic and in his fictional response, raising questions of genre (and its dependence on the market and the entertainment industry), of subjective agency (and its philosophical and political implications), and of artistic ingenuity vis-à-vis despotic power. Although Lem’s reading of Todorov involves considerable misunderstanding, it nevertheless produces fascinating results and exemplifies the impossibility of relegating literary theory to a single regime of relevance.


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