Dissertations / Theses on the topic 'Twenty-first century fiction'

My dissertation is interested in exploring dialectical relations that reveal complex power (im)balances in recent fiction. In my close reading of five novels published since the year 2000, I reflect on the postmodern legacy in the twenty-first century, after the declaration of the death of metanarratives and the concomitant emergence of marginalized voices in late twentieth century. How has fiction in recent years engage with persistent macro narratives in the light of emergent voices? What are the new questions and/or positions that are opened up, recurring issues that are unsettled, or even promises unfulfilled, in these writings with regards to the ‘maturation’ of formerly disenfranchised identities? There are three main areas of contention that I will analyse in my reading of the novels: gender relations, diasporic and local identities, as well as the role of scientific thought in present-day representations of identities, particularly its narratives of Darwinism, genetics and reproduction. They are compelling issues as, despite the postmodern drive to collapse margins and center, they represent instances of recurring peripheral and dominating narratives; indeed, even as familiar power dynamics are challenged or undermined, new ones are born. I will examine in individual chapters the novels’ portrayal of both old and new structures of opposition and power within the discourse of two formerly disenfranchised voices: the female and the colonized/decolonized. Following this will be a chapter on the literary reflection on the hegemonic role of science in our society today. These chapters, as well as areas of overlap within and among them, reveal the ever-increasing complexity and interconnectedness of power relations that demand the intellectual skill, dexterity, and concentration akin to that of a tightrope walker to achieve a nuanced understanding of individual and collective identities in the twenty-first century.

The Western conception of the proper human proposes that there is a potent divide between humans and all other animate creatures. Even though the terms of such a divide have been shown to be indecisive, relationships between humans and animals continue to take place across it, and are conditioned by the ways it is imagined. My thesis asks how twenty-first century fiction engages with and practises the textual politics of animal representation, and the forms these representations take when their positions relative to the many and complex compositions of the human-animal divide are taken into account. My analysis is located in contemporary critical debate about human-animal relationships. Taking the animal work of such thinkers as Jacques Derrida and Cary Wolfe as a conceptual starting point, I make a detailed and precise engagement with the conditions and terms of literary animal representation in order to give forceful shape to awkward and uncomfortable ideas about animals. Derrida contends that there is a “plural and repeatedly folded frontier” between human and nonhuman animals, and my study scrutinises the multiple conditions at play in the conceptual and material composition of this frontier as it is invoked in fictional animal representations. I argue that human relationships with animals are conditioned by our imaginative shapings of them, and that the animals we imagine are, therefore, of enormous significance for real animals. Working in the newly established field of Literary Animal Studies, I read representations of ordinary animals in a selection of twenty-first century novels, including Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People, E. O. Wilson’s Anthill, Carol Hart’s A History of the Novel in Ants, Aryn Kyle’s The God of Animals, Yann Martel’s Beatrice and Virgil, Mark McNay’s Fresh, James Lever’s Me Cheeta, and Karen Joy Fowler’s We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves. I interrogate how fictional animal forms and tropes are responding to, participating in or challenging the ways animals’ lives are lived out in consequence of human imaginings of them. There are many folds in the frontier between human and nonhuman animals, and my thesis is structured to address how particular forms of discursive boundary-building are invoked in, shape, or are shaped by, the fictional representations of animals. Each of the four chapters in this study takes spectively, political, metaphorical, material and cognitive – between humans and other animals. Analysis is directed at developing concepts and critical practices which articulate the singular literariness of the human, ant, horse, donkey, chicken and ape representations encountered throughout my study. Understanding the ways we make animals through our imaginative eyes is essential to understanding how we make our ethical relationships with them. A key task for Literary Animal Studies is to make visible how literary animal representations may either reinforce homogeneous and reductive conceptions of animals, or may participate in a re-making of our imaginings of them. My study contributes to clarifications of the terms of this task by evolving ways to read unusual or unacknowledged manifestations of the human-animal divide, by giving form to previously unarticulated questions and conditions about how animals are imagined, and by evaluating literary re-imaginings of them.

According to Pierre Nora, “[m]emory and history, far from being synonymous, appear now to be in fundamental opposition”. Drawing on theories of memory and psychoanalysis, my thesis examines the role of memory as a narrative of the past in late twentieth-century and twenty-first-century Scottish literature. I challenge Nora’s supposition that memory and history are fundamentally opposed and I argue that modern Scottish literature uses a variety of forms of memory to interrogate traditional forms of history. In my Introduction, I set the paradigms for my investigation of memory. I examine the perceived paradox in Scottish literature between memory and history as appropriate ways to depict the past. Tracing the origins of this debate to the work of Walter Scott, I argue that he sets the precedent for writers of modernity, where the concerns are amplified in late twentieth and twenty-first century literature and criticism. While literary criticism, such as the work of Cairns Craig and Eleanor Bell, studies the trope of history, Scottish fiction, such as the writing of Alasdair Gray, James Robertson, and John Burnside, asserts the position of memory as a useful way of studying the past. Chapter One examines the transmission of memory. Using George Mackay Brown’s Greenvoe, I consider the implications of three methods of transferring memory. Mrs McKee’s refusal to disclose her experience indicates a refusal to mourn loss and to transmit memory. Skarf’s revision of historical narratives indicates a desire to share experience. The Mystery of the Ancient Horsemen demonstrates the use of ritual in the preservation and the communication of the past for future generations. Chapter Two studies the Gothic fiction of Emma Tennant and Elspeth Barker. I examine sensory experience as indicative of the interior and non-linear structure of memory. I argue that the refusal to accept personal and familial loss reveals problematic forms of memory. Chapter Three traces unacknowledged memory in Alice Thompson’s Pharos. I use Nicolas Abraham’s theory of the transgenerational phantom to consider the effects of this undisclosed memory. I argue that the past and its deliberate suppression haunt future generations. Chapter Four considers the use of nostalgia as a form of memory. I investigate the perceptions and definitions of nostalgia, particularly its use as a representation of the Scottish national past. Using Neil Gunn’s Highland River, I identify nostalgia’s diverse functions. I examine nostalgia as a way in which, through the Scottish diaspora, memory is transferred and exhibited beyond national boundaries. Chapter Five builds on the previous chapter and extends the analysis of the ways nostalgia functions. I study nostalgia’s manifestations in the diasporic Scottish-Canadian literature of Sara Jeanette Duncan, John Buchan, Eric McCormack, and Alastair MacLeod.

This thesis is, and is about, fiction which reworks folkloric narrative using aesthetics and ethics which react against postmodernism. Part one is a critical essay in which I define a group of such novels written in the early twenty-first-century as 'folklore-inflected', and examine how they set themselves apart from the postmodernist fairy tale fictions which came before them. Focusing on A Summer of Drowning by John Burnside, Eowyn Ivey's The Snow Child, and Patrick Ness's The Crane Wife, I show how they turn from irony to sincerity, from magic to the Todovorian fantastic, and from overt political engagement to a quieter ethics linked to the sublime and the sacred. Part two comprises a novel, Depths, which enacts and develops many of the paradigms described in part one, for example by eschewing postmodern irony in the narrative style and focusing on characters' various attempts at authenticity. It retells the Celtic legend of the kelpie, a shape-shifting water horse which tempts people into drowning, in present-day Scotland; at the same time it is a story of a disappearance (of Iain - friend, brother, and almost-lover to the protagonists) and an appearance (of Mary, who cannot remember who she is), and their consequences for the three people they affect most closely. Following Donall, Dia, and Fay as their lives are infiltrated and their desires twisted by Mary's influence, the novel maintains a fantastic hesitation around the character of Mary, whose increasing manipulation may, or may not, have its roots in folklore.

The thesis seeks to illuminate the post-postmodern poetics of contemporary global literature about World War II. Whereas twentieth-century novels concerned with the representation of the Second World War tend toward postmodern playfulness and deconstructivism, contemporary literatures about the Second World War, I argue, pay renewed attention to reality. Through textual examples, I convey how authors reprise the techniques of modern and classical genres in tandem with postmodern traits in order to realise the Second World War as an historical event as well as a discursive subject and a plot device through which to explore the intersections of human history and violence. This thesis considers in detail works by Chilean author, Roberto Bolaño; French author, Jonathan Littell; American author, William T. Vollmann; and Australian author, Richard Flanagan. It also makes comparisons between their approaches to representing World War II and those of other writers such as Philip Roth, Laurent Binet, Giorgio Falco, Martin Amis, Andrea Levy, Sarah Waters, Ian McEwan, and others. The breadth of authors analysed is intended to convey the extent to which contemporary representations of World War II converge around a postpostmodern return of the real, and therefore testify to the evolution of post-postmodern poetics as an international phenomenon and the form of the global novel.

This thesis considers how contemporary American and British novels at the turn of the century attempt to conceptualize global human, political, economic and ecological risks through different levels of global connectedness. Taking a theoretical approach, the thesis offers up the notion of critical cosmopolitanism as a form of literary critique that might help to connect the field of literature to current sociological debates about globalization and cosmopolitanism. Critical cosmopolitanism is summarized here as follows: a predisposition towards cosmopolitan ideals but also a self-reflexive awareness of its perceived ideological and narrative shortcomings; a desire to conceive of a planetary self-conscious by maneuvering across and between spatial containers like the nation-state; an attempt to map disjunctive flows of global capital onto various narrative ‘worlds’; a type of narrative reflexivity that is transferred onto the reader. The thesis comprises of two parts. Part 1 considers how the war on terror discourse problematizes novelists’ attempts to imagine planetary connectedness, and their struggles to imbue their readers with a self-reflexivity as an act of critical cosmopolitanism. Chapter 1 discusses the representational challenges that 9/11 presents to the novelist in terms of historicity, and outlines some of the prevailing metanarratives/counternarratives that are projected by them. Chapter 2 considers how alterity is used to critique or negotiate representations of the terrorist persona in novels by Don DeLillo, John Updike and Mohsin Hamid. Pointing to flaws in their narrative forms, these novelists enable their reader to transcend certain ideological boundaries which are denied to their own protagonists. Chapter 3 considers the interrelationship between terror and the spectacle in novels by Don DeLillo, Jonathan Safran Foer and Ian McEwan, looking at how 9/11’s images are able to project itself across the world but still reduce viewers’ capacity for imagining global connectedness. Part 2 explores how novelists use a range of postmodern strategies to represent the various connections/dislocations made possible by global capital and how it problematize perceptions of human relationships across the world. Global capital is presented as a fluid dynamic that enables greater connectivity across the globe, but it also poses difficulties in one’s ability to realize a genuine cosmopolitanism against the all-incorporating power of the market. Chapter 4 deals with a variety of attempts in novels by William Gibson and Don DeLillo to cognitively map the relations of capital and consumer culture, and to make these complex global systems more intelligible to the reader. Chapter 5 discusses novels by David Mitchell and Rana Dasgupta that experiment with heterotopic, multi-layered narrative platforms to represent interconnecting but geographically separate ‘worlds’, and their ability to project cosmopolitan ideals across these textual horizons of space and time.
published_or_final_version
English
Doctoral
Doctor of Philosophy

This doctoral thesis examines the ways in which contemporary writers have adopted the critical dystopian mode in order to radically deconstruct the socio-political conditions that preclude equality, inclusion and collective political appearance in twenty-first century Britain. The thesis performs theoretically-informed close readings of contemporary novels from authors J.G. Ballard, Maggie Gee, Sarah Hall and Rupert Thomson in its analysis, and argues that the speculative visions of Kingdom Come (2006), The Flood (2004), The Carhullan Army (2007) and Divided Kingdom (2005) are engaged with a wave of contemporary dystopian writing in which the destructive and divisive forms of consensus that are to be found within Britain's contemporary socio-political moment are identified and challenged. The thesis proposes that, in their politically-engaged extrapolations, contemporary British writers are engaged with specifically dystopian expressions of dissensus. Reflecting key theoretical and political nuances found in Jacques Rancière's concept of 'dissensus', I argue that the novels illustrate dissensual interventions within the imagined political space of British societies in which inequalities, oppressions and exclusions are endemic - often proceeding to present modest, 'minor' utopian arguments for more equal, heterogeneous and democratic possibilities in the process. Contributing new, theoretically-inflected analysis of key speculative fictions from twenty-first century British writers, and locating their critiques within the literary, socio-political and theoretical contexts they are meaningfully engaged with, the thesis ultimately argues that in interrogating and reimagining the socio-political spaces of twenty-first century Britain, contemporary writers of dystopian fiction demonstrate literature working in its most dissensual, political and transformative mode.

The novel, The Fourth Expedition, which follows a collection of poetry, Things Visible and Things Invisible, already presented in the first year of the Masters, is based on the journals of a nineteenth century explorer of the Australian continent. Built into the story is the relationship between the explorer and a woman who is also a historic figure and an acknowledged artist, a painter.

This thesis examines the legacies of literary naturalism in twentieth- and twenty- first-century British fiction. My work aims to look beyond the reductive summation of naturalism as an offshoot of realism, to demonstrate that the innovative developments in the construction of narrative and the reassessments of novelistic subject-matter often associated with modernism and postmodernism can actually be traced back to naturalism. My extended introduction discusses the dialogues that have effaced the relevance of naturalism to British literature and seeks to provide a working definition of the genre that can account for the paradoxical definitions offered by naturalism’s founder, Emile Zola. I go on to delineate the characteristics particular to naturalism and argue that the genre opens up new methods for experimentation that have been vital to the development of British literature during the past hundred years. My work attends to a survey of twentieth-century writing and comprises three extended single-author case studies. Each study matches a generic feature of naturalism to a text or texts — James Joyce’s Dubliners with the notion of naturalist entropy, George Orwell’s Burmese Days and Keep the Aspidistra Flying with naturalism’s tendency to create paranoid narratives, J.G. Ballard’s The Atrocity Exhibition and Crash with the naturalist gaze — to draw out the diverse ways that these writers have used naturalist principles as means for portraying their cultures. I conclude by examining how naturalism’s legacy has endured into the twenty-first century, observing how the fiction of Ian McEwan negotiates an engagement with the genre by returning to its interest in evolutionary biology. The key finding of my research is that British writers have turned to naturalism as providing the best means for problematizing the notion of endings and of looking at the world like a naturalist in order to access ‘truth’.

[From the introduction]: In the twenty-first century, poetry, speculative fiction, science fiction, and young-adult fiction introduce new representations of youth in relation to contemporary social changes that arise from the application of technology to everyday life. The figure of youth in twenty-first-century dystopian, post­apocalyptic, and science-fictional settings is used to emphasise the future challenges facing the younger generation. This thesis breaks new ground in examining contemporary literature that engages with youth and the repercussions of certain scientific developments while addressing the interstitial value of young-adult fiction, science fiction, and poetry. The originality of my argument lies mainly in the comparative analysis of poetry and fiction in the twenty-first century focusing on youth and the impact of scientific development on contemporary society and culture. This thesis also demonstrates how the boundaries between the different genres are gradually diminishing when engaging with the topics of technology and youth which is becoming more important to authors and readers than the literary categorisation of texts. This thesis explores the contemporary literary representations of modified bodies in twenty-first-century fiction and poetry. These representations include organically modified bodies (Chapter One) as well as artificially devised ones (Chapter Two). Another primary objective is to investigate the literary representations of social attitudes towards the generation of youth through adult characters such as parents and guardians (Chapter Three). The following three chapters aim to identify the literary standpoints regarding the cultural dominance of new technologies in contemporary societies, especially since advanced technology made its way into people's lives through social media and the internet. I will examine poetry and narrative poetry as well as post­apocalyptic and dystopian fiction and young-adult fiction in the twenty-first century representing the role of advanced technology in creating the posthuman.

Questa tesi si propone di esaminare la rappresentazione di diversità, xenofobia, razzismo e pratiche di esclusione in due serie TV di fantascienza di recente produzione: Humans (Sam Vincent e Jonathan Brackley, Channel 4 e AMC, UK e USA, 3 stagioni, 24 episodi, 2015-2018) e The Aliens (Fintan Ryan, E4, 1 stagione, 6 episodi, 2016). Entrambe le serie sono ambientate nel Regno Unito, in un presente alternativo in cui oltre agli umani è presente un’altra specie umanoide senziente: androidi nel primo caso, alieni nel secondo. In entrambe le serie, il gruppo di non-umani è costretto ad una posizione sociale subalterna e i protagonisti non-umani subiscono discriminazione e razzismo da parte degli umani: in questo modo, si rappresenta metaforicamente la condizione dei migranti e delle minoranze etniche nel Nord Globale di oggi. Partendo da questa simbologia, il mio scopo è di analizzare Humans e The Aliens attraverso un approccio culturalista, per determinare se queste due serie presentino particolari innovazioni nella rappresentazione della diversità all’interno del genere fantascientifico. Nell’introduzione spiego i motivi che mi hanno portata a scegliere questo argomento di studio e fornisco una cornice metodologica per la mia analisi. Traccio poi un quadro generale dei tropi dell’alieno e dell’androide come metafore di alterità, basandomi sull’attuale stato dell’arte nei principali campi di studio coinvolti: fantascienza, cinema e televisione, studi culturali, studi sulle migrazioni. Evidenzio che nel cinema, in particolare, la rappresentazione di alieni e androidi è stata spesso considerata eccessivamente semplificata e binaria, con personaggi non-umani presentati come univocamente positivi o negativi. Ipotizzo, quindi, che le serie TV contemporanee, che sono spesso lodate per la loro capacità di raccontare storie corali e sfaccettate, possano fornire rappresentazioni della diversità più complesse, in cui si dà spazio a molteplici punti di vista e a una pluralità di prospettive. Nel primo capitolo spiego il motivo per cui ho scelto Humans e The Aliens e analizzo la rappresentazione della diversità nelle due serie, concentrandomi sulla costruzione e imposizione dell’alterità, sullo status sociale dei personaggi non-umani, sulle spazialità dell’abiezione, e su come tutti questi aspetti possano essere letti come metafora della condizione dei migranti nel Nord Globale, in particolare nel Regno Unito e negli Stati Uniti. Nel secondo capitolo analizzo la caratterizzazione di androidi e alieni nelle due serie, dimostrando attraverso quali strategie questi personaggi vengano arricchiti di voce e agency, e come la lunghezza e l’organizzazione temporale della narrazione permettano effettivamente di presentare punti di vista diversi e in contrasto tra loro. Esamino poi la narrazione affettiva in Humans e The Aliens, che ritengo innovativa rispetto a casi precedenti nella fantascienza, e traccio una possibile connessione con la recente rilevanza dell’affetto notata già da tempo da studiosi di molte discipline filosofiche, psicologiche e umanistiche e divenuta sempre più importante in tempi recenti nell’ambito degli studi culturali, dell’analisi del discorso, della comunicazione politica e della teoria dei media. Nelle conclusioni confermo che Humans e The Aliens presentano alcune interessanti innovazioni nella rappresentazione della diversità all’interno del genere fantascientifico; queste innovazioni sono rese possibili dalla specificità del mezzo narrativo utilizzato e sono coerenti con tendenze culturali e comunicative recenti. Infine, suggerisco alcune domande e questioni rimaste da esplorare e propongo possibili sviluppi di ricerca futuri.
This work examines the representation of diversity, xenophobia, racism, and exclusionary practices in two recent science fiction TV series: Humans (Sam Vincent and Jonathan Brackley, Channel 4 and AMC, UK and USA, 3 seasons, 24 episodes, 2015-2018) and The Aliens (Fintan Ryan, E4, 1 season, 6 episodes, 2016). Both series are set in the United Kingdom and represent an alternative present in which another sentient humanoid species exists alongside humans: androids in one case, aliens in the other. In both series, the group of non-humans is confined to a subaltern position in society, and the main non-human characters face discrimination and racism in their everyday life: this makes them clear symbols for migrants and ethnic minorities in countries of the Global North today. Based on this metaphor, my aim is to analyse the two series using a cultural approach, to determine whether they bring any innovation to the representation of difference within the science fiction genre. In the Introduction, I explain the reasons behind my choice of this research topic and provide the theoretical framework for my analysis. I then provide a general overview of the tropes of the alien and the android as symbols of racial difference, based on the current state of the art in science fiction studies, film and television studies, cultural studies, and migration studies. I highlight how the representation of aliens and androids in science fiction cinema, in particular, has often been considered oversimplified, portraying non-humans univocally as either positive or negative characters. I suggest that contemporary TV series might provide more complex representations of diversity, since TV series in the twenty-first century have been praised for their potential to tell multifaceted and multi-perspectival stories. In the first chapter, I explain why Humans and The Aliens were chosen for my analysis, and I explore the portrayal of difference in the two series, focusing on how the creation and enforcement of otherness, the social status of non-humans, and the rendering of spatialities of abjection mirror social issues related to the current condition of migrants in the Global North, specifically in the United Kingdom and in the United States. In the second chapter, I provide an analysis of the characterisation of non-humans in the two series, examining the representational strategies through which they are given voice and agency, and demonstrating how the length and structure of the narrative do indeed allow for the presence of multiple, often contrasting points of view and the creation of intense bonding with the audience. I hence expand on affective narrative in Humans and The Aliens, arguing that it presents some novelties in the science fiction genre and that these novelties are possibly connected to the ‘affective turn’ noted by philosophers and scholars across the Humanities, which has recently acquired increasing momentum in the fields of cultural studies, political communication, and discourse and media theory. In the Conclusions, I argue that Humans and The Aliens are innovative in their representation of difference within the science fiction genre; this complex and effective representation is allowed by the specificity of the narrative medium and is coherent with recent cultural and communicative trends. Finally, I suggest some questions and issues that might be addressed by future research in this field.

The Appalachian studies tradition ascertains that Appalachian people politically, socially, and academically represent a heterogeneous minority group of our own. In post-capitalistic America, however, the Appalachian region serves as a hotspot for media misrepresentation and tourism that perpetuate through works of fiction, nonfiction, and scholarship both negative and positive stereotypes in the overall American consciousness. Twenty-first-century Appalachian authors, I contend, are reinventing Appalachia from its postmodern rubble through fictionalized reconceptualizations of our region’s history, shifts in our collective consciousness from anthropocentric to ecocentric, and subversions of the heteronormative discourse of our internal colony through explorations of the psychosexual. The contemporary Appalachian texts that exemplify these abilities are Ron Rash’s The Cove, Barbara Kingsolver’s Prodigal Summer and Jeff Mann’s Loving Mountains, Loving Men because each represents a paradigm shift within their own aesthetic metanarratives in Appalachian literary history.

Inspired by 2009 pastiche Inglourious Basterds (US/DE), my research presents counterfactual historical film, firstly, as a marginalised type of film: the 2000s and 2010s have seen an abundance of overtly fictional films which do not intend to represent the past but nonetheless playfully refer to imageries of National Socialist and Holocaust history. These films have so far been neglected by historical film studies which, despite a consensus not to judge films according to their factual accuracy, tend to focus on genres close to historiography. My research considers as historical films the counterfactual parodies Churchill: The Hollywood Years (GB 2004) and Mein Führer: Die wirklich wahrste Wahrheit über Adolf Hitler (DE 2007), as well as Inglourious Basterds and, in a brief conclusion, Nazi zombie films. In this sense, counterfactual historical film is, secondly, a research approach which suggests reconfiguring academic definitions of the field of history and film and historical film. Assuming that historical film never visualises past reality but engages with a history that is always already medialised, I propose that the above films despite their counterfactual plots embark on a visual historical discourse, and what is more reflect upon cinema and history in their own enlightening ways. My analyses show how twenty-first century counterfactual historical films revise Nazi and Holocaust visual history, and how they describe National Socialist history as visually constructed and historical Nazism as an eclectic amalgamation drawing on fictional as well as factual media sources. In regard to the present, they explore tensions between popular and academic culture through the dissolving binaries of fiction film and historiographical fact, and propose to recognise the reciprocity of media representation and actual past as an object of research in its own right. My research demonstrates the value of cinema's playful engagement with history as a potential contribution to the theory and practise of historical film studies.

I identify and analyse an emergent sub-genre of contemporary literature by women that I am calling ‘New Femininities’ fiction. This fiction is about the distinctly feminine experience of contemporary domestic life written by women about the lives of heterosexual female characters that are married or in committed partnerships, often with children. These texts are concerned with the nature of the self, with a self that is plural and ‘in process’, and make use of particular narrative devices – ironic voice, unreliable narration, free indirect discourse, and interrogative endings that exceed their roles as simply telling stories. ‘New Femininities’ fictions allow their language the necessary freedom to multiply meanings and enact the narrative conflicts they raise and by so doing, undermine the binary oppositions which structure a gendered world. In this dissertation, I argue the models of existing criticism would do a disservice to these texts because much of the criticism either overvalues the theoretical and ignores the literariness of the text or seeks to identify a ‘feminine’ language the definition of which serves to reinforce and revalue patriarchal notions of femininity. The readings that this fiction requires necessitate a negotiation with established models of feminist literary criticism. I attempt to identify the characteristics of their style that allows them to straddle binary oppositions and to look at the language these authors use without having to label it ‘feminine’ and by so doing establish, build, or reinforce a boundary with some undefined ‘masculine’ language which stands in for all occurrences that are not ‘feminine’. Additionally, I attempt to forge a transformed, adapted concept vocabulary for dealing with this group of writers. To this end, I make use of various discourses to show how the different authors either negotiate with that discourse or prove its inadequacy to describe or explain these new femininities.

Science fiction film has been telling stories about artificial anthropomorphic robots and androids for almost a hundred years, spawning films, such as Metropolis (1927), Ghost in the Shell (1951), and Blade Runner (1982). Each of these science-fiction films was complemented by a musical score that helped to create an onscreen world dominated by a dystopian view of the future. Influenced by the generations of prior science-fiction films, Automata (2014), The Machine (2013), and Ex Machina (2015) are all concerned with the same narrative in which humanity is in decline while artificial robots are rising up and experiencing life in a way that humans are no longer capable of doing. These three films were all chosen as exemplars of recent science- fiction films with stories about robots versus humans. Further, this difference between robots and humans is paralleled in the film's musical scores. Humans are represented by depressive musical themes with dull and cold timbres that symbolize how empty they have become. Robots, on the other hand, are represented by bright and lively timbres that symbolize how the robots are living more vibrant lives than humans. This thesis traces themes for humans and robots through several important moments and tropes in each film: the state of humanity, the first encounter with the robot, the quality of life for robots and humans, and the eventual conflict that erupts between artificial and organic life. This conflict ends with the arrival of a robotic Eve figure, a sole female robot that is set apart by the film score as a special being, the start of a new age that is dominated by robotic life. These films choose to portray female robots and promote the idea of Eve because the female is seen as a mysterious Other to be feared; in the same way, humans fear these female robots because of their Otherness. Analysis and conclusions were achieved through transcription of the film scores, interviews with the film composers, analysis connecting the score to the visual scene, and constructing a historical context that connects the three films to their predecessors. Future research can expand on these findings by adding more science fiction films to the film pool, examining just how far the musical difference between humans and robots can be traced in film. Unlocking the musical themes assigned to humans and examining how they change over time can reveal how humans perceive themselves, for better or worse. This study is also meant to serve as a gateway for more science fiction films to be studied through their music, as some film's have hidden meanings that can only be understood by examining the music and how it interacts with the visual scene. A study of Automata, The Machine, and Ex Machina manifests how humanity is making way for the robotic Eve and the next stage of evolution for the world.

Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
Twenty-first century women’s science fiction mobilises the posthuman imaginary—tropes like the hybrid, the splice and the technologically created monster—to challenge systems and ideologies that position certain individuals and groups as Others on the basis of their race, gender, biology or appearance. In this thesis I examine the different manifestations of the posthuman in five recent novels by women writers. I argue that each narrative questions the politics of the embodiment and the Othering of those deemed ‘nonhuman’ as a result of their deviance from normal aesthetic or biological models of the human. I analyse Marissa Meyer’s 'Cinder' (2012) as a young adult science fiction narrative in which the posthuman becomes an apposite metaphor for the female coming-of-age process, presenting a contemporary example of how fictional cyborg embodiment is being utilised to engage with notions of anomalous embodiment. I also examine depictions of posthuman coming-of-age in Mary E. Pearson’s 'The Adoration of Jenna Fox' (2008), a process that involves tensions between real and artificial, human and machine. I consider how Pearson utilises the posthuman to engage in questions of personhood and posthuman ethics, and whether ‘human essence’ can be located in the mind, body or soul. Julianna Baggott’s post-apocalyptic novel 'Pure' (2012) destabilises associations between ‘normal’ embodiment and definitions of the human: as I demonstrate, Baggott humanises various ‘fused’ hybrid figures and depicts new patterns of Othering emerging in a posthuman world. I also argue that Stephanie Saulter’s adult science fiction novel 'Gemsigns' (2013) mobilises the figure of the genetically engineered ‘splice,’ portraying an exploited underclass of genetically enhanced humans to explore the politics of the biologically deviant posthuman body. Finally, I discuss how Jeanette Winterson’s experimental dystopian science fiction, 'The Stone Gods' (2007) portrays repeating cycles of Othering—of nature, women, children and machines—to highlight patterns of exploitation and destruction. These five novels demonstrate how women writers of the twenty-first century use science fiction to present vastly different yet compelling portrayals of how humans are conceived of in posthuman worlds, offering new definitions of the human that encompass the marginalised Other.

碩士
國立成功大學
台灣文學系
102
Since the eighties, Taiwan has structural changes in politic, economic and cultural aspects. At present, the two thousand years later, contemporary culture still changes constantly and impact society and system in nowadays. Throughout female novels since the eighties, we can find that many women writers have taken “Middle-aged Women” as the objects that their novels speak up for; this kind of coincidence seems to disclose women writers’ concern and care about the issue of “middle-age”. This article has selected three representative contemporary women writers, Chu Tian-hsin, Ping Lu, and Chang Yuan, as analysis objects. By analyzing the writing history of these three writers, we can find that all of them have published a series of novels about “Middle-aged Women” after the nineties. They discriminated the relationship between women and “middle-age” by writing over and over and tried to reverse people’s established impression to “Middle-aged Women”. It is no longer taken for granted that middle-aged women are regarded as someone’s mother wife, or a female image who would feel sorrowful and anile due to “middle-age”. They try to reveal the positive, active and multiplex implication that “Middle-aged Women” might have.

This dissertation uses theories of cognitive conceptual integration (as outlined by Gilles Fauconnier and Mark Turner) to propose a model of narrative reading that mediates between narratology and theories of reception. I use this model to demonstrate how new experimental narratives achieve a potent balance between a determinate and open story-form. Where the high postmodernists of the 1970s and 80s created ironic, undecidable story-worlds, the novels considered here allow readers to embrace seemingly opposite propositions without retreating into ironic suspension, trading the postmodernist “neither/nor” for a new “both/and.” This technique demands significant revision of both descriptions of radical experimentation in twenty-first-century novels, and of earlier narratological accounts of the distinction between story and discourse. Each novel considered in this dissertation encourages its reader to recognize combined concepts in the course of the reading process. Shelley Jackson’s Half Life combines singular and plural identity, reimagining individualist subjectivity and the literary treatment of (dis)ability. Mark Z. Danielewski’s Only Revolutions combines objective and subjective temporality, offering a new perspective on American myth-making in the popular post-Kerouac road-novel tradition. Percival Everett’s Erasure combines reliable and unreliable narration to create a complex critique of the idea of an African American novel tradition. M.D. Coverley’s hypertext novel Califia involves the reader in all three of these discursive dimensions at once, updating the marginalized art of hypertext fiction by inviting the reader to see his or her role in navigating the text as both creative and determined—the epitome of open-and-closed form. My analysis demonstrates how cognitive blending is a precise method for describing how a reader interprets complex narrative structures. I propose this blending-model as a new approach to contemporary experimental fiction from the perspective of the reader’s cognitive work, and show how it offers new readings of important contemporary fiction. I argue that twenty-first-century authors attempt simultaneously to construct “open” forms, and to address real socio-cultural concerns in the world; I also argue that a narratology founded on theories of cognitive processes is best-equipped to describe the operations of reading and understanding these complex narrative forms.

Representations of the posthuman in contemporary novels are of great cultural and political significance because of their capacity to expose and challenge attitudes to structures of human privilege and ideas of the future organised around the normative human subject. As a privileged site for the cultural construction of human identity, the novel is an ideal domain not only for examining those depictions of the human but also for breaking them apart. Through analysing the representation of the posthuman in contemporary novels, this thesis seeks to provide a clearer and more critical understanding of the human in novels at the start of the twenty-first century, and the role of fiction in both perpetuating and conspiring against dominant ideas of the human. The thesis mobilises recent theoretical debates about the posthuman and posthumanism as a conceptual framework to investigate the status of the posthuman in fiction. It then offers close readings of how five early twenty-first-century novels imagine the human differently, including Michel Faber’s Under the Skin (2000), Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake (2003), David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go (2005) and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007). The posthuman has traditionally been shoehorned into a question for theory and, specifically, the critical framework of posthumanism. Posthumanist scholarship has often overlooked the posthuman’s proliferation in fiction and, in particular, how significant literary novels of the early twenty-first century have unsettled normative ideas of the human. Indeed, the central argument of this thesis is that the cultural and political “work” of the posthuman and posthumanism is carried out by both literature and theory. The thesis defends the position that reading novels is imperative to establishing a critical politics of the human, and argues that novels about the posthuman intervene in posthumanism’s theoretical project. In telling stories of radically decentred human subjectivity, these novels dramatise their own critique of the human and its ensconced position of privilege within the Western cultural imagination. Detailed textual analysis of the posthuman in contemporary literature illustrates the complexities and contradictions underlying culture’s attempts to rework the traditional human subject. In particular, this thesis analyses the persistent depiction of the posthuman as a queer figure in the selected novels and more broadly. In these queer manifestations, the posthuman is militant in its disruption of any normative sense of the human and its future. A reading of Never Let Me Go discusses language’s regulation of the posthuman and normative sexuality’s purchase on the human. An examination of Under the Skin considers the posthuman as a nexus of anxieties about anomalous bodies, sexuality and consumption practices. Analyses of Oryx and Crake and The Stone Gods demonstrate the posthuman’s significance to fictional thought experiments of human extinction, the Anthropocene and human reproductive futures. Finally, a chapter on Cloud Atlas addresses the failure of the posthuman to usher in any final dismantling of the human as the underlying term of Western culture and politics. These analyses emphasise that the posthuman imagination exists in a state of tension with a revivified and normative human exceptionalism, which surreptitiously re-enters posthuman fictions to restabilise narratives upon reassuring human scales.

In light of recent shifts in emigration figures from Mexico and the overall lack of engagement with the subjective dimension of the phenomenon, an analysis of the migration imaginaries presented in twenty-first century Mexican fiction sheds light on the cultural debate surrounding the issue within Mexican society. Highlighting the role of fiction for the creation of these imaginaries, a transmedial narratological framework devised for textual application permits the comparison of these representations both regarding their destinations – the USA or Europe – and considering medium-specific differences for the filmic (La misma luna and Guten Tag, Ramón) and the prose productions (Señales que precederán al fin del mundo and Méjico). The underlying question of the state of the master narrative of the American Dream and a possible European counterpart contextually guides this discussion of imaginaries both on the level of the story and the discourse. The findings from these two levels are, then, used for a comparative analysis with the aim of deducing the possible implications of fictional creations for migration and its societal stigmatisation. In that, the fictional material is considered in view of its real world impact and its ability to shape both migration imaginaries and societal structures.

This dissertation on “Climate Change, the Ruined Island, and British Metamodernism” proceeds from the premise that a perspectival shift occurred in the early 2000s that altered the tenor of British climate fiction published in the decade that followed. The release of a third Assessment Report by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), less than a month after the 9/11 terrorist attacks, prompted an acute awareness of the present as a post-apocalyptic condition bracketed by catastrophe and extinction. In response, British authors experimented with double-mapping techniques designed to concretize the supranational scope of advanced climate change. An increasing number of British authors projected the historical ruination of remote island communities onto speculative topographies extrapolated from IPCC Assessments to compel contemporary readers to conceive of a climate-changed planet aslant. Given the spate of ruined-island- as-future-Earth novels published at the turn of the millennium, this dissertation intervenes in extant criticism by identifying David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas (2004), Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006), and Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007) as noteworthy examples of a metamodernist subgenre that makes a distant future of a “futureless” past to position the reader in a state of imagined obsolescence. This project consequently draws on metamodernist theory as a useful heuristic for articulating the traits that distinguish metamodernist cli-fi from precursory texts, with the aim to connect British post-apocalyptic fiction, climate-fiction, and literary metamodernism in productive ways. As the body chapters of this dissertation demonstrate, metamodernist cli-fi primarily uses the double-mapped island to structurally discredit the present as singular in cataclysmic consequence and, therefore, deserving of an unprecedented technological fix. Ultimately, in attempting to refute the moment of completion that would mark history’s end, metamodernist cli-fi challenges the givenness of an anticipated future through which to anchor the advent of an irreversible tipping point. Given the relative dearth of literary scholarship devoted to metamodernist cli-fi, this project posits that this subgenre warrants greater critical attention because it offers potent means for short-circuiting the type of cynical optimism that insists on envisioning human survival in terms of divine, authoritarian, or techno-escapist interventions.
Graduate
2021-08-08