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Journal articles on the topic 'Science fiction conventions'
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1
Chupasov, Vadim. "Not-for-children reading: markers of adult sci-fi in Sergei lukyanenko’s writings." Children's Readings: Studies in Children's Literature 19, no. 1 (2021): 268–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.31860/2304-5817-2021-1-19-268-280.
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New forms of science fiction had emerged in several post-Soviet countries in years 1990–2000. New science fiction inherits and transforms traditions and conventions of Soviet “science fiction” (nauchnaya fantastica). The emergence of market relations in the “field of literature” provoked an identity crisis, also initiating various attempts to redefine the boundaries between science fiction and previously closely related discourses, including children’s literature. This article, using several works by S. Lukyanenko as an example, examines how this rhetorical strategy has been implemented within science fiction texts. At the level of motifs and themes, references to sexuality and violence (especially in child-adult relations), tabooed in children’s literature, play a significant part in categorizing Lukyanenko’s novels as adult literature. In the system of typical of SF generic conventions this presents the depicted world as the harsh reality, thus creating a realistic effect. Markers of the second type point to historical dimensions of the fictional world, and this technique invokes conventions of “serious” (i.e. adult) speculative fiction. Also the references to iconic science fiction texts show that the novels are intended for adults and not for children. In conclusion the article raises the issue of children’s literature as being a specific construct and being the neglected Other within science fiction.
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Steble, Janez. "The role of science fiction within the fluidity of slipstream literature." Acta Neophilologica 48, no. 1-2 (December 15, 2015): 67–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.48.1-2.67-86.
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The paper explores the complex and contradictory role of science fiction in slipstream, the type of postmodern non-realistic literature situated between the fantastic genres and the mainstream literary fiction. Because of its unstable status of occupying an interstitial position between multiple literary conventions, the article first deals with an expansive terminology affiliated with slipstream and elucidates upon using a unified term for it. Avantpop, transrealism, and interstitial fiction all help us in understanding the vast postmodern horizon of slipstream. Furthermore, the slipstream's philosophy of cognitive dissonance in comparison to science fiction's is analysed to see the similarities and differences between them. The section is mainly concerned on expanding Darko Suvin's concept of cognition and viewing it as partially compatible with slipstream's estrangement techniques. The final part is focused on the exemplary slipstream novel Vurt by Jeff Noon, a perfect example of science fiction providing material, including latest post-Newtonian paradigms of science, for slipstream to mould it in its own fashion.
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Šporčič, Anamarija. "The (Ir)Relevance of Science Fiction to Non-Binary and Genderqueer Readers." ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries 15, no. 1 (June 25, 2018): 51–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/elope.15.1.51-67.
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As an example of jean Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, contemporary science fiction represents a convenient literary platform for the exploration of our current and future understanding of gender, gender variants and gender fluidity. The genre should, in theory, have the advantage of being able to avoid the limitations posed by cultural conventions and transcend them in new and original ways. In practice, however, literary works of science fiction that are not subject to the dictations of the binary understanding of gender are few and far between, as authors overwhelmingly use the binary gender division as a binding element between the fictional world and that of the reader. The reversal of gender roles, merging of gender traits, androgynous characters and genderless societies nevertheless began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper briefly examines the history of attempts at transcending the gender binary in science fiction, and explores the possibility of such writing empowering non-binary/genderqueer individuals.
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Farahbakhsh, Alireza, and Soulmaz Kakaee. "A DYSTOPIAN READING OF THE PRESENT TIME IN DAVID MITCHELL'S NUMBER 9 DREAM." International Journal of Research -GRANTHAALAYAH 6, no. 12 (December 31, 2018): 12–22. http://dx.doi.org/10.29121/granthaalayah.v6.i12.2018.1070.
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With the intention to study the implications and their affinity with and deviation from reality, the present study will analyze Number9Dream (2001) in terms of its narrative style, ontological qualities, and certain conventions which lead to the particular genre of dystopian science fiction. It tends to settle the following questions: are the implications and contributions of categorizing Number9Dream as a dystopian science fiction significant in any way? What is the role and ontological significance of setting in the novel? Narratological approach and genre criticism are applied to the novel to analyze it from the perspective of its critical engagement with dystopia. It traces science fictional elements and then continues to examine their utopian or dystopian nature and the different functions of those elements. It also refers to the connection between the given ontologies and reality. The present article shows that the novel provides a range of multiple possible worlds through two layers of internal and external ontology which are the representations of the real world. Dystopian narrative and science fiction conventions are exploited to address today's world issues. Through a detached view toward the present societies, Mitchell gives the opportunity to criticize what is not otherwise visible. The novel warns about human's isolation, alienation, and dehumanization and calls people to action accordingly. It briefly refers to the reconciliation of past/ present and nature/ science as a solution.
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Rabkin, Eric S. "Science Fiction and the Future of Criticism." PMLA/Publications of the Modern Language Association of America 119, no. 3 (May 2004): 457–73. http://dx.doi.org/10.1632/003081204x20488.
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Science fiction, ranging from films to industrial design to world's fairs, is a cultural system no more confined to literature than love is to love letters. From its self-recognition in 1926, science fiction has involved commercial and social realities most obviously visible in fandom and the hundreds of annual science fiction conventions. This system includes many types of consumers and producers, even collaboratively self-correcting volunteer bibliographers. Collectively, science fiction fandom, the first organized fandom, has created vast informational resources that allow not only reference but also statistical inquiry. The Genre Evolution Project (http://www.umich.edu/~genreevo/) shows that these social structures and resources potentiate, in an age of widespread computer networking, the transformation of criticism from acts of isolated scholars working with narrowly defined subjects to collaborative projects drawing on human and informational resources across disciplinary boundaries. Science fiction points to a future in which criticism will be more systematic, collaborative, and quantitative.
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Vinod, Meera, and Gaana Jayadevan. "A History of the Future: Time-Travel, Technology, Dystopia, and Postcolonial Anxiety in Vandana Singh’s “Delhi”." Artha - Journal of Social Sciences 17, no. 3 (July 1, 2018): 73–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.12724/ajss.46.5.
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The paper examines postcolonial concerns arising in and through the science fiction, “Delhi,” by Vandana Singh as the author consciously deviates from generic conventions of the structures of Western science fiction. We argue that the protagonist in “Delhi” could be viewed as a postcolonial subject experiencing alienation and powerlessness. The character‟s postcolonial subjectivity is traced through Singh‟s manipulations of western science fiction tropes vis-à-vis time-travel, technology, dystopia, and narrative techniques. Using „abrogation‟ and „appropriation‟ (Ashcroft, Griffiths & Tiffin, 1989), and Ricoeur‟s Time and Narrative (1988), the paper analyses how postcolonial elements are foregrounded. It also examines the larger implications of engaging in a postcolonial reading of a science fiction text produced from a technologically developing Indian context.
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Domaciuk-Czarny, Izabela. "Intertekstualność nazewniczych neologizmów w grotesce science fiction Stanisława Lema." Język Polski 101, no. 1 (May 2021): 70–83. http://dx.doi.org/10.31286/jp.101.1.6.
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The article discusses intertextual onymy in selected grotesque texts written by Stanisław Lem. The study focuses on the stories from the two collections: Cyberiada (The Cyberiad) and Dzienniki gwiazdowe (The Star Diaries). Intertextuality is the author’s play with different styles, conventions and genres. Therefore, the study involves the analysis of the intertextual function of proper names in the texts. In science fiction grotesque, proper names which are elements of the fantastic, fabulous as well as the ludic and grotesque cur-rent in literary onomastics, artificial onyms that are deformed and asemantic, only occasionally perform such a function (for instance Palibaba – Ali Baba). It is crucial, therefore, to analyze the propria in the con-text of the selected fragments while focusing on the style, poetics, and the meaning of the entire work.
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Joseph-Vilain, Mélanie. "Cartographies génériques, spatiales et identitaires en Afrique du Sud : Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes, Henrietta Rose-Innes." Études littéraires africaines, no. 38 (February 16, 2015): 69–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1028675ar.
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This article examines how three South African novelists, Margie Orford, Lauren Beukes and Henrietta Rose-Innes, use crime fiction to write their country. After a brief survey of the rapid development of crime fiction in South Africa and of the critical response it received, the article proposes a reading of Like Clockwork, Zoo City and Nineveh, whereby their respective contribution to crime fiction displays three major features : first, Orford’s novel chimes in with generic conventions ; second, Beukes’s novel combines features borrowed from both crime fiction and science fiction ; and last, Rose-Innes’s novel displaces the detective story narrative into a context where « murder » is invested with a symbolic meaning. By handling the investigation theme in a variety of ways, the three novelists adapt it to the South African context and besides show that the feminine body fits in more or less problematically within the space of the city and of the nation.
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Yeates, Robert. "Serial fiction podcasting and participatory culture: Fan influence and representation in The Adventure Zone." European Journal of Cultural Studies 23, no. 2 (August 29, 2018): 223–43. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1367549418786420.
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New media affords significant opportunities for audience feedback and participation, with the power to influence the creation and development of contemporary works of fiction, particularly when these appear in serialized instalments. With access to creators permitted via social media, and with online platforms facilitating the creation and distribution of audience paratexts, fans increasingly have the power to shape the fictional worlds and diversity of the characters found within the series they enjoy. A noteworthy and understudied example is fiction podcasting, an emerging form that draws on conventions of established media such as radio and television. Despite the recent surge in the popularity of podcasts, little scholarly attention has been given to the format, except to discuss it as either a continuation of radio programming or part of a transmedia landscape for texts which are centred in media such as television and film. This article argues that fiction podcasting offers unique affordances for creating serial works of fiction, taking The Adventure Zone as a case study which demonstrates the power of successful participatory culture. The podcast has grown from modest beginnings to acquire a considerable and passionate fan network, has diversified into other media forms, and, though available for free, is financially supporting its creators and raising substantial amounts of money for charities. Crucial in its success is the creators’ cultivation of an inclusive environment for fans, and a constant attempt to feature characters representative of a diversity of gender and sexual identities, particularly those typically excluded from other science fiction worlds. This article argues that The Adventure Zone and the format of fiction podcasting demonstrate a shift in contemporary culture, away from established mass media programming and towards a participatory, transmedia, fan-focused form of storytelling which utilizes the unique advantages of new media technologies in its creation, development, and distribution.
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Wodzyński, Łukasz. "Modernism Romanced: Imaginary Geography in Jerzy Żuławski'sThe Lunar Trilogy." Slavic Review 77, no. 3 (2018): 685–703. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/slr.2018.205.
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The article examines the imaginary geography of Jerzy Żuławski'sThe Lunar Trilogy–On the Silver Globe(1903),The Conqueror(1910), andThe Old Earth(1911) – focusing on the relationship between the author's modernist sensibilities and the trilogy's adoption of the nascent science fiction genre. While modernism and popular fiction are usually placed on opposite ends of the literary spectrum, the example of Żuławski demonstrates that popular fiction was a valuable tool for modernist authors who sought to overcome the limits of realist conventions but were reluctant to alienate the mass readership. Drawing inspiration from the broadly-conceived spatial turn in the humanities, the article positions Żuławski and his work within the literary tradition that utilizes the romance mode (as defined by Northrop Frye, Fredric Jameson, and others) to reflect on modern subjectivity and its relations with what Max Weber called the “disenchanted world.”
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Smith, Dina, Casey Stannar, and Jenna Tedrick Kuttruff. "Closet cosplay: Everyday expressions of science fiction and fantasy fandom among women." Fashion, Style & Popular Culture 7, no. 1 (January 1, 2020): 29–50. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/fspc_00004_1.
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Abstract Some American science fiction and fantasy (SF&F) female fans participate in Cosplay or costume play, the global practice of dressing in costume and performing fictional characters from popular culture. Cosplay is typically only socially sanctioned at conventions and other fan events, leaving fans searching for new ways to express their fandom in everyday life. Closet cosplay is one solution in which everyday clothing and accessories can be worn to express fandom. The motivations for wearing everyday fan fashion have been only briefly mentioned by other authors or studied within limited social contexts. Therefore, the purpose of this research was to explore SF&F female fans' participation in closet cosplay as it is worn in everyday contexts. An exploratory qualitative study was conducted using a social interactionist perspective, and Sarah Thornton's concept of subcultural capital and Pierre Bourdieu's theory of cultural capital. Semi-structured, online interviews were conducted with sixteen participants who wore closet cosplay related to SF&F films and/or television series, which included Star Wars, Marvel Comics, DC Comics, Disney films, Harry Potter and anime fandoms like Sailor Moon (1995‐2000). The interview data were analysed using NVivo qualitative analysis software and the constant comparison method. Two themes emerged from the data: the definition of closet cosplay and motivations for wearing closet cosplay. Through examining these themes, it was evident that female SF&F fans used closet cosplay to express a salient fan identity, which enabled them to simultaneously gain subcultural capital and feminized cultural capital.
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Stevens, E. Charlotte. "“Researching Starsky and Hutch is exquisite torture”." Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 20 (January 27, 2021): 213–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.33178/alpha.20.16.
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This paper reflects on work-in-progress on archived media fans’ letterzines of the 1970s and 1980s. Growing out of the science fiction APA fanzine scene, letterzines collect letters of comment (LOCs) between female fans and capture conversations about their television viewing. Zines from this period go beyond science fiction and include fandoms for cop shows such as Starsky & Hutch (ABC, 1975–1979) and Simon & Simon (CBS, 1981–1989). Letterzines, which have not typically been used as a source for exploring women’s television history, contain a range of information of interest to historians: interpretations of character and narrative, reports on fan conventions and meet-ups, and discussions of how women related to contemporary television at a time when VCRs started to saturate the domestic market. These primary source documents can potentially nuance assumptions about what women watched, their views on the programmes, and the contexts in which they watched.
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Woo, Benjamin, Brian Johnson, Bart Beaty, and Miranda Campbell. "Theorizing comic cons." Journal of Fandom Studies 8, no. 1 (March 1, 2020): 9–31. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jfs_00007_1.
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When comics fandom emerged as a distinct media-oriented community in the 1960s, one of the things it brought with it from science-fiction fandoms was the convention. Buoyed by the synergistic relationship between Hollywood and the San Diego Comic-Con and the growing prominence of ‘geek’ culture, comic conventions, comic art festivals and related media fandom events across North America have enjoyed enhanced prestige, attention and attendance over the last fifteen to twenty years. But what kind of event are these ‘con events’? This article builds on a cultural mapping survey of convention organizers. The survey’s goal was to suggest something of the scope and diversity of the contemporary sector. Behind this variation, we define the con event as an organizational and cultural form that is (1) oriented to media, (2) audience-facing and (3) concerned with circulation.
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Prickman, Gregory J. "A Network and its Ephemera before the Internet: The Hidden Treasures and Clear Challenges of Apazines." RBM: A Journal of Rare Books, Manuscripts, and Cultural Heritage 9, no. 1 (March 1, 2008): 136–41. http://dx.doi.org/10.5860/rbm.9.1.303.
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Subcultures produce many types of ephemera, and they often have linguistic conventions that accompany them. To those outside, words such as “minac,” “egoboo,” “annish,” and “akicif ” have little meaning, but they are all examples from a particular subculture’s ephemeral publication that even goes by a name that is obscure: the apazine. What is an apazine, why are they increasingly important, and how is this type of ephemeral material made accessible? These questions can be answered by looking at how apazines developed and the characteristics of the subculture of science fiction fandom that created them.Message boards, listservs, and other ...
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Morgan, Ceri. "Québec’s new regional fiction: Louise Penny and Johanne Seymour." British Journal of Canadian Studies: Volume 33, Issue 2 33, no. 2 (September 1, 2021): 225–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.3828/bjcs.2021.15.
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Louise Penny’s Still Life (2005) and Johanne Seymour’s Le Cri du cerf (2005) are both murder mysteries set in the Eastern Townships, in south-eastern and south-central Québec. Much of the region borders the United States. To varying degrees, the border makes its presence felt in the novels by Penny and Seymour, along with other landmarks familiar to domestic audiences. This article argues that the apparent situatedness of the texts is, however, challenged by their adherence to the formal conventions of the murder mystery and associated subgenres. In so doing, it claims that Still Life and Le Cri du cerf foster multi-layered readings which, in bringing together the hyper-local and the international, prompt a reconsideration of understandings of regional fiction.
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Cook, Amy. "Cognitive Contagion: Thinking with and through Theatre." Gestalt Theory 41, no. 2 (July 1, 2019): 129–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/gth-2019-0014.
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Summary Theatre offers an opportunity for communities to think with and through fiction. We come together to hear and tell stories because it is moving, both in the literal and the figurative sense: it changes us. Theories from cognitive science of embodied cognition make clear that making sense of theatre is a full-bodied affair. In this essay, I argue that we can see moments when theatre invited its audience to think in new ways by shifting theatrical conventions. I explore how a contemporary production of Hamlet, Pan Pan’s production of “The Rehearsal: Playing the Dane”, brings its audience to question the stability of the self and text by altering the conventions around casting and representation. This is theatre that I may not understand in a traditional way, but this gives me a way to understand a new way of thinking about the world around me. It is theatre I can use.
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MORSE, RUTH. "Racination and ratiocination: post-colonial crime." European Review 13, no. 1 (January 20, 2005): 79–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1062798705000086.
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Crime fiction is currently one of the most globalized, most popular, and biggest-selling of commercial genres, but there has been almost no attempt to study it in relation to other kinds of post-colonial literature. There is no bibliography of crime writers as ‘post-colonial’, and no attempt to generalize about a body of fiction. This paper is a brief extract from work in progress, based on the books of over fifty Anglophone or Francophone authors who might be categorized as ‘post-colonial’ by birth or residence. I test post-colonial theory against crime fiction, to argue that strong generic conventions call into question some of that theory's received ideas. I consider two linked problems: first, so-called ‘colonial mimicry’ and its obverse, ‘ventriloquism’, because it seems to me a wrong turning in 20th-century criticism; and, second, the demand for new literatures which would create ‘national identities’. I argue that ‘mimicry’ makes no sense in the context of a strong popular genre, and that accusations of ‘colonial mimicry’ reinscribe the asymmetries of judgement they appear to attack. The possibility of imagined geopolitical units as identity-forming, especially in genres which are informed by social criticism, calls into question the demand for literature as a source of national identity.
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Marshall, Andrea. "Our stories, our selves: Star Wars fanfictions as feminist counterpublic discourses in digital imaginaria." Journal of Fandom Studies 8, no. 3 (September 1, 2020): 277–88. http://dx.doi.org/10.1386/jfs_00024_1.
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Fanfiction has a long and varied history in the Star Wars franchise since it began in 1977 with the debut of the first film, Star Wars Episode IV: A New Hope. The decade of the 1970s created new possibilities for science fiction multiverses and metanarratives; science fiction became an adaptive film genre that could be reimagined with seemingly infinite narrational results. The myriad of genre films that were released in the mid-to-late 1970s revealed dynamic syntheses with horror (e.g. Alien, Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Close Encounters of the Third Kind), franchises that previously had existed solely on television (Star Trek: The Motion Picture) and musical theatre (The Rocky Horror Picture Show). Cinematic audiences became increasingly accustomed to science fiction tropes and themes in film; audience participation in the theatre (e.g. The Rocky Horror Picture Show) expanded to print zines (often with fanfiction) for multiple franchises as well as fan conventions. Fanfiction’s beginnings as an analogue culture dramatically changed with the advent of the internet and the evolution of fandoms as digital cultures. Web-based platforms such as FanFiction.net and Archive of Our Own (AO3) host sundry fan communities’ creative outputs including podcasts, art and, most frequently, fanfiction stories. The release of Star Wars: The Force Awakens in 2015 immediately captured the fandom’s imagination; the animosity and tension between the new villain Kylo Ren (Ben Solo) and protagonist Rey of Jakku particularly fascinated the young adult fans who were lately converted to the Star Wars fandom due to this pairing (known as Reylo within the fandom and within cinematic circles). The newest generations of fans were acclimated to audience participation and paratextual interactions due to their positions as digital natives. The Reylo fan phenomenon particularly erupted into fanfictions as critical data artefacts, even predicting Reylo as a romantic pairing years before the second and third films in the franchise trilogy Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker. The Reylo pairing is just one example of how online Star Wars fanfiction communities expand audience participation to autonomous collective identity formation. This article examines feminist fanfictions in the Star Wars fandom as gendered critical data artefacts, as collaborative communities of practice, and as counterpublic discourses that apply feminist critiques to conventional gender roles within the most recent film trilogy and the fandom itself.
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Corbella, Maurizio, and Anna Katharina Windisch. "Sound Synthesis, Representation and Narrative Cinema in the Transition to Sound (1926-1935)." Cinémas 24, no. 1 (February 26, 2014): 59–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.7202/1023110ar.
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Since the beginnings of western media culture, sound synthesis has played a major role in articulating cultural notions of the fantastic and the uncanny. As a counterpart to sound reproduction, sound synthesis operated in the interstices of the original/copy correspondence and prefigured the construction of a virtual reality through the generation of novel sounds apparently lacking any equivalent with the acoustic world. Experiments on synthetic sound crucially intersected cinema’s transition to synchronous sound in the late 1920s, thus configuring a particularly fertile scenario for the redefinition of narrative paradigms and the establishment of conventions for sound film production. Sound synthesis can thus be viewed as a structuring device of such film genres as horror and science fiction, whose codification depended on the constitution of synchronized sound film. More broadly, sound synthesis challenged the basic implications of realism based on the rendering of speech and the construction of cinematic soundscapes.
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Mannon, Susan E., and Eileen K. Camfield. "Sociology Students as Storytellers: What Narrative Sociology and C. Wright Mills Can Teach Us about Writing in the Discipline." Teaching Sociology 47, no. 3 (March 5, 2019): 177–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0092055x19828802.
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The Writing in the Disciplines approach encourages writing instruction in specific majors so that students learn the writing conventions of their discipline. As writing instructors, however, the role of the sociologist is problematic. Not only has standard sociological writing been jargon laden, it has privileged a clinical style of writing. Thus, we ask whether learning sociology also means learning how to write poorly or at least narrowly. Drawing from narrative sociology, we suggest that mainstream sociological writing should be viewed as a writing genre—one of many genres that students, and sociologists themselves, can choose from. Framing sociologists as both truth tellers and storytellers, we invite sociology instructors to consider at least three alternative genres for assignment in the classroom: life stories, fiction stories, and visual stories. Finally, we offer C. Wright Mills as a model for how to think like a sociologist while still writing well.
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Jones, Calvert W., and Celia Paris. "It’s the End of the World and They Know It: How Dystopian Fiction Shapes Political Attitudes." Perspectives on Politics 16, no. 4 (November 23, 2018): 969–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1537592718002153.
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Given that the fictional narratives found in novels, movies, and television shows enjoy wide public consumption, memorably convey information, minimize counter-arguing, and often emphasize politically-relevant themes, we argue that greater scholarly attention must be paid to theorizing and measuring how fiction affects political attitudes. We argue for a genre-based approach for studying fiction effects, and apply it to the popular dystopian genre. Results across three experiments are striking: we find consistent evidence that dystopian narratives enhance the willingness to justify radical—especially violent—forms of political action. Yet we find no evidence for the conventional wisdom that they reduce political trust and efficacy, illustrating that fiction’s effects may not be what they seem and underscoring the need for political scientists to take fiction seriously.
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Halpin, Jenni G. "You’re an Orphan When Science Fiction Raises You." American, British and Canadian Studies 35, no. 1 (December 1, 2020): 68–85. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/abcsj-2020-0017.
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Abstract In Among Others, Jo Walton’s fairy story about a science-fiction fan, science fiction as a genre and archive serves as an adoptive parent for Morwenna Markova as much as the extended family who provide the more conventional parenting in the absence of the father who deserted her as an infant and the presence of the mother whose unacknowledged psychiatric condition prevented appropriate caregiving. Laden with allusions to science fictional texts of the nineteen-seventies and earlier, this epistolary novel defines and redefines both family and community, challenging the groups in which we live through the fairies who taught Mor about magic and the texts which offer speculations on alternative mores. This article argues that Mor’s approach to the magical world she inhabits is productively informed and futuristically oriented by her reading in science fiction. Among Others demonstrates a restorative power of agency in the formation of all social and familial groupings, engaging in what Donna J. Haraway has described as a transformation into a Chthulucene period which supports the continuation of kin-communities through a transformation of the outcast. In Among Others, the free play between fantasy and science fiction makes kin-formation an ordinary process thereby radically transforming the social possibilities for orphans and others.
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Kečan, Ana. "(CYBER) PUNK'S NOT DEAD – RICHARD MORGAN'S ALTERED CARBON." Knowledge International Journal 34, no. 6 (October 4, 2019): 1603–7. http://dx.doi.org/10.35120/kij34061603k.
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The term cyberpunk refers to an offspring or subgenre of science fiction which rose to popularity in the 1980s. It was first coined by Bruce Bethke in his story of the same name, published in 1983. Even though there are critics today who claim that cyberpunk is long dead, numerous examples from the 21st century show that it is still very well and alive, and this revival is particularly aided by television, as cyberpunk has a massive visual potential. Hence, the 21st century saw the sequel to the cult Blade Runner (originally released in 1982), titled Blade Runner 2049 (released in 2017), another (fourth) sequel of The Matrix (set to be released in 2020), TV adaptations of Philip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams (2017) and, the main interest of this essay, Richard Morgan’s Altered Carbon (season 1 in 2018 and season 2 set to be released in 2020). In this essay we are going to, first, outline the main narrative and stylistic conventions of cyberpunk, which include: a time and place in the future dominated by advanced achievements in information technology, science and computers (hence the term ‘cyber’) at the expense of a loss or breakdown of social order (hence the term ‘punk’) to the point of a dystopia (or post-utopia, as has been argued); virtual reality, data networks, illusion, bodily metamorphosis, media overload, intensity of visual components, bordering on what Norman Spinrad said was a fusion of the romantic impulse with science and technology. All of these encapsulate a core theme of the loss of distinction between real and artificial. In addition to this, the term cyberpunk requires clarification against several other terms which often appear alongside it and are related in one way or another, including science fiction, neo-noir, hard-boiled, post-cyberpunk, transhumanism, post-anthropocentrism, etc. Second, we are going to look at how those elements come together in the context of the first novel of Richard Morgan’s trilogy about Takeshi Kovacs, titled Altered Carbon, published in 2002 (the sequels, Broken Angels - 2003 and Woken Furies – 2005, have not yet been adapted for television and will, therefore, not be included in our analysis). We are going to, then, compare those elements with the Netflix version of the novel, a 10-episode TV series, released in 2018. The comparison of the visual versus the verbal narrative will show the differences in the presentation of cyberpunk elements and how (or whether) these differences are dictated by the medium or not. It will also show whether what started out as a dystopia in the original text has grown into a post-utopia in the television series, simply reflecting the current trend of nostalgia and nostalgic recycling.
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Crookston, Cameron. "Can I Be Frank with You?" GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies 27, no. 2 (April 1, 2021): 233–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1215/10642684-8871677.
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When Fox 21 Television Studios announced that Laverne Cox would play the role of Frank N. Furter in their 2016 The Rocky Horror Picture Show: Let’s Do the Time Warp Again, most public response circled around how Cox’s visible political identity as a trans woman spoke to the problematic nature of Rocky Horror’s language and dated identity politics. Released in 1975, Richard O’Brien and Jim Sharman’s The Rocky Horror Picture Show has been a touchstone of queer popular culture for more than forty years. Rocky Horror is constructed as a self- conscious pastiche of multiple cultural moments and queer coded pieces of popular culture; Gothic literature, classic Hollywood film, science fiction B movies, Glam Rock, and drag all mingle in the queer cultural collage that makes up the show’s dramaturgy. As such, the scope of Rocky Horror serves as a kind of performative queer archive, collecting and performing generations of queer culture. However, in addition to offering a dense collection of queer cultural artifacts, Rocky Horror has also inherited many of the complicated representational aspects of its sources, such as the racist coding and simultaneous racial erasure of Gothic and horror conventions as well as rapidly changing and often conflicted trans identity politics of the mid- twentieth century. These problematic appropriations and omissions become all the more salient in light of Cox’s 2016 performance. In this article, Crookston examines how Rocky Horror has functioned as a performative queer cultural archive and how Danny Ortega’s remake, starring Cox, challenges, complicates, and excavates O’Brien’s original historiographic dramaturgy.
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Amatucci, Kristi Bruce. "Writing “Teacher”." International Review of Qualitative Research 5, no. 2 (August 2012): 271–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1525/irqr.2012.5.2.271.
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This paper details an experiment with how the process of writing, specifically writing fictional narratives, can take my queries into teacher subjectivity in unexpected directions, into what St. Pierre (2011) called the post-qualitative landscape. Building on the idea of writing as inquiry (Richardson, 1994), I produce fictional texts that expand the boundaries of traditional qualitative research and push the limits of what counts as knowledge. Specifically, as a former high school teacher, I question conventional constructs of teacher by writing her as me/not me, as fiction in search of a truth. Such methodological experiments work to develop epistemological elasticity and to resist movements toward a normative science that defines itself in opposition to artful expression.
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Winstead, Teddy. "Masquerading with Superheroes: The 56th World Science Fiction Convention." Imagine 6, no. 2 (1998): 14–15. http://dx.doi.org/10.1353/imag.2003.0272.
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Fornoff, Carolyn. "Álvaro Menen Desleal’s Speculative Planetary Imagination." Revista Canadiense de Estudios Hispánicos 44, no. 1 (May 22, 2021): 43–66. http://dx.doi.org/10.18192/rceh.v44i1.5900.
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Science fiction has long held a marginalized status within the Latin American literary canon. This is due to myriad assumptions: its supposed inferior quality, sensationalist content, and disconnect from socio-historical reality. In this article, I argue for the recuperation of Salvadoran author Álvaro Menen Desleal as a foundational writer of Central American speculative fiction. I explore why Menen Desleal turns to sci-fi - abstracting his fictive worlds to far-off futures or other planets - at a moment when the writing of contemporaries of the Committed Generation was increasingly politicized and realist. I argue that Menen Desleal’s speculative planetary imagination toggles between scaling up localized concerns and evading them altogether to play with “universal” categories. By thinking with the categories of the human or the planet from an ex-centric position, Menen Desleal playfully appropriates generic convention, only to disrupt it from within.
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Obidič, Andrejka. "Margaret Atwood’s Postcolonial and Postmodern Feminist Novels with Psychological and Mythic Influences: The Archetypal Analysis of the Novel Surfacing." Acta Neophilologica 50, no. 1-2 (November 13, 2017): 5–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.4312/an.50.1-2.5-24.
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The paper analyzes Margaret Atwood’s postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels from the psychological perspective of Carl Gustav Jung’s theory of archetypes and from the perspective of Robert Graves’s mythological figures of the triple goddess presented in his work The White Goddess: A Historical Grammar of Poetic Myth (1997). In this regard, the paper focuses on the mythic and psychological roles embodied and played by Atwood’s victimized female protagonists who actively seek their identity and professional self-realization on their path towards personal evolution in the North American patriarchal society of the twentieth century. Thus, they are no longer passive as female characters of the nineteenth-century colonial novels which are centered on the male hero and his colonial adventures. In her postcolonial and postmodern feminist novels, Atwood further introduces elements of folk tales, fairy tales, legends, myths and revives different literary genres, such as a detective story, a crime and historical novel, a gothic romance, a comedy, science fiction, etc. Moreover, she often abuses the conventions of the existing genre and mixes several genres in the same narrative. For instance, her narrative The Penelopiad (2005) is a genre-hybrid novella in which she parodies the Grecian myth of the adventurer Odysseus and his faithful wife Penelope by subverting Homer’s serious epic poem into a witty satire. In addition, the last part of the paper analyzes the author’s cult novel Surfacing (1972 (1984)) according to Joseph Campbell’s and Northrop Frye’s archetypal/myth criticism and it demonstrates that Atwood revises the biblical myth of the hero’s quest and the idealized world of medieval grail romances from the ironic prospective of the twentieth century, as it is typical of postmodernism.
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Gittes, T. F. "“Forgers of Falsehood, Physicians of Nought”: Retailing Fictions in Boccaccio’s Decameron." Quaderni d'italianistica 38, no. 2 (February 4, 2019): 139–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.33137/q.i..v38i2.32234.
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Whereas Petrarch’s portrait of his doctor in Invectives Against a Physician is deliberately caricatural and seized at a glance, Boccaccio’s attitude towards doctors in the Decameron is far harder to grasp and easily overlooked. Yet, doctors and medical science are a central concern of the Decameron, whose first significant action (the brigata’s movement from the plague-afflicted city to the countryside) and activity (storytelling) are predicated on the Florentine doctors’ failure to find a remedy for the plague. Throughout the Decameron, the doctors’ glaring incapacity to help their patients is implicitly contrasted with the poets’ success in offering some measure of solace—if not a definitive cure—to those afflicted by the plague. The conventional view that poets retail fictions, and doctors, real cures, is repeatedly cast into doubt as Boccaccio reveals that all too often the real difference between doctors and poets is that doctors hawk medical fictions (their arsenal of exotic powders and decoctions) as true cures, whereas poets cloak true cures in poetic fictions. Medical fictions sicken the healthy and kill the sick; poetic fictions quicken the spirit and promote life. This counterpoising of doctors and poets (or painters), medicine and fiction in the Decameron both anticipates and contributes to Boccaccio’s lifelong defense of poetry that culminates in the 14th and 15th books of the Genealogy of the Pagan Gods.
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Williams, Kristin S. "Introducing ficto-feminism: a non-fiction, fictitious conversation with Hallie Flanagan, director of the Federal Theatre Project (1935–1939)." Qualitative Research Journal 21, no. 3 (March 30, 2021): 244–57. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/qrj-10-2020-0127.
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PurposeFicto-feminism is offered here as a creative method for feminist historical inquiry in management and organizational studies (MOSs).Design/methodology/approachThis paper introduces a new method called ficto-feminism. Using feminist polemics as a starting point, ficto-feminism fuses aspects of collective biography with the emic potential of autoethnography and rhizomatic capacity of fictocriticism to advance not only a new account of history in subject but also in style of writing.FindingsThe aim of ficto-feminism is to create a plausible, powerful and persuasive account of an overlooked female figure which not only challenges convention but also surfaces her lost lessons and accomplishments to benefit today's development of theory and practice.Research limitations/implicationsThe paper reviews the methodological components of ficto-feminism and speaks to the merit of writing differently and incorporating fictional techniques.Originality/valueTo illustrate the method in action, the paper features a non-fiction, fictitious conversation with Hallie Flanagan (1890–1969) and investigates her role as national director of the Federal Theatre Project (FTP) (1935–1939). The FTP was part of the most elaborate relief programs ever conceived as part of the New Deal (a series of public works projects and financial reforms enacted in the 1930s in the USA).
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Magnani, L. "Is abduction ignorance-preserving? Conventions, models and fictions in science." Logic Journal of IGPL 21, no. 6 (April 4, 2013): 882–914. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/jigpal/jzt012.
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Peers, Douglas M. "‘Those Noble Exemplars of the True Military Tradition’; Constructions of the Indian Army in the Mid-Victorian Press." Modern Asian Studies 31, no. 1 (February 1997): 109–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0026749x00016954.
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This paper is directed first at identifying where and by whom military influences or topics manifested themselves in the periodical pressʼns coverage of India in the period up to the Indian Rebellion. How such manifestations changed over time, as well as the convergence of Anglo-Indian and British newspapers and magazines on Indian topics, will form an important component of this study. Stemming from these initial enquiries, I will further suggest that the model often employed to comprehend such representations —namely ‘orientalism’ —is, as it is often configured, too simplistic and reductionist to account for all the forces at work in the production of images of India. Instead, the mid-Victorian image of India was produced by a very fractured discourse. Racial stereotypes and affirmations of British superiority were certainly to the forefront, but these were frequently inflected by quite separate agendaʼns, such as the military's pursuit of political and professional status and influence, publishers’ search for profits, and the quest for suitable middle-class role models. Moreover, it was a discourse constrained by the dominant contemporary literary conventions and tropes, notably the historical romance in fiction and didacticism in history and biography. Yet there is one strand that runs through these various agendas and literary strategies and that is the one provided by the Indian army. India was by the third decade of the nineteenth-century as much a military as it was a commercial site. In 1850, the then reigning governor-general, Lord Dalhousie, was reminded by John Lawrence of this fact when the latter insisted that ‘public opinion is essentially military in India. Military views, feelings and interests are therefore paramount’.
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Norris, M. K. Gaedeke, Bradley P. Fuhrman, and Corinne Lowe Leach. "Liquid Ventilation: It’s Not Science Fiction Anymore." AACN Advanced Critical Care 5, no. 3 (August 1, 1994): 246–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.4037/15597768-1994-3004.
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Liquid ventilation is, by all initial considerations, an unconventional concept. Decades of research, however, have found that by using perfluorocarbons, which are capable of holding high concentrations of critical gases such as oxygen and carbon dioxide, gas exchange optimal enough to support life is possible with no known toxic effects. The earliest method of liquid ventilation, tidal liquid breathing, involved infusion and active removal of tidal volumes of perfluorocarbons by a liquid ventilator for gas exchange. Recently, a new method of partial liquid breathing, called perfluorocarbon-associated gas exchange, makes the process of liquid ventilation simpler by using conventional gas ventilators. Current research is showing great promise in the use of liquid ventilation for patients with pulmonary pathology. Critical care nurses should become knowledgeable of this new mode of ventilation and be prepared to meet the special needs of this unique population
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Troiani, Igea. "Sci-fi Eco-Architecture: science fiction, sustainability and design studio." Architectural Research Quarterly 16, no. 4 (December 2012): 313–24. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1359135513000201.
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In the summer of 2009, while on vacation in Italy, I lay on a deck chair on a beach under the scorching sun reading Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster. I had taken Mike Davis's book as holiday reading after becoming interested in attitudes to sustainability as represented in films through supervising the unpublished dissertation ‘The Science and Fiction of Sustainable Living’. The dissertation analysed approaches to the green movement of the 1970s versus those held today. It did this through the study of ecological science fiction movies made during the two periods. As someone grounded in humanities research, using film studies research methods rather than conventional building science methods seemed to me an engaging, original approach to sustainability. The dissertation compared the 1972 American environmental science fiction film Silent Running to the 2007 British science fiction film Sunshine. During this supervision, the student gave me a copy of the films. Because Silent Running resonated with me, I took it on that same Italian holiday and watched it again. I recall thinking that Silent Running offered a departure point for an alternative kind of sustainable design studio. Then and there, I selected a film clip that I screened – in the background and without volume – at studio presentations to students held in September 2009.
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Laakso, Maria. "The paradox of imagining the post-human world." Narrative Inquiry 29, no. 2 (October 16, 2019): 371–90. http://dx.doi.org/10.1075/ni.19022.laa.
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Abstract Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, works depicting a post-human world have become a popular non-fiction genre. This kind of disanthropy is an extreme form of apocalyptic thinking. In this article, I examine one such disanthropic narrative, Alan Weisman’s bestselling non-fiction book The World Without Us (2007), using the theoretical framework of narrative fictionality studies. The World Without Us falls between the conventional oppositional pairing of factual and fictional narratives. The book bases its rhetoric heavily on scientific facts – or at least on scientific expectations – especially in its use of interviews with scientists. Nevertheless, the core idea of a world without humans is inevitably fictional since the presence of readers makes the book’s premise manifestly counterfactual and paradoxical. In my analysis, I adopt a rhetorical approach to fictionality and factuality to ask how particular techniques and strategies connected to fictionality and factuality are employed in Weisman’s text in order to discuss the anxieties, desires, hopes, and fears of the possibility of human extinction.
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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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Menadue, Christopher Benjamin. "Hubbard Bubble, Dianetics Trouble: An Evaluation of the Representations of Dianetics and Scientology in Science Fiction Magazines From 1949 to 1999." SAGE Open 8, no. 4 (October 2018): 215824401880757. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2158244018807572.
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Dianetics was unveiled to the public in the May 1950 edition of Astounding Science Fiction. Dianetics was the brainchild of science fiction author L. Ron Hubbard, and became the foundation for scientology toward the end of the decade. Dianetics was marketed as a “scientific” method for mental improvement—a robust alternative to conventional psychiatry—and was strongly debated in science fiction (sf) magazines. This article follows the trajectory of this cultural phenomenon from 1949 to 1999 as it appeared in this form of popular culture. A proximal reading method was applied to analyze 4,431 magazines, and identified 389 references to dianetics and scientology. References were found in advertising, reader letters, stories, feature articles, and editorials. Significant fluctuations in the prominence and perception of dianetics became clearly visible in the source material across a broad spectrum of content. Negative criticism was present from the outset, and based on logical and scientific arguments. This was countered by obfuscation, or attacks on the authors of these critiques. The followers and promoters of dianetics did not provide scientifically rigorous proof of their claims, and by the mid-1980s, dianetics and scientology were no longer serious topics in the magazines but had been added to other fads and fallacies of sf history. This article demonstrates the effectiveness of a digital humanities proximal reading method to underpin objective classification and analysis of this culturally significant phenomenon.
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Rubins, Maria. "Transnational Identities in Diaspora Writing: The Narratives of Vasily Yanovsky." Slavic Review 73, no. 01 (2014): 62–84. http://dx.doi.org/10.5612/slavicreview.73.1.0062.
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Focusing on Vasily Yanovsky's prose fiction as a specific case study, this article sets modernist narratives informed by exile, dislocation, and migration in dialogue with the evolving theory of transnationalism. By engaging with the hybrid, cross-cultural nature of diaspora writing, this research challenges conventional, mono-national classifications based on the author's language and origin. Yanovsky's key texts transcending a range of boundaries (between Russian and English, fiction and nonfiction, Russian spirituality and western thought, science and fantasy) are brought to bear to demonstrate that language can be a matter of a writer's personal aesthetic choice, rather than a fixed marker of his appurtenance to a national canon. This article also argues for transnational identity as an intellectual and emotional, and thus translatable, affiliation, formed across national fault lines and cultural traditions.
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McGillivray, Anne. "The Long Awaited: Past Futures of Children’s Rights." International Journal of Children’s Rights 21, no. 2 (2013): 209–32. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15718182-02102009.
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This paper is an invitation to re-think how we think about the future of children’s rights. Utopias, science fictions, and the trajectories of history are invoked in futurist imaginings. Utopian thinking across centuries has both marked and marred social interventions into the conduct of childhood. Visionaries from More to Comenius to H.G. Wells have to a greater or lesser extent focused on childhood as means to a utopian end. While utopianism has deeply harmed children, the Convention on the Rights of the Child is in some ways indebted to Wells’s imagined World State. The long history of childhood discloses intimations of rights millennia before rights existed. It also discloses how doing good for children often has gone terribly wrong due to failure of the imagination. Science fictions are rapidly becoming fact. Rights thinking has failed to keep pace with developments profoundly affecting children and the conduct of their childhood.
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Kaczor, Katarzyna. "SMOK to nie smok. Legendy polskie w XXI w." Literatura i Kultura Popularna 23 (May 31, 2018): 63–74. http://dx.doi.org/10.19195/0867-7441.23.5.
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DRAGON is not a dragon. Polish legends in the 21st centuryThe subject of the article is the presentation of the project “Legends of Poland”, indicating the reinterpretation strategies used by its creators. The subject of the analysis are the works by Robert M. Wegner and Tomasz Baginski — the story Milczenie owcy The Silence of a Lamb and its film adaptation SMOK DRAGON. Their authors reinterpreted the most famous Polish legend about the Wawel dragon in a science fiction convention, thus pointing to the potential of famous stories that can be used to create whole universes.
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Belghazi, Taieb, and Abelhay Moudden. "Visualizing the Painful Past." Middle East Journal of Culture and Communication 11, no. 3 (November 23, 2018): 229–47. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/18739865-01103001.
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Abstract Conventional social science studies of state violence privilege ‘instrumental’ approaches in which the main focus is on rational and calculated acts of state violence that operate as a means to achieve specific ends. In this paper, we use six Moroccan feature films on the subject of violence as an introduction to ‘expressive’ dimensions of state violence, the set of meanings it expresses and the affects it triggers. Fictive as they are, the films highlight key issues pertaining to the topic, issues that have remained insufficiently addressed by social scientists. These issues include the cultural meanings of retributive justice for state perpetrators, political betrayal, political innocence, the multiple aspects of activism and resistance and societal reconciliation. The films not only trigger pertinent intellectual dilemmas, they also offer a ‘fictional framing’ of political reconciliation in which the family operates as the ‘weapon of the weak’ and the locus for restoring a lost past order are shattered by state violence.
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Ghube, Parth. "Anatomy of Self Driving Vehicle." International Journal for Research in Applied Science and Engineering Technology 9, no. VII (July 10, 2021): 393–401. http://dx.doi.org/10.22214/ijraset.2021.36334.
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The concept of Autonomous Vehicles portrayed in several Science Fiction mediums is now close to commercial reality. The new technology has the potential to change the conventional Transportation Industry. If implemented successfully, it will benefit society as a whole. As emerging as it seems; it also raises some serious challenges. This paper presents a systematic outline of the key components of Self Driving vehicles, current systems used, an overview of the Decision-making models, future scope and the practical challenges faced while developing and deploying the technology.
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Wankhammer, Johannes. "Anthropomorphism, Trope, and the Hidden Life of Trees: On Peter Wohlleben’s Rhetoric." Literatur für Leser 40, no. 2 (January 1, 2017): 139–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.3726/lfl022017k_139.
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While the textual representation of plants is yet an emerging concern in academic literary studies, it has squarely arrived in the mainstream of a general reading public: The best-selling German non-fiction book of the past few years, Das geheime Leben der Bäume (2015), is a sustained writerly exercise in representing the complexity of vegetal life.147 Written by the forest ranger Peter Wohlleben, the book portrays trees as exquisitely complex creatures, exploring (among other things) their capacities for communication, memory, and community formation. In terms of genre, the work is perhaps best categorized as creative non-fiction in the tradition of Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring: Wohlleben synthesizes scientific findings about trees and forest ecosystems in an accessible and captivating form, blending science with personal experience in the service of an environmental mission – in his case, that of raising consciousness for the damaging effects of conventional forestry on ecosystems.148
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Viglas, Katelis. "The Placement of Lucian’s Novel True History in the Genre of Science Fiction." Interlitteraria 21, no. 1 (July 4, 2016): 158. http://dx.doi.org/10.12697/il.2016.21.1.13.
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Among the works of the ancient Greek satirist Lucian of Samosata, well-known for his scathing and obscene irony, there is the novel True History. In this work Lucian, being in an intense satirical mood, intended to undermine the values of the classical world. Through a continuous parade of wonderful events, beings and situations as a substitute for the realistic approach to reality, he parodies the scientific knowledge, creating a literary model for the subsequent writers. Without doubt, nowadays, Lucian’s large influence on the history of literature has been highlighted. What is missing is pointing out the specific characteristics that would lead to the placement of True History at the starting point of Science Fiction. We are going to highlight two of these features: first, the operation of “cognitive estrangement”, which aims at providing the reader with the perception of the difference between the convention and the truth, and second, the use of strange innovations (“novum”) that verify the value of Lucian’s work by connecting it to historicity.
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KOZLOV, EVGENY V. "SCREEN ATTRACTIONS: BETWEEN VISUAL AND NARRATIVE." ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION 17, no. 1 (2021): 11–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.30628/1994-9529-2021-17.1-11-28.
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Based on a number of provisions of aesthetics and film semiotics, the article interprets the structural features of the attractions of screen civilization and analyzes their varieties in the context of serial art products that reveal their structural and receptive specifics. The attraction has its deep reflection in the mental structure. The attraction appears as an external manifestation of the phantasm. The attraction, like phantasm, resonates on the basis of the difference of several episodes with which it is connected by the relation of causality. Art “produces the phantasm theatrically” (according to G. Deleuze), bringing the quasi-event from the depths of the psychic to the surface, into the symbolic space of artistic fiction. Phantasm is an internal resonance of the two series, while an attraction appears as an external manifestation and effect of the difference between the causal series (visual/narrative; rational/emotional; singular/universal, fictional/real, presence/absence). Based on the disjunctive synthesis of these series, an attraction occurs in films and comic books on foot of the ultimate (limiting the space for fiction) and the transcendent, going beyond the screen limitations, canceling the conventional barriers for fiction. A locomotive rushing into the auditorium from the cinema screen is an example of an attraction that is considered in the screen civilization as an attractive and sensational element of an artistic program. Such a cinema attraction is addressed almost exclusively to the eye, and for its success the resonance is important, which is provided by the predominance of the visual over the narrative. The juxtaposition, going back to André Gaudreault’s semiotics, between a cinematic attraction (in which the visual component is almost unchallenged) and НАУКА ТЕЛЕВИДЕНИЯ № 17.1, 2021 14 THE ART AND SCIENCE OF TELEVISION that of films (filmique), in which the narrative might have a chance for revenge, reveals an interesting response in the culture of the modern series. A film attraction appears as a result of the constructive interaction of visual perceptions and creative interpretations of the plot, shaped by the recipients themselves. It is assumed that a cliffhanger, which is often used in the series, can be such an attraction. In the modern storytelling, the art of creating and maintaining intrigue is endowed with fundamental importance. The attraction of the series is aimed at the continuation, at the teaser of the next episode, which should look as attractive as possible and seem to be an artistic product absolutely mandatory for consumption. The techniques and practices developed for these purposes become systematically updated in the media space, which nowadays is literally “infected with cliffhangers”.
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Rice, Stephen E. "Modern Microscopy on the Light Side: TEM in the Trenches." Microscopy Today 1, no. 4 (June 1993): 6–10. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1551929500067390.
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Great strides have been made in the last decade in high resolution transmission electron microscopes (TEMs) which can also provide elemental information via energy dispersive X-ray analysis (EDX) or energy loss spectroscopy (EELS), and proponents of various TEM techniques make bold claims. Convergent beam elecjron diffraction and microdifff action shine as techniques for defect structure analysis and means for solving crystal structures. The spectroscopies can now be used to map chemical state information at a level which until recently might be encountered in science fiction. As a pure imaging device, electron holography holds great promise for providing Ehe ultimate (would you believe 0.1Å?) imaging resolution. Although conventional TEMs will never approach this, it appears that we are learning more and more about less and less, until we will soon know everything there is to know about nothing.
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Waters, Thomas. "Magic and the British Middle Classes, 1750–1900." Journal of British Studies 54, no. 3 (June 5, 2015): 632–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/jbr.2015.56.
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AbstractThis essay explores the attitudes of the British middle classes towards witchcraft, ghosts, and other so-called superstitions from the mid-eighteenth to the late nineteenth centuries. Conventional historiographical wisdom maintains that belief in magic among middle-class Britons declined gradually between the early modern and modern eras. Grounded in the study of newspapers, antiquarianism, public lectures, and literary fiction, this essay proposes a more precise chronology for the decline and subsequent resurgence of magic. It argues that it was only from the 1820s that the middle classes, the media that served them, the police, and certain politicians put popular superstitions under significant duress, and examines the agendas and anxieties underlying this temporary cultural shift away from magic. The later Victorian period saw the emergence of greater tolerance towards witchcraft and ghost beliefs, allowing them to be reinterpreted as picturesque folklore or fitting subjects for the enquiries of psychical science.
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Graham, Gary, Rashid Mehmood, and Eve Coles. "Exploring future cityscapes through urban logistics prototyping: a technical viewpoint." Supply Chain Management: An International Journal 20, no. 3 (May 11, 2015): 341–52. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/scm-05-2014-0169.
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Purpose – The purpose of this technical viewpoint is to provide a commentary of how we went about using logistics prototyping as a method to engage citizens, science fiction (SF) writers and small- to medium- sized enterprises (SME’s). Six urban logistic prototypes built on the themes of future cities, community resilience and urban supply chain management (SCM) are summarized, together with details of the data collection procedure and the methodological challenges encountered. Our investigation aimed to explore the potential of logistics prototyping to develop “user-driven” and “SME” approaches to future city design and urban supply chain decision-making. Design/methodology/approach – This Boston field experiment was a case study investigation conducted between May and August 2013. Qualitative data was collected using a “mixed-method” approach combining together focus groups (MIT faculty), scenarios, prototyping workshops, interviews and document analysis. These story-creators could use the prototype method as a way of testing their hypotheses, theories and constrained speculations with regard to specified future city and urban supply chain scenarios. Findings – This viewpoint suggests that the prototyping method allows for unique individual perspectives on future city planning and urban supply chain design. This work also attempts to demonstrate that prototyping can create sufficiently cogent environments for future city and urban SCM theories to be both detected and analysed therein. Although this is an experimental field of the SCM theory building, more conventional theories could also be “tested” in the same manner. Research limitations/implications – By embedding logistics prototyping within a mixed method approach, we might be criticized as constraining its capability to map out the future – that its potential to be flexible and imaginative are held back by the equal weighting given to the more conventional component. In basing our case study within one city then this might be seen as limiting the complexity of the empirical context – however, the situation within different cities is inherently complex. Case studies also attract criticism on the grounds of not being representative; in this situation, they might be criticized as imperfect indicators of what transpires in other situations. However, this technical viewpoint suggests that in spite of its limitations, prototyping facilitates an imaginative and creative approach to theory generation and concept building. Practical implications – The methodology allows everyday citizens and SME’s to develop user-driven foresight and planning scenarios with city strategists’ and urban logistic designers. It facilitates much broader stakeholder involvement in city and urban supply chain policymaking, than current “quantitative” approaches. Social implications – Logistics fiction prototyping provides a democratic approach to future city planning and urban supply chain design. It involves collectively imagining socio-technical futures and second-order sociological effects through the writing of SF narratives or building “design fictions”. Originality/value – Decision-making in future cities and urban SCM is often a notable challenge, balancing the varying needs and claims of multiple stakeholders, while negotiating an acceptable trade-off between their competing claims. Engagement with stakeholders and active encouragement of stakeholder participation in the supply chain aspects of future cities is increasingly a feature of twenty-first century social decision-making. This viewpoint suggests that the prototyping method allows for unique individual perspectives on future city planning and urban supply chain design. This work also attempts to demonstrate that prototyping can create sufficiently cogent environments for future city and the urban SCM theories to be both detected and analysed therein. Although this is an experimental field of SCM theory building, more conventional theories could also be “tested” in the same manner.
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Cacchione, Pamela, Caio Mucchiani, Kristine Lima, Ross Mead, Mark Yim, and Michelle Johnson. "Engaging End Users in Designing Systems and Hardware for a Socially Assistive Robot." Innovation in Aging 4, Supplement_1 (December 1, 2020): 823. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/geroni/igaa057.3002.
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Abstract Development of low-cost robots to assist older adults requires the input of end users: older adults, paid caregivers and clinicians. This study builds on prior work focused on the task investigation and deployment of mobile robots in a Program of All-inclusive Care for the Elderly. We identified hydration, walking and reaching as tasks appropriate for the robot and helpful to the older adults. In this study we investigated the design specifications for a socially assistive robot to perform the above tasks. Through focus groups of clinicians, older adults and paid caregivers we sought preferences on the design specifications. Using conventional content analysis, the following four themes emerged: the robot must be polite and personable; science fiction or alien like; depends on the need of the older adult; and multifaceted to meet the needs of older adults. These themes were used in the design and deployment of the Quori robot.
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Kim, Do Young. "A Design Methodology Using Prototyping Based on the Digital-Physical Models in the Architectural Design Process." Sustainability 11, no. 16 (August 15, 2019): 4416. http://dx.doi.org/10.3390/su11164416.
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In this study, a design methodology based on prototyping is proposed. This design methodology is intended to enhance the functionality of the test, differentiating it from the prototyping that is being conducted in conventional architectural design projects. The objective of this study is to explore reference cases that enable designers to maximize the utilization of both digital models and physical models that have been currently used in architectural designs. Also, it is to explore the complementary roles and effects of digital models and physical models. Smart Building Envelopes (SBEs) are one of challenging topics in architectural design and requires innovative design process included tests and risk management. A conceptual prototyping-based model considering the topic is applied to the design studio (education environment in university). Designing SBEs is not difficult to conceive ideas, but it is impossible to “implement” using the conventional design method. Implementing SBEs requires to strengthen validities and improve responsibilities of ideas in the stages of architectural designs, with cutting-edge technologies and smart materials. The design methodology enables designers (represented by students) to apply materials and manufacturing methods using digital models (parametric design, simulation, BIM) and physical models, rather than representing vanity images that are considered simple science fiction.