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Journal articles on the topic 'Human body – Fiction'
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1
Douglass, Robin. "The Body Politic “is a fictitious body”." Hobbes Studies 27, no. 2 (September 8, 2014): 126–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18750257-02702005.
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Thomas Hobbes once wrote that the body politic “is a fictitious body”, thereby contrasting it with a natural body. In this essay I argue that a central purpose of Hobbes’s political philosophy was to cast the fiction of the body politic upon the imaginations of his readers. I elucidate the role of the imagination in Hobbes’s account of human nature, before examining two ways in which his political philosophy sought to transform the imaginations of his audience. The first involved effacing the false ideas that led to sedition by enlightening men from the kingdom of spiritual darkness. I thus advance an interpretation of Hobbes’s eschatology focused upon his attempt to dislodge certain theological conceptions from the minds of men. The second involved replacing this religious imagery with the fiction of the body politic and the image of the mortal God, which, I argue, Hobbes developed in order to transform the way that men conceive of their relationship with the commonwealth. I conclude by adumbrating the implications of my reading for Hobbes’s social contract theory and showing why the covenant that generates the commonwealth is best understood as imaginary.
2
Latham, Clara. "The Sound Machine in the Body." Resonance 2, no. 4 (2021): 559–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/res.2021.2.4.559.
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What happens when music, which is historically understood to be an inherently human activity, joins with cybernetics, which claims to fold the human into the machine? I explore this question through a case study of the theremin, focusing on both the instrument’s initial cultural reception circa 1930 and its reappearance two decades later in Hollywood’s “Golden Age of Science Fiction” films, a period in which the theremin’s warbling soprano came to signify otherworldly presence. The theremin’s coupling of embodied performance and electronic manifestation of sound encapsulates the cybernetic relationship between matter and information. Like the phonograph and the radio that preceded it, the theremin conjured music and sound from an inanimate object, but in this case a human performer was directly involved. While the instrument appeared invisible to audiences, descriptions of it collapsed the machine into the body of the performer herself. Audiences understood that the resulting sound corresponded to the performer’s movements, which implied a translation from human movement to electronic sound. In this article, I will first explore the ways in which the theremin posed problems for humanistic assumptions around music. I will then explore how the theremin came into contact with cybernetic ideas in post-World War II American popular culture, through its role in science fiction films.
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Yu, Le. "Body and Power: Study of Body Politics in The Power." Scholars Journal of Arts, Humanities and Social Sciences 12, no. 06 (June 3, 2024): 182–91. http://dx.doi.org/10.36347/sjahss.2024.v12i06.001.
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British science fiction writer Naomi Alderman's seminal work The Power constructs a thought experiment on how divergent bodies influence power structures. In a cybernetic world arising from genetic mutations of women, the body, imbued with symbolic attributes, becomes a tool for achieving liberation and equality. This paper aims to employ close textual analysis, drawing on Nietzsche's phenomenology and Wilhelm Reich's political psychology, to explore the intrinsic connection and dialectical relationship between the body and power. The body, as a tangible entity, a locus of strength, and an embodiment of life, forms the solid foundation of power, serving as a potent driving force for its development and its primal origin. Simultaneously, the body undergoes transformations under authority and contributes to the reproduction of social structures. Power itself harbors profound conflicts of force, thus inevitably sparking continuous and intense struggles as long as the will to power exists. The Power, as a cybernetic-themed speculative fiction, offers new possibilities for power dynamics, reflecting Alderman's imagination on constructing the human destiny community.
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Mann, Rachel, and Michael Gavin. "Distant Reading the Body, 1640–1699." Review of English Studies 70, no. 296 (January 14, 2019): 681–701. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/res/hgy114.
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Abstract This paper analyses seventeenth-century discourse of the human body over the Early English Books Online full-text corpus. Anatomy and medicine depict the body as a physiological object, knowable mainly through its parts and processes. Fiction and poetry tend to represent the body as a social entity, knowable primarily through intersubjective action and ethical ideals. In both contexts, bodies are perceived and described through close attention to their parts, but when bodies are conceived as such, they are described as abstract entities that organize the whole. This distinction is difficult to see at the level of close reading but unmistakable at larger scale. Deep conceptual structures at work underneath both anatomy and fiction, we argue, underlie a conception of the body that informs more particularized notions of mobility, sociality, and physicality.
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Parfit, Derek. "We Are Not Human Beings." Philosophy 87, no. 1 (January 2012): 5–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0031819111000520.
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We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every other way just like me.
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Saprykina, Elena Yu. "Humanized Artificial Body in the 20th Century Italian Literature." Studia Litterarum 5, no. 3 (2020): 186–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.22455/2500-4247-2020-5-3-186-199.
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In various epochs, science fiction writers shared an interest in problems related to the humanization of an artificial body and the process of human interaction with a man’s own creation. In the 20th century Italian literature, in particular, this theme emerged already at the dawn of the century (e.g. а futuristic novel by F.T. Marinetti) and was present up until the beginning of the current “age of artificial intelligence.” Fantastic plots of several short stories and novellas by D. Buzzati and T. Landolfi, written in the 1950s and 60s, depicted ambivalent perception of the technogenic civilization and its novelties by the modern cultural consciousness. On the one hand, these works reflected the turning of the machine into an indispensable attribute of the social status of the modern human, the guarant of her private life success and mental health. On the other hand, in science fiction, there is a clear tendency to dramatize the problems and difficulties that the technological age set for a human — in particular, the problem of preserving the privilege of the human consciousness over the increasingly sophisticated artificial intelligence of the machine.
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Žiūraitė-Pupelė, Justina. "Dirbtinis intelektas moterišku kūnu filmuose Ex Machina ir Ji." Athena: filosofijos studijos 16 (December 30, 2021): 69–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.53631/athena.2021.16.5.
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The article explores how artificial intelligence is constructed in a female body and showcases the boundaries between human and technological traits, as well as the relationship between human beings and technology. The article defines the notion of artificial intelligence and discusses how artificial intelligence is portrayed in science fiction films. The article does not attempt to provide new theoretical insights into artificial intelligence but, instead, to show how artificial intelligence is characterised in the context of modern science fiction films. Two contemporary science fiction films, which focus on the artificial intelligence in the female body, are analysed: Alex Garland’s Ex Machina (2014) and Spike Jonze’s Her (2013). The analysis of the films showcases the blurred lines between being a human and being a robot: AI in the female body is portrayed as having adequate cognitive abilities and an ability to experience or to realistically imitate various mental states. The AI embodiment found in the films explores different narratives: the anthropomorphic body (Ex Machina) motivates to get to know the world and thus expands one’s experience, while the partial embodiment (Her) “programs” intellectual actions and development beyond the human body. Ex Machina highlights the anti-humanity of the female robot: another (human) life is devalued in order to pursue a goal. On the contrary, Her highlights the hyper-humanity of the operating system: continuous improvements exceed the boundaries of communication with other people.
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Weston, Natasha Lyle. "Whose city? (De)colonising the bodies of speculative fiction in Lauren Beukes's Zoo City." Image & Text, no. 37 (November 1, 2023): 1–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.17159/2617-3255/2023/n37a34.
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This article explores the (de)colonisation of the body and body boundaries in contemporary South African speculative fiction, paying particular attention to award-wining author, Lauren Beukes's, second novel, Zoo City (2010). I will apply Lara Cox's (2018:317) argument that 'Haraway's cyborg resembles the liminal view of identity presented by queer theory, which seeks to blur strict divisions between sexual and gender categories, dissolving binary oppositions such as woman/man and heterosexual/homosexual', to my reading of Zoo City. By centring the novel around Zinzi December, a resident of 'Zoo City' (the marginalised underbelly of Johannesburg), and situating the novel in the cradle of humankind, Beukes reacts against South Africa's colonial history and its colonisation of the body by blurring the animal-human boundary and challenging the colonial construct of body binaries. The novel can be read as a decolonial feminist text as it re-writes South Africa's apartheid history and critiques its division, separation and bodily segregation. Furthermore, I explore how fictional bodies are imagined and constructed in the text; I ask what kinds of boundary-breaking bodies predominate; and consider their thematic, narrative, and political significance in the postapartheid imaginary in relation to speculative fiction. I examine how new boundaries (particularly between 'normative' society and 'Zoo City') are formulated. Zoo City pulls into focus Kristeva's (1982) notion of the abject body as a central to its concerns, while also bringing attention to Foucault's (1992) notion of the 'disciplined' body. It foregrounds questions about the formulation and destabilisation of identity, with a particular focus on the construction of female identity. This article builds on the critical literature on the dystopian post-apartheid state by examining Zoo City's depictions of marginalised people and its construction of the body and body boundaries, as well as by extending the examination of representations of the body in speculative fiction.
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Sey, J. "The terminator syndrome: Science fiction, cinema and contemporary culture." Literator 13, no. 3 (May 6, 1992): 13–20. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v13i3.760.
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This paper examines the impact of contemporary technology on representations of the human body in American popular culture, focusing on James Cameron’s science fiction films The Terminator (1984) and The Terminator II - Judgment Day (1991) in both of which the key figures are cybernetic organisms (cyborgs) or a robot which can exactly imitate the human form . The paper argues that the ability of modern film technology’ to represent the human form in robotic guise undercuts the distinction between nature and culture which maintains the position of the human being in society. The ability of the robot or cyborg to be ‘polygendered’ in particular, undermines the position of a properly oedipalized human body in society, one which balances the instinctual life against the rule of cultural law. As a result the second Terminator film attempts a recuperation of the category of the human by an oedipalization of the terminator cyborg.
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Sey, J. "Psychoanalysis, science fiction and cyborgianism." Literator 17, no. 2 (April 30, 1996): 105–16. http://dx.doi.org/10.4102/lit.v17i2.607.
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Central to this paper is the understanding that much of crucial importance to psychoanalytic thought rests on a conception of the subject as inseparable from a history of the body a history in turn inseparable from the central tenets of Oedipus, in its turn a concept which originates in and is illustrated by literature. The paper will suggest that when recent cultural theorists, drawing on the implications of cybernetics and infoculture theory, contest the psychoanalytic notion of the subject, it is not surprising that they do so in terms of the possibility of an alternative body - a hybrid form of subjectivity between human and machine. Nor, the paper suggests, is it surprising that it should be science fiction, a genre with a long-standing concern with the possibility of such an amalgam, which supplies the key evidence for a post-oedipal theory of this "cyborg" subject. The paper concludes by speculating on the productivity of the conjunction between literature and thinking about the body, inasmuch as this conjunction attempts to establish a new anthropology of the self.
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Sun, Younghyun. "A Study on 'Thoughts and Reflections' Presented in Hyperrealism Art: Focusing on the Art Works of Ron Mueck, Duane Hanson, Richard Estes." Korean Society of Culture and Convergence 45, no. 5 (May 31, 2023): 935–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.33645/cnc.2023.05.45.05.935.
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The purpose of this paper is to discuss Hyperrealism and its significance for modern society through an analysis of the works of Ron Mueck, Duane Hanson, and Richard Estes. Mueck uses variations in the scale of the human body to create an unrealistically realistic figure, prompting viewers to contemplate the fundamental existence of humans. Hanson's reproductions of the human body maximize realism, factuality, and on-site presence, prompting viewers to reflect on real-world issues and engage with the artwork. Estes creates a fictional city, allowing viewers to experience the difference between reality and fiction and contemplate the truth about their environment. These Hyperrealist artworks offer a unique interpretation of reality, showcasing contemplation on humans and exposing issues of modern society, rather than mechanically depicting reality.
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Nigst, Lorenz. "Druze Reincarnation in Fiction." Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies 19 (August 1, 2019): 15–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.5617/jais.7048.
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In the Druze outlook, each human soul completes successive life-circuits as different human beings. If one of these human beings dies, the soul immediately migrates to the body of a newborn child. Normally, it is unknown who the soul was previously. However, in exceptional cases, mostly young children remember and “speak” about a previous life that usually came to an unexpected and tragic end. This also represents the backdrop of Anīs Yaḥyà’s novel Jasad kāna lī, which is set in a Druze context and revolves around a murder case and a little girl that remembers her death and names her murderer. The subject of transmigration is omnipresent in the novel. As this article seeks to show, this turns the novel into a highly relevant source for anthropological research into the Druze understanding of transmigration. The novel not only corroborates respective findings, but also complements them and thus contributes to a fuller understanding of the social and discursive presence of transmigration and “speaking” in Druze contexts. At the same time, anthropological research seems essential for a more profound understanding of this particular thematic dimension of the novel.
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Bökös, Borbála. "Human-Alien Encounters in Science Fiction: A Postcolonial Perspective." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 16, no. 1 (August 1, 2019): 189–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2019-0010.
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Abstract An (un)conventional encounter between humans and alien beings has long been one of the main thematic preoccupations of the genre of science fiction. Such stories would thus include typical invasion narratives, as in the case of the three science fiction films I will discuss in the present paper: the Invasion of the Body Snatchers (Don Siegel, 1956; Philip Kaufman, 1978; Abel Ferrara, 1993), The Host (Andrew Niccol, 2013), and Avatar (James Cameron, 2009). I will examine the films in relation to postcolonial theories, while attempting to look at the ways of revisiting one’s history and culture (both alien and human) in the films’ worlds that takes place in order to uncover and heal the violent effects of colonization. In my reading of the films I will shed light on the specific processes of identity formation (of an individual or a group), and the possibilities of individual and communal recuperation through memories, rites of passages, as well as hybridization. I will argue that the colonized human or alien body can serve either as a mediator between the two cultures, or as an agent which fundamentally distances two separate civilizations, thus irrevocably bringing about the loss of identity, as well as the lack of comprehension of cultural differences.
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Tucherman, Ieda. "Fabricando corpos: ficção e tecnologia." Comunicação Mídia e Consumo 3, no. 7 (September 23, 2008): 77–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.18568/cmc.v3i7.71.
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Desdobramento dos extensos estudos da autora sobre a ficção científica no cinema como narrativa representativa do mundo contemporâneo, o artigo enfoca especificamente as questões relacionadas ao corpo humano e à tecnologia que emergem dos filmes desse gênero nascido sob o signo da cultura visual médica. As narrativas fílmicas contemporâneas de ficção científica abrem espaço para reflexões sobre as sociedades atuais em mutação e para questionarmos até que ponto, diante da profunda interação homem-máquina, permanecemos ainda humanos.
Palavras-chave: Ficção científica; cinema; tecnociência; corpo; subjetividade.
ABSTRACT
This article draws on my extensive studies on science fiction cinema as a form of narrative which represents contemporary world. The work focus specifically the questions related with the human body and the technology which emerges from sci fi films generated under the sign of medical visual culture. Contemporary filmic science fiction narratives give way to refletions over present mutating societies and to questioning how far, given the deep human-machine interaction, we are still human.
Keywords: Science fiction; cinema; technoscience; body; subjectivity.
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Leach, Antonia. "Iain M. Banks – Human, Posthuman and Beyond Human." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 15, no. 1 (June 11, 2018): 69–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.15.1.69-81.
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Iain M. Banks has been at the forefront of the space opera science fiction scene since the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, in 1987. Upon Banks’ death in 2013, the culture series became a complete body of work. Whilst some criticism has focused on the social and political implications of the culture universe, little has engaged with the philosophical concepts that underpin it in relation to the current debate regarding our posthuman future. This paper seeks to show how Banks problematises the relationship between the human and posthuman through an exploration of the representation of the posthuman body. Furthermore, it also seeks to address the implications of current concepts of what it means to be human by exploring the relationship between the posthuman and form of Artificial Intelligence that Banks presents. to illustrate these arguments, three culture texts will be discussed: The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and “The State of the Art” (1989).
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Von Mücke, Dorothea. "Humanist vestiges in contemporary science fiction." Cadernos de Letras da UFF 29, no. 58 (July 12, 2019): 127–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.22409/cadletrasuff.2019n58a658.
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Both Spike Jonze’s her and Alex Garland’s ex machina make references to such outdated media and cultural techniques as the handwritten letter, the hand-drawn sketch, oil paintings and the bound volume of the book. An analysis of the use and function of these seemingly obsolete cultural techniques in the two science fiction movies reveals a surprising commitment to traditionally humanist values as grounded in the invocation of the individualized, mortal human body.---Original in English.
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Stroyeva, Olesya V. "Mind-Body Dialectics in the Latest Science Fiction TV-Series." Journal of Flm Arts and Film Studies 10, no. 2 (June 15, 2018): 62–71. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/vgik10262-71.
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The article is devoted to the analysis of the latest science fiction series in the context of the mind-body philosophical problems. The synthesis of theoretical knowledge and empirical science (phenomenological, psychoanalytic, neurophysical and cybernetic experience) is used for the analysis. Prospects for the development of artificial intelligence, including the issue of creating self-conscious robots, unfold not only in science fiction but also in reality thus causing the high ratings of the cyberpunk genre. The destruction of the boundary between man and machine, natural and artificial body, physical and non-physical, real and virtual, is the key point of the newest series The Black Mirror, Electric Dreams of Philip K. Dick, Altered Carbon, Westworld. Mind-body dialectics in philosophy construed by R. Descartes and B. Spinoza, further developed by phenomenologists, is actualized today in the context of technological development. Despite the insights and warnings of science fiction writers, scientists seek for making the breakthrough in the invention of an artificial man. This tendency is caused, first of all, by the desire to conceive the arrangement of human consciousness: how it is generated by matter - the network of neurons of the brain. Solving this philosophical dilemma inevitably leads to unpredictable consequences and radical changes in the development of civilization. Nevertheless, this step is fatal in the general tendency of demiurgy and mimesis, which underlie all the cultural, creative and aesthetic activities of mankind. The author comes to the conclusion that cinema demonstrates models of the possible development of events and the consequences of technogenic tendencies, while the reality clearly indicates that the era of posthumanism has already begun, and were witnessing the most incredible scenarios created by the world of science fiction.
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Kazakova, Irina Borisovna. "Concepts of hermeticism and gnosticism in contemporary science fiction." Philology. Issues of Theory and Practice 17, no. 4 (April 26, 2024): 1292–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.30853/phil20240187.
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The aim of the research is to clarify the features of the interpretation of the concepts of hermeticism and gnosticism in science fiction in the late 20th and 21st centuries devoted to the problems of trans- and posthumanism. The paper examines the features of the integration of gnostic and hermetic ideas into modern English-language science fiction. The scientific novelty of the research lies in considering the works of contemporary science fiction writers (G. Egan, R. Sawyer, N. Stephenson, W. Gibson, Ch. Stross) and in identifying the main variants of how gnostic and hermetic themes are developed in the writings of these writers. The author sees the influence of gnostic and hermetic ideas in science fiction works devoted to the topic of transhumanist changes in the form of interventions in the human body at the biochemical level, the themes of mind scanning and digital immortality, and the rational observer of the Universe. As a result, it is proved that gnostic and hermetic elements in contemporary science fiction devoted to the problems of trans- and posthumanism allow writers to include the problematic of hypothetical technologies for improving human nature into the context of a centuries-old religious tradition.
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Kuo, Chia-wen. "Quasi-Bodies and Kafka’s Castle in Sion Sono’s Crime Noir Guilty of Romance (2011)." Acta Universitatis Sapientiae, Film and Media Studies 8, no. 1 (September 1, 2014): 167–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/ausfm-2014-0032.
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Abstract Sion Sono’s Guilty of Romance (Koi no tsumi, 2011) was adapted from an actual crime in Tokyo’s love hotel: an educated woman (a prostitute at night) was found decapitated and her limbs were re-assembled with a sex-doll. Sono renders this through his cinematic narrative blurring the distinction between true crime and fictional sin like Rancière’s idea that everything is a narrative dissipating the opposition between “fact and fiction,” and “quasi-body” becomes a product of human literarity while an imaginary collective body is formed to fill the fracture in-between. In Sono’s story, the victim is a literature professor tormented by an incestuous desire for her father, whose favorite book is Kafka’s Castle. Thus she compares the love-hotel district where she turns loose at night as a castle of lusts. Here the narrative becomes a collective body that puppeteers human “quasi-bodies” in a Kafkaesque spatio-temporal aporia, and time’s spatialized horizontally with the germs of desire spread like a contagion on a Deleuzian “plane of immanence.”
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Kostenko, Olena. "EROTIC SIGNIFICANCE AND GROTESQUE BODY IMAGE IN SHORT STORIES BY VOLODYMYR VYNNYCHENKO." Odessa National University Herald. Series: Philology 28, no. 1(27) (December 23, 2023): 27–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.18524/2307-8332.2023.1(27).297877.
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The article outlines the modes of manifestation of the corporeal as a dominant in the artistic world of V. Vynnychenko. The author substantiates the modernist approach to the problem of the body in the writer’s short fiction, where it manifests itself in a new quality (bodily self) and not only determines the artistic space, but is a determinant of intrapersonal processes and structures. The corporeal becomes a “material substance”, a hypostasis of the human self, human subjectivity, and individuality. The lifting of the taboo on the manifestation of the corporeal as an expression of human vital intentions was embodied in the cultivation of hedonistic, erotic motives, deepened interest in any manifestations of the physiological, somatic in direct connection with mental, internal processes, the subconscious, which was embodied in the work of V. K. Vynnychenko. Therefore, the author emphasizes the specific forms and means of artistic depiction of the corporeal in the artist’s works. A detailed characterization of bestiary images is given, the essence and role of the phenomenon of the affective body in the writer’s short fiction is revealed. The researcher focuses on the portrait characterization of the characters, where a special place is occupied by an abstract portrait and a portrait “scattered throughout the text”. Particular attention is paid to the grotesque image of the body, which is clearly outlined in Volodymyr Vynnychenko’s artistic picture of the world.
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Ginway, M. Elizabeth. "The Posthuman Body and Climate Crisis in Latin American Science Fiction Written by Women." Revista de Estudios Hispánicos 58, no. 1 (March 2024): 107–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/rvs.2024.a931921.
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Abstract: Four Latin American women authors—Karen Chacek and Gabriela Damián Miravete of Mexico, and Roberta Spindler and Aline Valek of Brazil—address the current climate crisis in narratives that break down barriers between the human body and the environment. Their stories explore the absorption of elements of the natural world into the human body, suggesting an exchange of both physicality and consciousness. This merging of elements from the plant, insect, and animal realms with the human body is evocative of Donna Haraway's networked body and Bolívar Echeverría's codigofagia , that is, the mixing of diverse codes toward the creation of future societies or civilizational experiments. The texts combine the possibilities of science fiction with the grieving process for a damaged planet, but without essentializing either women or nature. Using Rosi Braidotti's concept of posthuman feminism and Stacy Alaimo's transcorporeality, this article suggests that this approach to climate change—through bodily transformation and transcendent consciousness—captures the resilience of Latin American culture.
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Hladki, Janice. "Hazardous Futures and Damned Embodiments: Disability and White Masculinization in Science Fiction Film." Journal of Literary & Cultural Disability Studies: Volume 14, Issue 4 14, no. 4 (October 1, 2020): 453–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/jlcds.2020.30.
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Drawing on critical disability interrogations of the “human,” this article explores how frameworks of normalization shape conceptions of human qualification and disqualification in two science fiction films. It examines how representations of the contaminated, injured, unstable, and mutated body produce discourses of, and social anxieties about, abnormalization and monstrosity. The films The Thing (1982) and Deadpool (2016), both characterized by science fiction cult popularity, are linked through multiple concerns for human futurity, including the dangers of monstrous disability and the need to redeem damaged and infected bodies. Bringing disability together with gender and race, the article argues that white able-bodied masculinization in the films, including aspects of militarism and colonialism, focuses on human qualification and on securing a future made non-hazardous by a masculinity recuperated from vulnerability and disability.
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Robinson, Michelle. "The Indispensable (and Strangely Disposable) Corpse in Early Parodies of Detective Fiction." Genre 55, no. 3 (December 1, 2022): 179–203. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/00166928-10146738.
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This essay argues that by studying parodies of detective fiction from the turn of the twentieth century, one can envision a more complete history of the detective genre's development and the alternate paths it might have pursued. Mark Twain's A Double-Barrelled Detective Story (1902), Melville Davisson Post's The Strange Schemes of Randolph Mason (1896), and Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne's The Wrong Box (1889) instruct the reader to regard detective fiction as a genre about the production of the corpse and the transnational economic systems that generated it, rather than the ratiocinative mastery of the detective. These three parodies of detective fiction burlesque incipient genre texts from the nineteenth century by painstakingly regurgitating the global political and economic stakes that set the stage for local mysteries, even when they defer rather than advance the plot. They also foreground the corpse-as-spectacle by engineering human remains that resist forensic elucidation and are the product of bizarre and cataclysmic histories of violence. In emphasizing detective fiction's nineteenth-century literary antecedents, Twain's, Post's, and Stevenson and Osbourne's detective parodies indicate that the genre might have pursued a different direction, one where its dominant element was the disturbing debasement of a body by a complex circuit of global political and economic relations.
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Rhodes, Bryan, and Srikanth Gandavaram. "3D printing human body parts: Science fiction or the new world of surgical innovation?" Morecambe Bay Medical Journal 7, no. 1 (April 1, 2014): 18–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.48037/mbmj.v7i1.191.
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Layton, David. "Being Human: Androids, Humans, and Identity in “Red Dwarf”." Galactica Media: Journal of Media Studies 3, no. 3 (October 29, 2021): 321–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.46539/gmd.v3i3.173.
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One of the more popular transhumanist ideas is the belief that technology will allow for the transfer of human personality into a machine or cyborg body. Additionally, some transhumanists believe that this transfer could happen with few to no problems, and that such a transfer would result in a definite improvement of the human species. The episode “DNA” from the humorous British science-fiction television series Red Dwarf presents a story that challenges this idea of the easy transfer of personality. The story of the android who gets his wish to become human allows the writers to invert the common belief in Western thought that being human is inherently better than being an imitation of a human, and that technologically upgrading human bodies will produce “better” humans. By inversion, the program presents the idea that clearer and more ethical thinking is needed regarding technological enhancement, and not the utopian visions of many transhumanists.
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Bahukhandi, Akanksha. "Are Archetypes Not Enough in Children's Literature? A Case Study of Body Shaming and Stereotypes in Roald Dahl's The Twits And The Witches." SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH 8, no. 2 (February 28, 2020): 10. http://dx.doi.org/10.24113/ijellh.v8i2.10413.
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Archetypes are easily identifiable in works of fiction regardless of when they were penned and the relevant cultural mileu. This is because archetypes are functional units of the 'collective unconcious' which is common to all. Going by that logic shouldn't the authors of fiction be just fine with exploring various aspects and variations af various archetyes deep seated in the psyche of their readers? If archetypes provide a sound base of ready acceptance by virtue of their familiarity to the entire human race, then what explains the rampant use of strereotypical characters and plots in fiction all across the globe and especially in children's literature? Do the stereotypes encourage prejudices and body shaming? The present paper aims to look into the possible reasons behind the use of stereotypes and caricatures, their effectiveness and their impact on the young readers.
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Moffat, Amber. "Breast augmentation and artificial insemination: Monstrous medicine and the female body in recent fiction." Australasian Journal of Popular Culture 11, no. 1 (December 1, 2022): 163–77. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/ajpc_00057_1.
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Recent fiction that depicts medical intervention upon the female body as monstrous reveals societal anxiety around aesthetic and reproductive medicine. As biotechnology rapidly advances, the female body continues to be a site on which improvements, efficiencies and controls are imposed. While Kristeva’s abject and Creed’s ‘monstrous-feminine’ explain the capacity of the female body to imbue horror, this literary analysis explores how the experience of the medicalized female body can convey anxiety relating to escalating aesthetic and reproductive demands. Works of fiction by Kawakami, Mazza, Hortle, Booth, Giddings, Gildfind and Taylor are considered in terms of medicine and the female body, with the narratives revealing common themes of monstrosity. Bakhtin’s grotesque and Kristeva’s abject informs the analysis, as does Foucault’s concept of the ‘medical gaze’. Bartky’s ‘fashion-beauty complex’ frames the investigation into depictions of cosmetic surgery, while the impact of capitalism is considered in relation to reproductive technologies and medical experimentation. The power structures that medicine operates within are considered and the article argues that the representation of medicine as monstrous in relation to the female body expresses collective unease about the increasingly unstable boundaries of the human body itself.
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Rao, Radhika. "Informed Consent, Body Property, and Self-Sovereignty." Journal of Law, Medicine & Ethics 44, no. 3 (2016): 437–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1073110516667940.
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Recent cases involving biosamples taken from indigenous tribes and newborn babies reveal the emptiness of informed consent. This venerable doctrine often functions as a charade, a collective fiction which thinly masks the uncomfortable fact that the subjects of human research are not actually afforded full information regarding the types of research that may be contemplated, nor do they provide meaningful consent. But if informed consent fails to provide adequate protection to the donors of biological materials, why not turn to principles of property law? Property is power, yet current law permits everyone except for those who donate biological materials to possess property rights. The reluctance to invoke property probably stems from fears of resurrecting slavery and the commodification of human beings. But ironically, avoidance of property transforms the subjects of human research into objects that can be owned only by others, resulting in new forms of oppression and exploitation. Human research subjects are autonomous individuals who should not only possess the power to contribute their biological materials, but also the right to help control the course of research, and to share in the resulting benefits or profits. Conferring body property might enable research subjects to regain power and a measure of self-sovereignty.
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Bradley, Keith. "Animalizing the Slave: the Truth of Fiction." Journal of Roman Studies 90 (November 2000): 110–25. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/300203.
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In his discussion of natural slavery in the first book of thePolitics(1254a17–1254b39), Aristotle notoriously assimilates human slaves to non-human animals. Natural slaves, Aristotle maintains (1254b16–20), are those who differ from others in the way that the body differs from the soul, or in the way that an animal differs from a human being; and into this category fall ‘all whose function is bodily service, and who produce their best when they supply such service’. The point is made more explicit in the argument (1254b20–4) that the capacity to be owned as property and the inability fully to participate in reason are defining characteristics of the natural slave: ‘Other animals do not apprehend reason but obey their instincts. Even so there is little divergence in the way they are used; both of them (slaves and tame animals) provide bodily assistance in satisfying essential needs’ (1254b24–6). Slaves and animals are not actually equated in Aristotle's views, but the inclination of the slave-owner in classical antiquity, or at least a representative of the slave-owning classes, to associate the slave with the animal is made evident enough. It appears again in Aristotle's later statement (1256b22–6) that the slave was as appropriate a target of hunting as the wild animal.
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Olofinsao, Minister Abiodun. "The Genre and Trends of Crime Fiction in Nigeria." Scholars International Journal of Law, Crime and Justice 7, no. 03 (March 15, 2024): 97–105. http://dx.doi.org/10.36348/sijlcj.2024.v07i03.001.
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The field of crime fiction in Nigeria remains under-explored in scholarly discourse. This lacuna is particularly notable given the absence of comprehensive academic works dedicated to this genre. Crime fiction, which delineates narratives surrounding criminals, their crimes, detection and investigation processes, and underlying motivations, has been a prolific subject in Nigerian creative literature. Despite the substantial body of Nigerian literary works delving into themes of crime, punishment, and motivation, it is intriguing that the genre has not garnered significant critical analysis. This study adopts a diachronic approach to trace the historical evolution of crime fiction in Nigeria. It further investigates various sub-genres within this literary category and examines how a multitude of socio-political dynamics have influenced the thematic focus of Nigerian crime fiction. The study posits that crime fiction is gaining relevance in contemporary Nigerian society. It reveals that a significant corpus of these narratives grapple with issues such as colonialism, militarism, corruption, government apathy towards human and national development, and other opaque political and economic elements that perpetuate Nigeria’s precarious journey towards democratic stability.
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Belozerova, Natalia N. "Human internal organs as a possible and textual world." Tyumen State University Herald. Humanities Research. Humanitates 5, no. 2 (June 28, 2019): 20–34. http://dx.doi.org/10.21684/2411-197x-2019-5-2-20-34.
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Ever since Shakespeare had sent a fat king to go a progress through the guts of a lean beggar [31] human internal organs started to serve as a textual locus in fiction and non-fiction, or a subject in a possible world. Their presentation varies depending upon the purpose, the form and the style of writing, semiotic modalities of their exposition, as well as the epistemological development of knowledge. These varieties come under the umbrella property known as “the possibility of the impossible” [12]. In such possible world a cat can walk in the brain as if it were his apartments [3], or together with children travel through the whole system of human internal organs [9], or a concerto could be designed for neurons and synapses [22]. In scientific articles, a textual world takes the form of topographic maps and models, including semantic distribution [11]. With this in the mind, we state the purpose for this paper to classify the types of textual “chronotops” (in a Bakhtinian sense [2]) that characterize fictional and nonfictional loci of human internal organs. We also aim at stating the type of dependences that provide narrative shapes to a possible world inside a human body. For the analyses we attract among others M. Bakhtin’s theories of the “carnival poetics” and “Chronotop” [2], and Yu. Lotman’s theories of “semiotic textualization” [18] and “semantic intersection” [19].<br> We state as our hypotheses that a blend of epistemological knowledge, personal involvement of the authors into any sort of scientific experiment and an educational goal determine the type of the deixis or “chronotop”, the major semiotic modality being “SAVOIR”-TO KNOW (in the Greimasian sense).
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Liste Noya, José. "“All business as usual”: Richard Powers’ Gain and the Complicities of (Re-)Incorporation." Anglia 139, no. 3 (September 1, 2021): 536–63. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/ang-2021-0042.
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Abstract Renowned for his thoroughly researched ‘discursive narratives’ that trace in near-encyclopedic mode the complex interconnectivity of life in our (post-)postmodern period, Richard Powers’ Gain ambivalently raises the stakes of politics in the novel of late capitalism by asserting the imaginative agency of fiction itself. But how does one employ fiction to redress the simulacral hollowing out of everyday life in a corporate culture that fabricates reality by molding consumer desire to its own ends, specifically the end of financial profit? Can the ethical acknowledgement of complicity do away with its inevitability and even willingness within the unmappable totality which is our late capitalist moment? Gain confronts this problematic in ways that both resist and embrace it. The novel’s seemingly intentional ambivalence that mimics, yet strives to invert, the unashamed cynicism of late capitalist ideology finds a point of obdurate insistence in the ‘corpo-reality’ of the human body itself. At the same time, it imagines a vehicle of transcendence in the re-incorporation of that body or, more specifically, that body’s agential possibilities in a sphere beyond mere economic interest. Yet the asymmetry patent between the body’s death and the deathless corporation, despite the narrative parallelisms that the novel damningly establishes, returns us to the ambivalence of fictional ambivalence itself and the ethical dilemma of imagining ourselves beyond the currently unimaginable real.1
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Nieto, Sonia. "Symposium: Fact and Fiction: Stories of Puerto Ricans in U.S. Schools." Harvard Educational Review 68, no. 2 (July 1, 1998): 133–64. http://dx.doi.org/10.17763/haer.68.2.d5466822h645t087.
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Puerto Rican communities have been a reality in many northeastern urban centers for over a century. Schools and classrooms have felt their presence through the Puerto Rican children attending school. The education of Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools has been documented for about seventy years, but in spite of numerous commissions, research reports, and other studies, this history is largely unknown to teachers and the general public. In addition to the research literature, a growing number of fictional accounts in English are providing another fertile avenue for understanding the challenges that Puerto Ricans have faced, and continue to face, in U.S. schools. In this article, Sonia Nieto combines the research on Puerto Rican students in U.S. schools with the power of the growing body of fiction written by Puerto Ricans. In this weaving of "fact" with "fiction," Nieto hopes to provide a more comprehensive and more human portrait of Puerto Rican students. Based on her reading of the literature in both educational research and fiction, Nieto suggests four interrelated and contrasting themes that have emerged from the long history of stories told about Puerto Ricans in U.S. schools: colonialism/resistance, cultural deficit/cultural acceptance, assimilation/identity, and marginalization/belonging. Nieto's analysis of these four themes then leads her to a discussion of the issue of care as the missing ingredient in the education of Puerto Ricans in the United States.
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Sidi Yacoub, Aïcha. "La Voix de L’indicible dans Enfance de Nathalie Sarraute." Traduction et Langues 15, no. 2 (December 31, 2016): 149–58. http://dx.doi.org/10.52919/translang.v15i2.692.
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The Voice of the Unspeakable in Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute
According to Nathalie Serrate, the question of relationships between writing and tropisms is raised right when dealing with fiction genre. Indeed, for that writer, elaborating "the verbal equivalent» of that matter, with an unspeakable characteristic within fiction, is a priority requiring for assiduous work on the literary style and questioning the narrative codes in use. Our article aims at exploring some exploited processes in "childhood" to give life to that sensitive matter. We initially show how the reformed instrumentalization of the interior discourse is suitable for the actualization of the tropism souvenirs, before analyzing the sense effects that involves the layout of a hyperbolic speech, a staging seat of an unfortunate body. As a conclusion, we will say that through Childhood, Sarraute once again offers writing as an experience that can question the unexpressed nature of the human. Indeed, the writer succeeds in carving up the envelope of the character and thus digging up the tropismic words that cross her silent interiority. And to fight against any fallacious representation of the Self, the current of consciousness of the voice that says "I" becomes the site of a most successful fictional adaptation through the alterity always in motion that it carries. Finally, the word is given to the body, to this inexhaustible reservoir of sensitive matter. Nothing is reassuring in this writing of corporeity: through hyperbolic language, everything becomes movement and “trembling”. Moreover, to be able to invest the novel which interests us here, the reader must exchange his amorphous reading to which he is accustomed with another which is more active, more elaborate because this fiction of the body becomes inaccessible for those who persist in reading with the schemes of traditional literature. The reassuring coherence of a well-ordered writing no longer has the right to exist, because the unsuspected depths impose an intense tropismic implication on the part of the reader.
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ChooJaeuk. "A Study on Hybrid Body of Human Being and His Identity in Victorian Science Fiction." Studies in English Language & Literature 38, no. 4 (November 2012): 171–95. http://dx.doi.org/10.21559/aellk.2012.38.4.009.
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Le, Vincent. "Philosophy’s dark heir: On Nick Land’s abstract horror fiction." Horror Studies 11, no. 1 (April 1, 2020): 25–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/host_00009_1.
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Nick Land is a British philosopher who developed a compelling transcendental materialist critique of anthropocentric philosophies throughout the 1990s before leaving academia at the turn of the century and moving to Shanghai. While he is now best known for his controversial pro-capitalist political writings, he has also recently developed a theory of what he calls ‘abstract horror fiction’, as well as applied it in practice by writing two abstract horror novellas. Although one might think that Land’s horror fiction, like his recent far-right politics, marks a new and independent body of work from his earlier academic writings as a philosopher, this article argues that Land turns to writing horror fiction, because he sees the genre as a better compositional form than traditional philosophy to continue his critique of anthropomorphism insofar as it is able to stage a confrontation with that which lies beyond all parochial human comprehension. I begin by outlining Land’s earlier critique of anthropocentric philosophies with recourse to the brute fact of humanity’s inexorable extinction as a way to undermine their attempts to project human values and concepts onto an inhuman cosmos for all time. I then examine Land’s theory of abstract horror to see how he envisions horror fiction as the best aesthetic means for transcendentally channeling the traumatic limits of human experience. I conclude with an analysis of Land’s two horror novellas, Phyl-Undhu and Chasm, to draw out the ways in which his earlier critical philosophy continues to inform their literary motifs. What ultimately emerges from this analysis of Land’s fiction is a conception of horror as the dark heir to critical philosophy.
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Goodlad, Lauren M. E. "The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape." Victorian Literature and Culture 49, no. 1 (2021): 107–38. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1060150319000639.
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This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.
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Lv, Zhihan. "From Three-Body game to Metaverse." Metaverse 4, no. 1 (May 15, 2023): 21. http://dx.doi.org/10.54517/m.v4i1.2162.
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<p>This paper aims to study the concept of the metaverse as reflected in the Three-Body game in the TV series <em>The Three-Body Problem</em>, as well as the current development status of the metaverse in the real world. Firstly, the Three-Body game in <em>The Three-Body problem</em> is analyzed and explained to uncover the underlying metaverse knowledge. Then, through a literature review, the implementation and application scenarios of the metaverse in various industries are investigated from the databases Web of Science and Scopus, using keywords such as “metaverse”, “Three-Body”, “virtual world”, “virtual reality games”, and “human-computer interaction”. Nearly 10,000 relevant articles were retrieved, and 20 articles were selected for in-depth qualitative and quantitative analysis. Subsequently, the content of the literature is summarized from three aspects: the current development status of the metaverse, advancements in virtual reality technology, and advancements in human-computer interaction technology. The application status and technological progress of the metaverse in various industries and the existing technological limitations are discussed. By extending the concept of the metaverse from science fiction, this paper provides research ideas for the future development of the metaverse.</p>
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Cohen, William A. "Faciality and Sensation in Hardy's The Return of the Native." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 121, no. 2 (March 2006): 437–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081206x129648.
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In Thomas Hardy's fiction, the human body is the untranscendible foundation of putatively ethereal interior entities such as mind and self. The emerging sciences of physiological psychology and evolutionary biology, with which Hardy was familiar, provide a context in which to understand his bodily materialism. Hardy explores these interests in The Return of the Native through a striking emphasis on the faces of characters and landscape and particularly on sensory perceptions–primarily associated with organs located in the face–as means of bringing the world into the human interior and of dissolving distinctions between subjects and objects. Reading Hardy's materialism with the tools provided by Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari's concept of faciality elucidates both the fiction and the theoretical model, for the writers share an idea of depsychologized character. For Hardy, as for Deleuze and Guattari, experience of the self and the world is fundamentally corporeal, and perceptual experience makes landscape inextricably contiguous with the human. (WAC)
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Zhao, Dingyi. "The Construction of Body and Consciousness in Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?" Communications in Humanities Research 20, no. 1 (December 7, 2023): 135–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.54254/2753-7064/20/20231311.
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Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? is a significant work of science fiction that explores the concept of the post-human condition. In his literary works, Philip K. Dick undertook the task of reconfiguring the physical and cognitive aspects of both human beings and replicants. One perspective suggests that there is a growing trend towards cybernetization in the human body, while another perspective argues that the physical composition of replicants is progressively resembling that of human beings. In contrast, there is a growing interconnection between human beings and replicants within the realm of mind and emotion. This research aims to examine the correlation between the physical, technical, cognitive, and subjective aspects of human and replicant bodies, thereby offering an interpretation of this novel concept via the lens of post-humanism. The act of constructing blurs the distinction between humans and androids, hence giving rise to an ethical dilemma wherein both humans and androids vie for subjective experiences. The establishment of a novel topic incorporating both human and non-human entities, with the aim of critically examining anthropocentrism, can be seen as a potential solution to address this issue.
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Patra, Indrajit. "Exploring the intersection of Lovecraftian monstrosity and techno-body horror in selected works of Neal Asher: an examination of (post-)humanity." Multidisciplinary Reviews 6, no. 1 (July 2, 2023): 2023009. http://dx.doi.org/10.31893/multirev.2023009.
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This scholarly investigation aims to meticulously examine the various mechanisms employed by British science fiction writer Neal Asher in his works, including the Transformation trilogy (2015–17), Lockdown Tales (2020), and Lockdown Tales 2 (2023), to convey the erosion of humanity following profound physiological and cognitive changes. This research highlights how Asher skillfully combines elements of Lovecraftian grotesqueness with intricate portrayals of physical horror, thereby challenging conventional categorizations. These narratives feature a diverse ensemble of human and non-human protagonists, each subjected to transformative biotechnological, computational, and psychological enhancements. These processes raise questions about the feasibility of preserving even a semblance of humanity in an overwhelmingly advanced, distinctly post-human cosmological environment. While both biotechnological and Lovecraftian modes of horror explore humanity’s insignificance within a vast, indifferent, and often malevolent universe, Asher’s body of work consistently delves into the theme of how humans can retain their inherent humanity in the face of monstrous metamorphosis. Additionally, this investigation elucidates how such transformations give rise to the emergence of the “other” within oneself and the monstrous “Other” that takes center stage in the narrative. By exploring these themes, this study contributes to the scholarly discourse on the intersection of horror, transformation, and the preservation of humanity in science fiction literature.
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Biswas, Pooja Mittal. "The Abolition of Gender." Crossings: A Journal of English Studies 12 (September 1, 2021): 19–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.59817/cjes.v12i.2.
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This paper studies a contemporary example of postgender science fiction, The Cage of Zeus by Sayuri Ueda. Postgenderism, a cultural movement towards the deconstruction of the gender binary, is often assisted in science fiction by postgender technologies such as reprogenetics or advanced bioengineering that alter the human body and its social perceptions beyond simple binary categorization. My paper will explore how, in the world of The Cage of Zeus, postgender technologies are used in an attempt to build an ideal postgender society in which binary gender no longer exists. However, the attempt ultimately fails, because those very postgender technologies undermine their own purpose by inadvertently promoting binary thinking. The paper is organized into three broad sections; the first section introduces postgenderism, the second section offers an overview of postgenderism in speculative fiction, and the third section engages deeply with the postgender technologies and world-building of The Cage of Zeus itself.
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Altaf, Sana. "Negotiating patriarchal hegemony: Female agency in Christina Dalcher’s Vox." Technoetic Arts 21, no. 1 (August 1, 2023): 125–33. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/tear_00103_1.
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Contemporary critics have opined that the vision of dystopian texts has come true about the present situation rather than about the future. In today’s technologically driven world, where the gulf between speculative fiction and political reality seems to have narrowed, feminist dystopian fiction has gained immense popularity. These texts address gender ideologies and issues and often use current social conditions to demonstrate the sexism inherent in patriarchal societies. This article aims to analyse the novel Vox (2018) by American writer Christina Dalcher within the framework of feminist dystopia to highlight the unbridled nature of violence used against women and the eventual emergence of the female body as the locus of self-articulation and resistance against the dystopian authority. It also demonstrates how the novel creates a narrative space within which the feminine body is transformed from a static object of representation to a potent subject of the text.
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Efremova, Valeria V. "Legal fiction in copyright." Russian Journal of Legal Studies 6, no. 3 (April 1, 2020): 74–78. http://dx.doi.org/10.17816/rjls19110.
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The need to study the possibilities of development of legal thought in copyright is caused by the fact that imposed on the legislator since the 90s, and more actively since the 2000s, the illusion that all relations of intellectual property in general are related to trade, is not true, and regulatory approval would lead to the destruction of significant and truly human traditional institutions of the Russian system of law such as copyright. No one can argue that it is one of a kind that allows a person to get acquainted with his inner content, and hence his potentials in the scale of participation in the social order. Drawing attention to the fact that intangible benefits creative works of science, literature, art require appropriate legal protection, which, first of all, is based on respect for the personality of its author, the article refers to the fact that the material objective forms of expression of these results of human creative activity are carefully protected by national rules of law, which establish the need for gentle treatment, constant monitoring, updating, repair of cultural objects: paintings, sculptures, architectural monuments, etc. The article attempts to draw the legislators attention to the protection of creative results, which is built, at least, in two plans: at the level of protection of cultural values, carried out on the basis of generally recognized principles of international law, such as: the non-use of force and threat of force, respect for sovereignty, non-interference in internal affairs; and at the level of institutions that ensure the replenishment of the material and spiritual Fund of the Russian Federation, the main of which is copyright. And with this view of improving the norms of legislation, the state needs personnel who are rich in potential, able to actively act in their creative force aimed at creating and asserting the enduring (constant) values of humanity. The direction of improvement of legal norms on copyright is the purification of the normative body from pseudo-legal fictions that do not create consequences that favorably affect the development of creative potential of people. It is possible to think in this case when looking for ways to improve the legal technique of copyright law on the content of the concepts of creative life and personality of the author.
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Van der Zwan, Pieter. "Fantasy and fiction in religion: monster-bodies as abject in the book of Job: a psychoanalytic perspective." Reflexão 47 (November 11, 2022): 1–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.24220/2447-6803v47e2022a5779.
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The question about fantasy and fiction in religion is probably as old as the first interrogation and critique of revealed religion. However, the relation between fiction and religion is a two-way street. Underlying both is imagination which brings into play the psychological dimension of both but this in turn is always based on the body. Fantasy dreamily imagines the perfect body precisely to try and fill the gap left by imperfection. As an example from religious fiction, the two monstrosities in the second divine speech virtually at the end of the book of Job will be viewed through the hermeneutical lens of abjection, as explained by Julia Kristeva. As projections of the sick protagonist’s own frustrated sexual and aggressive impulses embodied as abject animal bodies they are surprisingly celebrated by the Divine who can contain the id in its protest against the superego. In the tension between play and seriousness in this transitional space negotiated by the ego creativity rooted in the chaotic and free, polymorph perversity opens the door to the revelation from the unconscious. The fundamental question remains, however, if this creativity is purely human meaning-making or tapping into the divine through some kind of intuition.
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NIE, Zesen, and Dan CUI. "Body Writing and Identity Construction of Clones in Ishiguro Kazuo’s Science Fiction Novel Never Let Me Go." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 8, no. 2 (April 8, 2024): p40. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v8n2p40.
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Never Let Me Go is a science fiction novel written by Japanese-English author Kazuo Ishiguro (1954-) as a representative Nobel Prize winner in literature. This work has attracted a wide range of attention to the ethical issues related to the heated topic of cloning. The novel focuses on the body writing, through which Ishiguro portrays the clone’s physical health conditions, organ donation, existence of soul, and ultimately, the clone’s demise, in order to depict the difficulties the clones face in finding their place in human society. Such a profound exploration represents one of the major ethical issues coexisting with the anxiety caused with the cloning technology throughout human life.
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BERNAULT, FLORENCE. "BODY, POWER AND SACRIFICE IN EQUATORIAL AFRICA." Journal of African History 47, no. 2 (July 2006): 207–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0021853706001836.
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This article revisits the trope of the traffic in body parts in colonial and postcolonial Equatorial Africa. Current analyses, mostly written by anthropologists and sociologists, explain these rumors by the destructive integration of Africa in the world's economy and the commodification of the human body. While acknowledging their fertility, I argue that these approaches fail to understand how, during the colonial era, Europeans and Africans participated in the re-enchanting of the human body. The first part of the article examines Equatorial African conceptions of the body as central in the crafting of power and social reproduction, and reconstructs how these views were disturbed by colonial intrusion. The second part turns to European discourses and suggests that the colonial situation revealed significant contradictions in the western fiction of a modern disconnect between the body and power. The series of political and moral transgressions triggered by the conquest made apparent how Europeans themselves envisioned political survival as a form of positive exchange revolving around the body-fetish. The third section puts these ideas to the test of funeral practices to show how, in the colony, black and white bodies became re-sacralized as political resources. Building on these findings, the conclusion questions anthropologists' and historians' tendency to draw epistemic boundaries between western and African imaginaries.
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Fu, Li. "Language Control in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World." Studies in Linguistics and Literature 7, no. 4 (November 14, 2023): p187. http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/sll.v7n4p187.
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley is one of three most famous dystopian fictions. In the fiction Huxley depicted a future new world where advanced science and technology are largely used to suppress human beings. By depicting differences against tradition and demonstrating inevitable conflict between old tradition and civilized culture, Huxley expressed his concern and fear for problems of the day like overpopulation and overwhelming scientific impact on human beings. In order to pursue happiness and stability, the controllers use a series of instruments like ectogenesis, neo-Pavlovian conditioning and hypnopaedia to control human beings. Language plays a critical and irreplaceable role in the new world as a form of controlling.The main body of this thesis is divided into three chapters: language control of political consciousness, language control of moral education and language control of conventional finiteness. The conclusion of this paper is control from the new world to men’s ideology relies on language control to a large extent, in other words, without language control the new world Huxley structured in Brave New World cannot work. Therefore, language control ought to not be neglected in literary research on Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
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McKnight, Natalie. "Hair Apparent; or, Dickens’s Public Hair." Dickens Quarterly 41, no. 1 (March 2024): 109–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/dqt.2024.a920208.
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Abstract: Dickens plays off the strange hybrid nature of hair throughout his fiction. Hair is both alive and dead, public but also private, part of and not part of the body. Dickens uses hair to create both comedy and pathos, and it projects key aspects of many characters while simultaneously defying their control. Through hair, Dickens raises epistemological questions about the human tendency to categorize the world in binaries, and he suggests that all such categories misrepresent reality and fail to capture the complexity of human experience.
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Zeng, Xiaoxin. "Research on the paradoxes in the artificial intelligence images." Applied and Computational Engineering 5, no. 1 (June 14, 2023): 75–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.54254/2755-2721/5/20230534.
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There is a wide argument about the development of artificial intelligence and whether it has emotions right now, conveying concern about Artificial Intelligence in the future. While people have not formed a consensus about Artificial Intelligence, even in the technical development field, this article explores a paradox in the common recognition of Artificial Intelligence image, which is the mixture of fiction and reality, collection and individual, by focusing on media served as extensions of the body and perspective, and the difference between a world in artwork and reality. The article is going to talk about the paradox between the conceptional Artificial Intelligence image and the existing technology by illustrating how media like film and fiction played a role in shaping the conceptual image in human mind. Using the story and narrative layer theory in narratology and extension theory in philosophy to analyze excerpts in In Search of Lost Time, how the illusion provided by novel can be distinguished and understood will be more concrete and practical in the following texts. All the elements including time and character should be distinguished since the world in a fictional work is unequal to the real world. Moreover, how the fictional work can provide a different perspective of substance and inspiration for our future actions is crucial, instead of trapping us in the anxiety of being replaced by a machine in the future, which can never have an answer at this time.