Science Fiction and Cultural Theory

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138814981
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
This book combines key theoretical statements that have become touchstones for work in the field with more recent theoretical inventions that showcase how theoretical paradigms central to science fiction such as posthumanism and mediation have become central to critical theory overall in the twenty-first century

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138814981
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book

Book Description
This book combines key theoretical statements that have become touchstones for work in the field with more recent theoretical inventions that showcase how theoretical paradigms central to science fiction such as posthumanism and mediation have become central to critical theory overall in the twenty-first century

Alien Zone

Alien Zone PDF Author: Annette Kuhn
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860912781
Category : Science fiction films
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
This is especially true of the science fiction film--a genre as old as cinema itself--which has rarely received the serious attention devoted to such genres as the western, the film noir and recently, under the aegis of feminist film theory, the so-called "woman's film." Alien Zone aims to bring science fiction cinema fully into the ambit of cultural theory in general and of film theory in particular. The essays in this book--some newly written, others gathered from scattered sources--look at the ways in which contemporary science fiction films draw on, rework, and transform established themes and conventions of the genre: the mise-en-scene of future worlds; the myth of masculine mastery of nature; power and authority and their relation to technology. This material is ordered and contextualized by the editor with a view to exploring how science fiction cinema has been approached critically and theoretically by commentators on the genre: as a mirror of society, as bearing or producing ideology; as caught up in an intertext of media productions, or as expressing unconscious desires. Contributors include Giuliana Bruno, Scott Bukatman, Thomas B. Byers, Barbara Creed, Anne Cranny-Francis, Daniel Dervin, H. Bruce Franklin, James H. Kavanagh, Douglas Kelner, Steve Neale, Judith Newton, Constance Penley, Hugh Ruppersberg, Michael Ryan, Vivian Sobchack, Michael Stern, J. P. Telotte, and Paul Virilio.

Science Fiction Culture

Science Fiction Culture PDF Author: Camille Bacon-Smith
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
ISBN: 9780812215304
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 332

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Book Description
"[An] inside look at this wonderfully strange universe."--

Locating Science Fiction

Locating Science Fiction PDF Author: Andrew Milner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1846318424
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

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Book Description
In Locating Science Fiction, Andrew Milner looks at science fiction within the context of a host of other genres—including fantasy, romance, and the thriller—and explores the historical and geographic contexts of science fiction's emergence and development. Bringing in Raymond Williams's cultural materialism, Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of culture, and Franco Moretti's application of world systems to literary studies, he offers a persuasive, synthetic, and ultimately new mode of science fiction analysis that will become essential reading.

Science Fiction

Science Fiction PDF Author: Roger Luckhurst
Publisher: Polity
ISBN: 0745628923
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
In this new and timely cultural history of science fiction, Roger Luckhurst examines the genre from its origins in the late nineteenth century to its latest manifestations. The book introduces and explicates major works of science fiction literature by placing them in a series of contexts, using the history of science and technology, political and economic history, and cultural theory to develop the means for understanding the unique qualities of the genre. Luckhurst reads science fiction as a literature of modernity. His astute analysis examines how the genre provides a constantly modulating record of how human embodiment is transformed by scientific and technological change and how the very sense of self is imaginatively recomposed in popular fictions that range from utopian possibility to Gothic terror. This highly readable study charts the overlapping yet distinct histories of British and American science fiction, with commentary on the central authors, magazines, movements and texts from 1880 to the present day. It will be an invaluable guide and resource for all students taking courses on science fiction, technoculture and popular literature, but will equally be fascinating for anyone who has ever enjoyed a science fiction book.

Alien Zone

Alien Zone PDF Author: Annette Kuhn
Publisher: Verso
ISBN: 9780860919933
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 244

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Book Description
A collection of essays, bringing science fiction cinema into the ambit of film and cultural theory.

Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System

Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System PDF Author: John Rieder
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819577170
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 219

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Book Description
A fresh approach to the history and shape of science fiction In Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System, John Rieder asks literary scholars to consider what shape literary history takes when based on a historical, rather than formalist, genre theory. Rieder starts from the premise that science fiction and the other genres usually associated with so-called genre fiction comprise a system of genres entirely distinct from the pre-existing classical and academic genre system that includes the epic, tragedy, comedy, satire, romance, the lyric, and so on. He proposes that the field of literary production and the project of literary studies cannot be adequately conceptualized without taking into account the tensions between these two genre systems that arise from their different modes of production, distribution, and reception. Although the careful reading of individual texts forms an important part of this study, the systemic approach offered by Science Fiction and the Mass Cultural Genre System provides a fundamental challenge to literary methodologies that foreground individual innovation.

Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Critical Theory and Science Fiction PDF Author: Carl Freedman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

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Book Description
Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics

Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Politics PDF Author: Dan Hassler-Forest
Publisher: Radical Cultural Studies
ISBN: 9781783484935
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
From J.R.R. Tolkien to Star Trek and from Game of Thrones to Battlestar Galactica and from The Walking Dead to Janelle Mone's Afrofuturist concept albums, transmedia world building offer us complex and immersive environments beyond capitalism. Science Fiction, Fantasy and Politics examines the ways in which these popular storyworlds offer tools for anticapitalist theory and practice. Building on Hardt and Negir's theory of global capitalism. Dan Hassler-Forest shows how transmedia world-building has the potential to offer more than a momentary escape from capitalist realism in the age of media a converagence and participator culture. This book feature eight fantastic storyworlds that offer vivid illustration of global capitalism contradictory logic. Approaching transmedia world-building both as a cultural form and as a political economy, Hassler-Forest demonstrates the limitations inherent in fandom and fan culture, which is increasingly absorbed as a form of immaterial labor. At the same time, he also explores the productive ways in which fantastic storyworlds contain a radical energy that can give us new ways of thinking about politics popular culture and anticapitalism.

The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction

The Subject of Race in American Science Fiction PDF Author: Sharon DeGraw
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1135864594
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
While the connections between science fiction and race have largely been neglected by scholars, racial identity is a key element of the subjectivity constructed in American SF. In his Mars series, Edgar Rice Burroughs primarily supported essentialist constructions of racial identity, but also included a few elements of racial egalitarianism. Writing in the 1930s, George S. Schuyler revised Burroughs' normative SF triangle of white author, white audience, and white protagonist and promoted an individualistic, highly variable concept of race instead. While both Burroughs and Schuyler wrote SF focusing on racial identity, the largely separate genres of science fiction and African American literature prevented the similarities between the two authors from being adequately acknowledged and explored. Beginning in the 1960s, Samuel R. Delany more fully joined SF and African American literature. Delany expands on Schuyler's racial constructionist approach to identity, including gender and sexuality in addition to race. Critically intertwining the genres of SF and African American literature allows a critique of the racism in the science fiction and a more accurate and positive portrayal of the scientific connections in the African American literature. Connecting the popular fiction of Burroughs, the controversial career of Schuyler, and the postmodern texts of Delany illuminates a gradual change from a stable, essentialist construction of racial identity at the turn of the century to the variable, social construction of poststructuralist subjectivity today.