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Forsberg, Daniel. "The Future Societies of Ira Levin and William Gibson." Thesis, Högskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora, 2010. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:hig:diva-7776.
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The meaning of this essay is to look at how the narrative strategies, description of character and society differ between the two novels "This Perfect Day" and "Neuromancer". By looking at the different narrative techniques used by the authors and the results we can see why some of these strategies work very well in one novel but would not suit the other because of the contrasts in style it would produce.
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Griffin, Brent. ""Plagues of the New World Order": Technology and Political Alternatives in William Gibson's Neuromancer." Fogler Library, University of Maine, 2006. http://www.library.umaine.edu/theses/pdf/GriffinBX2006.pdf.
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Becker, Christophe. "L'Influence de William. S. Burroughs dans l’œuvre de William Gibson et de Genesis P-Orridge." Paris 8, 2010. http://www.theses.fr/2010PA084168.
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L’influence de l’écrivain américain William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) sur des artistes d’horizons différents, est aujourd’hui bien documentée. Peu d’artistes ont toutefois dépassé le stade de la simple influence pour véritablement travailler à prolonger son œuvre et la porter dans des directions inédites. Notre travail a consisté à étudier l’influence de William S. Burroughs sur deux artistes qui ont précisément fait ce choix : l’écrivain américain William Gibson et le musicien, « performer » et essayiste anglais Genesis P-Orridge. Nous nous sommes penché sur l’univers représenté dans les romans de Gibson et les textes programmatiques de Orridge, affirmant l’influence de l’œuvre burroughsienne sur le « Cyberpunk », sous-genre de la science-fiction, mais aussi sur la « Musique Industrielle », apparue en Angleterre et aux Etats-Unis en 1976-1977. Nous avons étudié les groupes fictionnels qui émergent de ces mondes dystopiques, ainsi que l’idée de société alternative qu’ils proposent tout en soulignant l’actualité des questions ainsi posées au lecteur (redéfinition des notions de « copyright » ou de « propriété intellectuelle »). Nous avons étudié les évocations, mentions et citations de William S. Burroughs dans les œuvres de Gibson et Orridge, en nous posant la question de leur fonction précise, et nous avons analysé les nouvelles modalités textuelles et narratives qu’ils proposent. Enfin, nous nous sommes concentré sur le sens que prend, chez Orridge, la substitution du corps vivant à la page, et chez Gibson la programmation d’un texte destiné à s’effacer au fur et à mesure que le lecteur en a pris connaissanceThe influence of the American writer William S. Burroughs (1914-1997) on artists from various horizons is now fairly well documented. While many have been influenced by his work, few have actually tried to pursue it in new and original ways. Our work consists in studying William S. Burroughs’ influence on two artists who adopted this very course : the American writer William Gibson and the English musician, performer, and essayist Genesis P-Orridge. The thesis focuses on the universe represented in Gibson’s novels and Orridge’s programmatic texts, confirming the influence of Burroughs on the “Cyberpunk” genre – a variant of science-fiction – but also on “Industrial Music” that appeared in England and the United States in 1976-1977. We have studied the groups of fictional characters which emerged from these dystopic worlds and the type of alternative society that they exemplify, emphasizing at the same time the topicality of the questions thus raised to the reader (such as : the redefinition of “copyright” and “intellectual property”). We have studied the references, mentions, and quotations of and by William S. Burroughs in Gibson’s and Orridge’s work, and analyzed the new textual and narrative modalities that they offer. Finally, we investigated the way the page is replaced by a living body in Orridge’s work, and the implications of a text written and programmed by Gibson to be erased as it is being read
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McFarlane, Anna M. "A gestalt approach to the science fiction novels of William Gibson." Thesis, University of St Andrews, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/10023/6263.
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Gestalt psychologists Kurt Koffka and Wolfgang Köhler argue that human perception relies on a form, or gestalt, into which perceptions are assimilated. Gestalt theory has been applied to the visual arts by Rudolf Arnheim and to literature by Wolfgang Iser. My original contribution to knowledge is to use gestalt theory to perform literary criticism, an approach that highlights the importance of perception in William Gibson's novels and the impact of this emphasis on posthumanism and science fiction studies. Science fiction addresses the problem of difference and the relationship between self and other. Gestalt literary criticism takes perception as the interface between the self and the other, the human and the inhuman. Gibson's work is of particular interest as his early novels are representative of 1980s cyberpunk while his later novels push the boundaries of science fiction through their contemporary settings. By engaging with Gibson the thesis makes its contribution to contemporary science fiction criticism explicit. In Gibson's Sprawl trilogy autopoiesis defines life and consciousness, elevating the importance of perception (Chapter I). The Bridge trilogy uses the metaphor of chaos theory to examine dialectic tensions, such as the tension between space and cyberspace (Chapter II). Faulty pattern recognition is a key theme in Gibson's post-9/11 work as gestalt perception allows and limits knowledge (Chapter III). Chapter IV explains how the gestalt in psychoanalysis creates a fragmented subject in Spook Country (2007). Finally, the gestalt appears as a parallax view, a view that oscillates between the world we experience and the world as represented in the text (Chapter V). I conclude that gestalt literary criticism offers an exciting new reading of Gibson's work that recognises its engagement with visual culture and cyberpunk as a whole.
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Haggis, Timothy Edward Matazone. "Hidden cyberspace : narrative and identity in the work of William Gibson." Thesis, University of Winchester, 2009. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.502246.
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The work of William Gibson has had a profound influence over the way that technology is viewed in modern society, but since the mid-1980s criticism of his work has been largely based on Cyberpunk manifestos and interpretations of the genre in which his career began. His first novel Neuromancer (1984) has been critically regarded as the pinnacle of his career due, in part, to his later works not evoking the same resonance with the thematic discourses of Cyberpunk. The themes of the Cyberpunk genre have been used to interpret Gibson's subsequent output, despite the novels' movement away from Cyberpunk motifs such as implanted technology and futuristic urban landscapes. The insights into his early works revealed by the changes in his narrative style and content have remained unstudied due to the dominant influence of the Cyberpunk discourses over approaches to Gibson's texts. This thesis examines the entirety of Gibson's fiction output to assess the relevance of a Cyberpunk-based approach to his later works, focussing primarily on his novels and the processes applied by other critics to their study. It uncovers new overarching motifs in his work that are used to reinterpret Neuromancer in a way that unites it thematically with his later texts. This thesis argues that his novels consistently address three main issues: these are the use of technology as a metaphor for the unconscious mind, change being a signifier of authenticity, and his association of information with the nature of God. It is these motifs that define Gibson's construction of narrative and identity. Their study reveals that his work consistently relies on introducing aspects of the unknown into technologically controlled environments. This thesis presents an approach to Gibson's work that reassesses core assumptions previously used in the study of this influential modern author.
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Ferreira, Alberto José Viralhadas. ""Futurshocked Zombies or Hopeful Monsters" : discursos (pós)-humanistas em Neuromancer de William Gibson." Master's thesis, Porto : [Edição de Autor], 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/10216/13692.
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Esta dissertação analisa a presença do Humanismo enquanto corrente filosófica, e de que forma esta voz se coaduna com as perspectivas pós e transhumanistas presentes na literatura cyberpunk, especificamente, na obra Neuromancer da autoria de William Gibson. Partindo de um fundo metafórico, a dissertação congrega diversos instrumentos metodológicos do campo da sociologia, filosofia e estudos culturais, encontrando-se dividida em três partes, sendo que as duas primeiras destinam-se a fundamentar teoricamente o estudo das posições narrativa acima descritas na terceira e última parte.
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Ferreira, Alberto José Viralhadas. ""Futurshocked Zombies or Hopeful Monsters" : discursos (pós)-humanistas em Neuromancer de William Gibson." Dissertação, Porto : [Edição de Autor], 2009. http://aleph.letras.up.pt/F?func=find-b&find_code=SYS&request=000193047.
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Esta dissertação analisa a presença do Humanismo enquanto corrente filosófica, e de que forma esta voz se coaduna com as perspectivas pós e transhumanistas presentes na literatura cyberpunk, especificamente, na obra Neuromancer da autoria de William Gibson. Partindo de um fundo metafórico, a dissertação congrega diversos instrumentos metodológicos do campo da sociologia, filosofia e estudos culturais, encontrando-se dividida em três partes, sendo que as duas primeiras destinam-se a fundamentar teoricamente o estudo das posições narrativa acima descritas na terceira e última parte.
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Junior, Newton Ribeiro Rocha. "Creator and creature in William Gibson´s "Neuromancer": the promethean motif in science fiction." Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais, 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/1843/ECAP-7E2KKV.
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The human pursuit of knowledge is the core of the Prometheus myth and science fiction (SF). The punishment of Prometheus is a reflection of the double nature of knowledge: it can be used for the benefit or the destruction of humanity. SF shares this topic, representing the complex relation between the human race and knowledge through many forms: the encounter with alien cultures and extraterrestrials, the consequences of technological development, and the confrontation between civilization and its creations. SF works are contemporary representations of the Promethean drama, especially in the narratives that deal with the relation between creators and creatures. This relation is a reaction to what Hans Blumenberg calls the "absolutism of reality": humankind's belief that it cannot fully control the conditions of its existence. The creator-versus-creature drama in SF evolves through a progressive selection of narratives that aim to give the Prometheus myth a final interpretation. From the monstrous creature of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein to the godlike artificial intelligences of William Gibson's Neuromancer, the relation between creator and creature in SF developed into new and complex configurations. SF's cyberpunk genre attempts to overcome the creator and creature dichotomy through the humanization of the creature and the objectification of human identity, summarized in the figure of the cyborg. Contemporary cyberpunk literature unifies humankind and its machines in a post human existence, where the differences between organic and artificial self-awareness are demoted. The Prometheus myth is then turned into a quest of identity by beings that are both creators and creatures.A busca humana do conhecimento é o núcleo principal do mito de Prometeus e da literatura de ficção científica (FC). A punição de Prometeus é um reflexo da natureza dupla do conhecimento: ele pode ser usado para o benefício ou a destruição da humanidade. A FC também lida com este tópico, representando a relação complexa entre a humanidade e o conhecimento através de várias formas: o encontro com culturas alienígenas, as conseqüências do desenvolvimento tecnológico e o confronto entre a civilização e suas criações. As obras de FC são representações contemporâneas do drama prometeico, especialmente nas narrativas que lidam com a relação entre criadores e criaturas. Esta relação é uma reação ao que Hans Blumenberg chama de absolutistmo da realidade, a crença da humanidade de que não pode controlar completamente as condições de sua existência. O drama do criador versus a criatura na FC evolve através de uma progressiva seleção de narrativas que procura dar ao mito de Prometeus uma interpretação final. Da monstruosa criatura do Frankenstein, de Mary Shelley até as inteligências artificiais com características divinas presentes em Neuromancer, de William Gibson, a relação entre o criador e criatura na FC desenvolveu-se em novas e complexas configurações. O subgênero cyberpunk da FC tenta superar a dicotomia entre o criador e a criatura através da humanização da criatura e da objetificação da identidade humana, sumarizada na figura do ciborgue. A literatura cyberpunk contemporânea unifica a humanidade e suas máquinas em uma existência pós-humana, na qual a diferença entre consciências orgânicas e artificiais são esquecidas. Assim, o mito de Prometeus se transforma em uma busca pela identidade de seres que são ao mesmo tempo criadores e criaturas.
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Kneale, James Robert. "Lost in space? : readers' constructions of science fiction worlds." Thesis, University College London (University of London), 1996. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.309071.
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Forshaw, Mark. "Affectless subjects, atrocious bodies : thematics and history in fictions by Burroughs, Ballard and Gibson." Thesis, Keele University, 2001. http://ethos.bl.uk/OrderDetails.do?uin=uk.bl.ethos.391222.
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Blatchford, Mathew. "An analysis of selected ""cyberpunk"" works by William Gibson, placed in a cultural and socio-political context." Doctoral thesis, University of Cape Town, 2005. http://hdl.handle.net/11427/6721.
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This thesis studies William Gibson's ""cyberspace trilogy"" (Neuromancer, Count Zero and Mona Lisa Overdrive). This was an extremely interesting and significant development in 1980s science fiction. It was used to codify and promote the ""cyberpunk"" movement in science fiction at that time, which this thesis also briefly studies. Such a study (at such a relatively late date, given the rapid pace of change in popular culture) seems valuable because a great deal of self-serving and mystifying comment and analysis has served to confuse critical understanding about this movement. It seems clear that cyberpunk was indeed a new development in science fiction (like other developments earlier in the twentieth century) but that the roots of this development were broader than the genre itself. However, much of the real novelty of Gibson's work is only evident through close analysis of the texts and how their apparent ideological message shifts focus with time. This message is inextricably entwined with Gibson's and cyberpunk's technological fantasias. Admittedly, these three texts appear to have been, broadly speaking, representations of a liberal U.S. world-view reflecting Gibson's own apparent beliefs. However, they were also expressions of a kind of technophilia which, while similar to that of much earlier science fiction, possessed its own special dynamic. In many ways this technophilia contradicted or undermined the classical liberalism nominally practiced in the United States. However, the combination of this framework and this dynamic, which appears both apocalyptic and conservative, appears in some ways to have been a reasonably accurate prediction of the future trajectory of the U.S. body politic -- towards exaggerated dependency on machines to resolve the consequences of an ever increasingly paranoid fantasy of the entire world as a threat. (It seems likely that this was also true, if sometimes to a lesser degree, of the cyberpunk movement as a whole.) While Gibson's work was enormously popular (both commercially and critically) in the 1980s and early 1990s, very little of this aspect of his work was taken seriously (except, to a limited degree, by a few Marxist and crypto-Marxist commentators like Darko Suvin). This seems ironic, given the avowedly futurological context of science fiction at this time.
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Tarapata, Olga [Verfasser], Hanjo [Gutachter] Berressem, and Urte [Gutachter] Helduser. "Beyond Disability: Extraordinary Bodies in the Work of William Gibson / Olga Tarapata ; Gutachter: Hanjo Berressem, Urte Helduser." Köln : Universitäts- und Stadtbibliothek Köln, 2018. http://d-nb.info/120668593X/34.
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Andersson, Sapir Erika. "Cowboys, meat-puppets och razor-girls : Ett genusperspektiv på kroppen i William Gibsons Neuromancer." Thesis, Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för film och litteratur (IFL), 2019. http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:lnu:diva-85671.
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Cyberpunk som litterär genre tar ofta upp teman som berör kroppen och dess förhållande till teknik på olika sätt. I denna uppsats studeras mäns och kvinnors förhållande till sin egen kropp och synen på manliga och kvinnliga kroppar i cyberpunk-romanen Neuromancer av William Gibson, utifrån Yvonne Hirdmans teorier om genus. I analysen av romanen kan man se två huvudsakliga spår utifrån Hirdmans tre formler för förhållandet mellan könen, varav det tydligaste är det som Hirdman kallar jämförelsens formel. Kvinnor ses som impulsstyrda och kroppsliga medan män står för intellektet och en längtan efter att lämna kroppen bakom sig. Eftersom kvinnor ses som kroppsliga, blir det kroppsliga också något kvinnligt och därmed något oönskat för de manliga karaktärerna. I cyberpunken modifierar kvinnor sina kroppar för att kunna stanna kvar i dem, medan män modifierar sina kroppar för att kunna lämna dem.
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Maass, Alexandra. "Digital Cityscapes in American Science Fiction: Physical Structure, Social Relationships, and Programmed Identities." OpenSIUC, 2013. https://opensiuc.lib.siu.edu/theses/1124.
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Because cities act as the primary site for the development and production of new technologies, they arguably act as crossing points into the growing digital environment. As information technologies such as computers, digital networks, and most specifically the Internet become normalized within American culture, a need arises to examine the impact these technologies have on those who use them. Science fiction texts often explore technological influence on the human body, social relationships, and developing culture, and typically utilize cities as settings for this exploration. An examination of four primary science fiction texts, Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, William Gibson's Neuromancer, the Wachowskis' The Matrix, and M.T. Anderson's Feed, and the connections they draw between cities and cyberspace reveal not only an ongoing ambivalent relationship between humans and the technology they create, but also a concern for the growing power of that technology's influence. Louis Wirth's observations of the early twentieth century city serve as a guide in looking at digital cityscapes first as structural, then as social, and finally as points of direct influence on human identity within these texts, suggesting mirrored concerns not only within American culture, but the global digital culture that is forming as a result of the connectivity offered by digital information technologies.
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Toro, García Cristian. "Imágenes recompuestas: un análisis del narrador de The difference engine." Tesis, Universidad de Chile, 2014. http://www.repositorio.uchile.cl/handle/2250/130260.
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Lawson, Jessica Lynn. "Subject matter: feminism, interiority, and literary embodiment after 1980." Diss., University of Iowa, 2015. https://ir.uiowa.edu/etd/6457.
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I argue that literary texts after 1980 use the fluid relationship between the physical world and the world of writing in order to present alternate versions of the body’s relationship to the mind. Examining works by Toni Morrison, William Gibson, Kathy Acker, Sarah Kane, and Shelley Jackson, I demonstrate the ways in which these texts reinterpret the relationship between mind and body by offering bodily metaphors for their character’s interior emotional lives; they compare this inner life to a pregnant mother, a sexual couple, and more. I emphasize the political implications of the kinds of bodies employed in these metaphors, setting this against the background of late twentieth century feminism. I read my primary texts alongside the work of Julia Kristeva, Hélène Cixous, Luce Irigary, and others, in order to chart the parallel projects of literature and theory in articulating the relationship between the body—especially, the female body—and our understandings of subjectivity and representation. Starting with the 1980s, when the second wave feminist movement suffered conservative backlash, and continuing through the development of the third wave, I examine literary theorizations of feminist concerns during a period of transition in the feminist movement itself.
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Toerien, Michelle. "Boundaries in cyberpunk fiction : William Gibson's Neuromancer trilogy, Bruce Sterling's Schismatrix, and Neal Stephenson's Snow crash." Thesis, Stellenbosch : Stellenbosch University, 2000. http://hdl.handle.net/10019.1/51639.
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Thesis (MA)--Stellenbosch University, 2000.ENGLISH ABSTRACT: Cyberpunk literature explores the effects that developments in technology will have on the lives of individuals in the future. Technology is seen as having the potential to be of benefit to society, but it is also seen as a dangerous tool that can be used to severely limit humanity's freedom. Most of the characters in the texts I examine wish to perpetuate the boundaries that contain them in a desperate search for stability. Only a few individuals manage to move beyond the boundaries created by multinational corporations that use technology, drugs or religion for their own benefit. This thesis will provide a definition of cyberpunk and explore its development from science fiction and postmodern writing. The influence of postmodern thinking on cyberpunk literature can be seen in its move from stability to fluidity, and in its insistence on the impossibility of creating fixed boundaries. Cyberpunk does not see the future of humanity as stable, and argues that it will be necessary for humanity to move beyond the boundaries that contain it. The novels I discuss present different views concerning the nature of humanity's merging with technology. One view is that humanity is moving towards a posthuman future, while some argue that humanity is not discarded, but that these characters have merely evolved to the next step in the natural development of humankind. Both these views deal with constant change, a notion advocated by both postmodernism and cyberpunk.
AFRIKAANSE OPSOMMING: "Cyberpunk" literatuur ondersoek die uitwerking wat tegnologiese ontwikkeling in die toekoms op die lewens van individue sal hê. Tegnologie word gesien as tot moontlike voordeel vir die samelewing, maar dit kan ook 'n gevaarlike wapen wees wat gebruik kan word om die mens se vryheid in te perk. Die meerderheid van die karakters in die romans wat ek bespreek verkies om die grense wat hulle inperk te handhaaf in 'n desperate strewe na stabiliteit. Slegs 'n paar individue kry dit wel reg om verby die grense te breek wat deur multinasionale organisasies geskep word vir hul eie gewin. In hierdie tesis kyk ek na 'n definisie van "cyberpunk" en ek ondersoek die invloed van wetenskapsfiksie en postmodernisme op die ontwikkeling van die beweging. Die invloed van postmodernistiese denke kan gesien word in "cyberpunk" se fokus op veranderlikheid eerder as stabiliteit. "Cyberpunk" sien nie die toekoms van die mens as stabiel nie, en die argument is dat dit nodig is vir die mens om verby die grense te beweeg wat vryheid inperk. Die romans wat ek bespreek bevat verskillende sieninge oor die tipe samesmelting wat die mens en tegnologie sal hê. Sommige voel dat die kategorie "mens" permanent agterlaat gaan word, terwyl ander argumenteer dat individue slegs sal ontwikkel tot die volgende stap in die natuurlike ontwikkeling van die mens. Voortdurende verandering is die fokus van beide hierdie standpunte, en dit is ook die belangrikste fokus van beide "cyberpunk" en postmodernisme.
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Granger, Remy Maud. "Le roman posthumain." Paris 3, 2006. http://www.theses.fr/2006PA030040.
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A travers l'analyse comparée des romans de Houellebecq, Dantec, Gibson et Ellis, cette thèse cherche à définir un nouveau genre littéraire transnational que j'appelle Le roman posthumain. L'accès à l'écriture des romanciers posthumains correspond à l'âge de la toute-puissance des médias. Leur statut d'écrivain s'inscrit dans une stratégie de manipulation de la couverture médiatique. Experts en scandale, ils sont l'illustration d'une double évolution : celle du statut de la littérature face à l'information, et de la posture de l'écrivain, entre engagement et star system. Ces textes peuvent d'abord se définir comme discours de la fin. Fin des temps et esthétique apocalyptique : les romans posthumains construisent une temporalité de l'imminence. Fin de l'homme et mort du personnage : l'âge posthumain signale le déclin de l'individu. Ce discours pessimiste s'élabore à travers un style éminemment satirique, qui révèle la posture prophétique des auteurs. La satire fonctionne à la fois comme une position morale, entre prophétie et dystopie, et comme une technique narrative qui fait entendre le langage global. Ces mutations linguistiques donnent lieu à une redéfinition générique du roman. Les phénomènes de simulation et de massification mettent en question les limites génériques des textes. L'espace virtuel met en question l'espace fictif, le thème du tourisme met en question la construction de l'intrigue, et le motif gothique contribue à la déréalisation de ces fictions. Les romanciers posthumains élaborent un modèle romanesque qui, bien qu'inspiré par le réalisme, se voit marqué par la désincarnation et l'immatérialité. Ces récits obsédés par l'actuel perdent de vue le vivantThrough a comparative analysis of the novels of Houellebecq, Dantec, Ellis and Gibson, this dissertation attempts to define the transnational literary genre that I call The Posthuman Novel. The posthuman novelists are children of the media-age. Their abilities to use and abuse media coverage makes them experts in the orchestration of various scandals, which illustrate the evolution of the status of literature at the mass media age, and the position of the writer, between intellectual engagement and star system. These texts can be defined first ideologically as discourses of the endings: End of the world and apocalyptic aesthetics; end of man and death of the character. The posthuman age is the defeat of the individual. Generally the posthuman writers are testifying to the loss of those modern conceptions of man, space and time inspired by transcendence and ideals. We will also observe the novels endings as they illustrate a problematic relationship with utopia. This pessimistic discourse is elaborated through a highly satirical style, which reveals the provocative and prophetic stance of these writers. The stylistic analysis of the satiric techniques shows that satire functions as a moral position, linked to prophecy, but also as a narrative technique which reveals the mutations of language and makes the global language audible. These linguistic mutations give way to a generic redefinition of the novel. Phenomena such as simulation and massification question the generic limits of the texts. The integration of virtual spaces in the narrative questions the fictional space, the staging of tourism questions the construction of the plot and the gothic pattern contribute to the derealisation of these fictions. In fact, the posthuman writers build the model of a disincarnated novel – a novel which has freed itself of the limits of realism, but has also lost touch with the flesh. Those narratives obsessed by the actual, are loosing sight of the living
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Laurie, Henri De Guise. "Transferentiality :|bmapping the margins of postmodern fiction / H. de G. Laurie." Thesis, North-West University, 2013. http://hdl.handle.net/10394/9670.
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This thesis starts from the observation that, while it is common for commentators to divide postmodern fiction into two general fields – one experimental and anti-mimetic, the other cautiously mimetic, there remains a fairly significant field of postmodern texts that use largely mimetic approaches but represent worlds that are categorically distinct from actuality. This third group is even more pronounced if popular culture and “commercial” fiction, in particular sf and fantasy, are taken into account. Additionally, the third category has the interesting characteristic that the texts within this group very often generate unusual loyalty among its fans.
Based on a renewed investigation of the main genre critics in postmodern fiction, the first chapter suggests a tripartite division of postmodern fiction, into formalist, metamimetic, and transreferetial texts. These are provisionally circumscribed by their reference worlds: formalist fiction attempts to derail its own capacity for presenting a world; metamimetic fiction presents mediated versions of worlds closely reminiscent of actuality; and transreferential fiction sets its narrative in worlds that are experienced as such, but are clearly distinct from actuality.
If transreferential fiction deals with alternate worlds, it also very often relies on the reader’s immersion in the fictional world to provide unique, often subversive, fictional experiences. This process can be identified as the exploration of the fictional world, and it is very often guided so as to be experienced as a virtual reality of sorts.
If transreferential texts are experienced as interactive in this sense, it is likely that they convey experiences and insights in ways different from either of the other two strands of postmodern fiction.
In order to investigate the interactive experience provided by these texts, an extended conceptual and analytical set is proposed, rooted primarily in Ricoeurian hermeutics and possible-worlds theory. These two main theoretical approaches approximately correspond to the temporal and the spatial dimensions of texts, respectively. Much of the power of these texts rooted in the care they take to guide the reader through their fictional worlds and the experiences offered by the narrative, often at the hand of fictioninternal ‘guides’.
These theoretical approaches are supplement by sf theoretical research and by Aleid Fokkema’s study of postmodern character.
Chapters 3, 4, and 5 apply the theoretical toolset to three paradigmatic transreferential texts: sf New Wave author M John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence; Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy; and Jeff Noon’s Vurt and Pollen, texts that have much in common with cyberpunk but which make much more extensive use of formalist techniques. Each chapter has a slightly different main focus, matching the text in question, respectively: aesthetic parameters and worldcreation strategies of transreferential fiction; close “guidance” of the reader and extrapolation; and virtual reality and identity games.
The final chapter presents the findings from the research conducted in the initial study. The findings stem from the central insight that transreferential texts deploy a powerful suit of mimetic strategies to maximise immersion, but simultaneously introduce a variety of interactive strategies. Transreferential fiction balances immersion against interactivity, often by selectively maximising the mimesis of some elements while allowing others to be presented through formalist strategies, which requires a reading mode that is simultaneously immersive and open to challenging propositions. A significant implication of this for critical studies – both literary and sf – is that the Barthesian formalist reading model is insufficient to deal with transreferential texts. Rather, texts like these demand a layered reading approach which facilitates immersion on a first reading and supplements it critically on a second.
The final chapter further considers how widely and in what forms the themes and strategies found in the preceding chapters recur in other texts from the proposed transreferential supergenre, including sf, magic realist and limitpostmodernist texts.Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.
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Bickerstaff, Meghan Triplett. "Okay, Maybe You Are Your Khakis: Consumerism, Art, and Identity in American Culture." Oxford, Ohio : Miami University, 2004. http://rave.ohiolink.edu/etdc/view?acc%5Fnum=miami1092258380.
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Hamade, Akram. "L'Influence du romantisme sur les oeuvres de Khalil Gibran et William Styron." Lille 3 : ANRT, 1986. http://catalogue.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/cb375947975.
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Hamade, Akram. "L'influence du romantisme sur les oeuvres de Khalil Gibran et William Styron." Rennes 2, 1985. http://www.theses.fr/1985REN20010.
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Flett, Edward Charles. "Virtual frontiers and the technological state : contemporary American narratives in a global context." Thesis, University of Oxford, 2012. http://ora.ox.ac.uk/objects/uuid:608353cc-62d8-496c-b8df-d79de028f03e.
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This thesis analyses a series of threshold states located within contemporary culture. It investigates the effects of technology on spatial relations and human conditions in recent centuries, with a specific interest in the rise of virtual phenomena and the ongoing process of virtualisation. Key to the discussion is measuring the extent to which America and its narratives have influenced the virtual layer attached to contemporary global technological culture. Prevalent within this framework is the idea of the frontier as an idealised outpost, a lingering threshold state that is scrutinised in terms of its metaphoric power and socio-historical relevance. The research examines the points of interaction between the frontier, the virtual, and recent technology, as well as the areas in which technology has been produced, distributed, and consumed, as a means of building on ‘virtual frontiers’ and the ‘technological state’ as original critical concepts. Chapter one, from a socio-cultural and historical perspective, develops the idea of California as the location where the frontier spirit dispersed, transferring to an extent from land to body. Rich in posthuman ambience, the state functions as a hub from which to negotiate the position of the body in relation to the frontier: to look at the body as a frontier in itself, its virtualisation, and the now perennial dialectic between the positive and negative effects of technology on human/non-human interactivity. From the ashes of the 1960s, pockets of urban youth living in America’s inner cities gave birth to a subculture that is now globally recognised as Hip Hop. Despite Hip Hop always being a potent reflective surface, chapter two assesses its development and continuing capacity as a virtual and technological form of expression. In the decades between Malcolm X’s assassination and the election of President Obama, how has Hip Hop changed as a virtual arena and mode of resistance, as it has simultaneously been incorporated into the American mainstream? Indeed, as a cultural object and virtual space with the potential to carry evocative messages across thresholds, did Hip Hop even survive this transition? And what were the ramifications of its transformation? The third chapter examines the shadows emanating from the terrorist attacks on the US in 2001. The narratives from 9/11 are considered while investigating a diverse selection of transnational texts that touch on the subject, including works from Don DeLillo, Amy Waldman, Martin Amis, and Frédéric Beigbeder. Also considered is the day’s social and historical significance, and its power as a virtual event. More specifically, the impact on time, perception, and narrative structure is observed, each element appearing in the shadows that stretch out from the decades before and beyond the events of that clear blue September morning. Through characters in recent fiction by William Gibson and Hari Kunzru, the final chapter scans American consumption and the representations projected out from its brands and advertising. Within technological states now transmitted globally, the chapter reflects on the consequences of consumer culture as we venture further into the virtual and its realities, drawn through what Jean Baudrillard calls an irreconcilable conflict between ‘total integration’ and the ‘dual form’.
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PANZANI, Ugo Francesco Mauriz. "“I think, therefore I connect”. Database, connessionismo ed esopoiesi nel romanzo anglo-americano (1995-2011)." Doctoral thesis, Università degli studi di Bergamo, 2012. http://hdl.handle.net/10446/26702.
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The aim of this doctoral thesis is to analyse how the contents and the structures of the Anglo-American novel have been influenced by the emergence of digital and telematic media during the last two decades. One of the primary targets is to identify the common strategies adopted by electronic and printed novels to analyze the complexity and to try, at the same time, to escape from the “trap” of language. In my introduction I argue about the increasing relevance of the pattern/randomness dialectic into the narrative field. In the first chapter, while analysing the two novels Galatea 2.2 (1995) by Richard Powers and Exegesis (1997) by Astro Teller, I try to show how computational practices are affecting the literary fruition and authorship along with the role that the novel might play as an instrument of knowledge and cultural interaction. In the subsequent chapters I bring together literary analysis and network culture, focusing on different notions such as the database as a symbolic form, the properties of connectionist networks, the idea of transliteracy and the concepts of autopoiesis and exopoiesis. For this very reason, I examined five different works: David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest (1996), William Gibson's Pattern Recognition (2003), Mark Z. Danielewski's Only Revolutions (2006), Kate Pullinger and Chris Joseph's Flight Paths (2007) and The Unknown (1998), developed by Scott Rettberg, William Gillespie, Dirk Stratton and Frank Marquardt. These literary texts propose different strategies to assimilate the structures and the dynamics proper to the networks in order to create new cognitive paradigms. It would seem that, through specific narrative structures and topics, some of the novelists of the last fifteen years are abandoning the self-reflexivity typical of the previous postmodern tradition in order to suggest an idea of fiction as an instrument to connect individual and contingency, reader and text, text and media ecology.
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Mocabee, Keith. "Anxiety in William Gibson's "Blue Ant" Trilogy| The Construction of Space, Time, and Community in the Post-Cyberpunk Literary Environment." Thesis, Southern Illinois University at Edwardsville, 2017. http://pqdtopen.proquest.com/#viewpdf?dispub=10250021.
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William Gibson is well known for his science fiction writing within the cyberpunk literary genre, which often evoke themes of economic disparity, environmental desolation, and the breakdown of the contracts between state and populace allowing corporate power to emerge dominant. In his most recent series of novels, commonly dubbed the Blue Ant trilogy, Gibson focuses on themes of national decay compounded by the real-time emergence of post-national corporate power that degrades or usurps control over borders, identities, and infrastructures.
My intent is to examine how Gibson's writing attempts to address the issue of the rise of post-national corporate power by singling out instances of anxiety in the white Western discursive sphere, and how Gibson's Blue Ant trilogy has difficulty addressing this anxiety due to a historically constituted, culturally imposed barrier that prevents both the narrative and the characters inside it from being able to articulate them. This essay further attempts to explore this barrier, best understood as a reinforcement of white, Western cultural hegemony, can be deconstructed and understood as a subjective position as opposed to a universal, and moved beyond it.
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Long, Bruce Raymond. "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction." Thesis, The University of Sydney, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5838.
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Informationist Science Fiction theory provides a way of analysing science fiction texts and narratives in order to demonstrate on an informational basis the uniqueness of science fiction proper as a mode of fiction writing. The theoretical framework presented can be applied to all types of written texts, including non-fictional texts. In "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction" the author applies the theoretical framework and its specific methods and principles to various contemporary science fiction works, including works by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. The theoretical framework introduces a new informational theoretic re-framing of existing science fiction literary theoretic posits such as Darko Suvin's novum, the mega-text as conceived of by Damien Broderick, and the work of Samuel R Delany in investigating the subjunctive mood in SF. An informational aesthetics of SF proper is established, and the influence of analytic philosophy - especially modal logic - is investigated. The materialist foundations of the metaphysical outlook of SF proper is investigated with a view to elucidating the importance of the relationship between scientific materialism and SF. SF is presented as The Fiction of Veridical, Counterfactual and Heterogeneous Information.
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Long, Bruce Raymond. "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction." University of Sydney, 2009. http://hdl.handle.net/2123/5838.
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Master of Philosophy (MPhil)Informationist Science Fiction theory provides a way of analysing science fiction texts and narratives in order to demonstrate on an informational basis the uniqueness of science fiction proper as a mode of fiction writing. The theoretical framework presented can be applied to all types of written texts, including non-fictional texts. In "Informationist Science Fiction Theory and Informationist Science Fiction" the author applies the theoretical framework and its specific methods and principles to various contemporary science fiction works, including works by William Gibson, Neal Stephenson and Vernor Vinge. The theoretical framework introduces a new informational theoretic re-framing of existing science fiction literary theoretic posits such as Darko Suvin's novum, the mega-text as conceived of by Damien Broderick, and the work of Samuel R Delany in investigating the subjunctive mood in SF. An informational aesthetics of SF proper is established, and the influence of analytic philosophy - especially modal logic - is investigated. The materialist foundations of the metaphysical outlook of SF proper is investigated with a view to elucidating the importance of the relationship between scientific materialism and SF. SF is presented as The Fiction of Veridical, Counterfactual and Heterogeneous Information.
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Latham, Jamie Marc. "The clergy and print in eighteenth-century England, c. 1714-1750." Thesis, University of Cambridge, 2018. https://www.repository.cam.ac.uk/handle/1810/275032.
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In much of the historiography surrounding print culture and the book trade, the worldliness of print remains a point of common emphasis. Indeed, many influential studies either assume or actively present the history of print as part of a broader ‘secularization thesis’. Recently, however, historians have challenged these narratives, recognizing the central role of religious print as a driver of growth within the book trade and discussion within the nascent ‘public sphere’. Yet the scholarship into ‘religion and the book’ remains fragmentary, focused on individual genres or persons, with no unified monograph or standard reference work yet to emerge. This dissertation addresses some of the barriers to synopsis by investigating the long-term print output of the largest social and professional group engaged in evangelizing Christianity to the public: the clergy of the Church of England. By focusing on the clergy, this dissertation evades the usual narrow focus on genre. In the past, book-historical and bibliographic studies have relied heavily on a priori classification schemes to study the market for print. While sufficient in the context of relatively well-defined genre categories, such as printed sermons, the validity of these classification schemes breaks down at the wider level, for example, under the conceptual burden of defining the highly fluid and wide-ranging category of ‘religious works’. This dissertation begins to remedy such problems by modelling the print output of a large population of authors who had the strongest stake in evangelizing Christianity to the public through print. It utilizes the latest techniques in the field of digital humanities and bibliometrics to create a representative sample of the print output of the Anglican clergy over the ‘long’ eighteenth-century (here 1660-1800). Based on statistical trends, the thesis identifies a crucial period in the history of clerical print culture, the first four decades of the Hanoverian regime. The period is explored in detail through three subsequent case studies. By combining both traditional and digital methods, therefore, the dissertation explores clerical publishing as a phenomenon subject to evolution and change at both the macro and micro level. The first chapter provides an overarching statistical study of clerical publishing between 1660 and 1800. By combining data from two bibliographical datasets, The English Short-Title Catalogue (ESTC), and the prosopographical resource, The Clergy of the Church of England Database (CCED), I extract and analyse a dataset of clerical works consisting of almost 35,000 bibliographic records. The remaining chapters approach the thesis topic through primary research-based case studies using both print and manuscript sources. The case studies were selected from the period identified in the preceding statistical analysis as a crucial transitional moment in the history of clerical publishing culture, c.1714 to 1750. These case studies form chapters 2, 3, and 4, each of which explore a different aspect of a network of authors who worked under the direction of the bishop of London, Edmund Gibson (1723-1748), during the era of Whig hegemony under Sir Robert Walpole. Finally, an appendix outlines the methodology used in chapter 1 to extract the sample of clerical printed works from the ESTC. Overall, the thesis demonstrates the profound influence of the clergy on the development of English print in the hand-press period. It thus forms both a historiographic intervention against the secularization thesis still implicit in discussions of print culture and the book trade, as well as providing a cautionary critique of the revisionism which has shaped recent investigations into the Church of England.
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Hayes, Elizabeth Anne. "Surface inscriptions: implications of the postmodern in William Gibson's future worlds." Thesis, 2015. http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1305702.
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Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)Throughout his Sprawl and Bridge trilogies, each of which portray visions of a future evolving from his postmodern present, William Gibson expresses concerns regarding postmodernization and its impact on individuals and society alike. I argue that in these trilogies in particular, Gibson asserts the view that the various dilemmas faced by postmodern culture arise from its passive submission to commodification and technologization. By adopting a Jamesonian approach to the postmodern and combining it with Guy Debord’s theory of spectacular societies and Jean Baudrillard’s hypotheses on postmodern consumerism, I analyze the way Gibson’s fiction details the possible consequences of spectacularization on cultural discourses, the human body, and historical perspective. In Fredric Jameson’s view, postmodernism is imbricated in “the cultural logic of late capitalism.” For Gibson, this logic, and its relationship to the development of multinational corporate powers, is the driving force behind the cultural constitution of his fictional worlds. The Sprawl and Bridge trilogies both articulate perspectives on consumer culture, its evolution within late capitalist societies, and the remodelling of discursive practices it initiates. Through his implementation of technological nomenclature in the Sprawl trilogy and his demonstration of consumer excess in the Bridge trilogy, Gibson expresses anxieties about the spectacle and its relationship to postmodern culture. He further develops these anxieties by way of his approach to posthuman forms and their existential boundaries, and by his profound commentary on postmodernism’s influence on both cultural history and personal memory. These three issues, emerging from Gibson’s observations of the 1980s and 1990s, form the basis of the discussion undertaken in this thesis. Essentially, postmodern culture does not just embrace new technologies or accept the logic of late capitalism with which consumer desires correspond. It also submits entirely to spectacularization, which, as Gibson puts forth in his work, challenges the very nature of humanity as well as our ability to fully understand, or respond to, the world in which we live.
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Lapointe, Annette. "The machineries of uncivilization: technology and the gendered body in the fiction of Margaret Atwood and William Gibson." 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/4337.
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My dissertation examines some of the ways in which new technologies alter traditional readings of the female body and of feminine subjectivity in contemporary fiction. To illustrate these alterations, I have selected two short stories, one by William Gibson and the other by Margaret Atwood, published in the speculative fiction Tesseracts2 anthology in 1987, both of which deal with disease and women's technological access. Within this context, I examine how feminine sexuality and embodiment are deconstructed and re-written. While historically women have been represented as victims of technology and/or intimately connected with the natural world, I propose that women's increased access to both bio-technologies and communications technologies offers an unprecedented route to self-definition and cultural power. I explore ways in which analogue technology mimics women's reproductive enslavement in Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, and in which the emergence of digital technology offers some emancipation in The Blind Assassin. Subsequently, I discuss the intersections of sex work and virtual reality in William Gibson's Cyberpunk Trilogy and associated short fiction, demonstrating that digitality is not a panacea for gendered oppression. However, digitized women may have unexpected opportunities for self-definition. In comparing Gibson's Idoru and Atwood's Oryx and Crake, I discuss how women “created” for the male gaze (either virtually or by cloning) may evade that gaze and both assert their individuality and create communities among women with similar origins. Subsequently, I examine the interconnections among women, animals, and food that emerge within technologized cultures. Self-protective anorexia provides a link among Atwood's earliest writing (The Edible Woman) and her most recent (Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood), and suggests that the same technological facility which provides access to power also induces profound bodily anxieties in female characters. Building on those anxieties, I conclude with a discussion of the ways in which disability disrupts expectations of feminine embodiment. The constant abjection of women with disabilities is counter-balanced by those women's ability to create radical innovations of technology that transform the larger culture.
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Holloway, Heather. "The evolution of cyberspace as a landscape in cyberpunk novels." 2004. http://www.georgiasouthern.edu/etd/commentframe.php?sid=24&fid=archive/Fall2004/hhollowa/holloway%5Fheather%5Fd%5F200408%5Fmae.pdf.
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Thesis (M.A.)--Georgia Southern University, 2004."A thesis submitted to the Graduate Faculty of Georgia Southern University in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Master of Arts." ETD. INDEX WORDS: William Gibson, Neal Stephenson, Neuromancer, Snow crash, science fiction, cyberpunk, cyberspace, metaphysics, cyberculture, transrealism. Includes bibliographical references (p. 71-73).
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Plaschka, Oliver [Verfasser]. "Verlorene Arkadien : das pastorale Motiv in der englischen und amerikanischen fantastischen Literatur ; H.P. Lovecraft, James Branch Cabell, Mervyn Peake, William Gibson / von Oliver Plaschka." 2009. http://d-nb.info/999205609/34.
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Taillefer, Hélène. "L'intelligence artificielle comme figure de la dystopie dans Nineteen eighty-four, de George Orwell, le Dépeupleur, de Samuel Beckett, et Neuromancer, de William Gibson." Mémoire, 2009. http://www.archipel.uqam.ca/2229/1/M10931.pdf.
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Ce mémoire porte sur la figure de l'intelligence artificielle, en ce qu'elle permet d'incarner les craintes et les angoisses mises au jour par la critique sociale véhiculée dans les fictions dystopiques. Il analyse les manifestations d'êtres-machines et de structures de contrôle social créés par l'humanité, et dont la conduite témoigne d'une forme d'intelligence; il montre ainsi en quoi certaines structures sociales se calquent sur les machines pensantes imaginées. S'appuyant sur une approche pluridisciplinaire qui fait notamment appel aux domaines de la cybernétique, de la biologie et de la science politique, cette étude de la dystopie se concentre plus particulièrement sur le corpus littéraire suivant: Nineteen Eighty-Four, de George Orwell, Le Dépeupleur, de Samuel Beckett, et Neuromancer, de William Gibson. Prenant ses racines dans l'utopie, la dystopie a été façonnée au XIXe siècle à partir des craintes et des désillusions liées à une industrialisation qui modifiait radicalement le mode de vie humain. Dans ce type de fictions, les rapports de force entre l'humanité et ses outils -ses créations -basculent, car la technique y permet la transmission d'un ascendant sur l'être humain. Cette emprise se voit exacerbée par la machine pensante, dont l'accession à la vie autorise un niveau d'indépendance et d'initiative inaccessible à ses prédécesseurs. Ce faisant, l'intelligence
artificielle permet d'imager le déplacement de point focal qui s'opère quand l'outil devient une fin en soi, de même qu'elle illustre les potentialités asservissantes d'une utilisation inconsidérée de la technique. À l'image de l'être artificiel, les structures machiniques de la dystopie acquièrent
suffisamment d'autonomie pour pouvoir, elles aussi, attenter à la souveraineté de l'individu. L'humain, noyé au sein de ces structures qui le submergent, n'est alors plus qu'une composante insignifiante dont la spécificité se fait systématiquement gommer par la machine sociale. En définitive, qu'il s'agisse d'un être ou d'un système, la figure de l'intelligence artificielle apparaît comme un sujet agissant, qui incarne la propension de la dystopie à réduire l'individu à l'état de pion. ______________________________________________________________________________ MOTS-CLÉS DE L’AUTEUR : Dystopie, Intelligence artificielle, Cybernétique, George Orwell, Samuel Beckett, William Gibson.
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Sanders, Leonard Patrick. "Postmodern orientalism : William Gibson, cyberpunk and Japan : a thesis presented in fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English at Massey University, Albany, New Zealand." 2008. http://hdl.handle.net/10179/816.
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Taking the works of William Gibson as its point of focus, this thesis considers cyberpunk’s expansion from an emphatically literary moment in the mid 1980s into a broader multimedia cultural phenomenon. It examines the representation of racial differences, and the formulation of global economic spaces and flows which structure the reception and production of cultural practices. These developments are construed in relation to ongoing debates around Japan’s identity and otherness in terms of both deviations from and congruities with the West (notably America). To account for these developments, this thesis adopts a theoretical framework informed by both postmodernism as the “cultural dominant” of late capitalism (Jameson), and orientalism, those discursive structures which produce the reified polarities of East versus West (Said). Cyberpunk thus exhibits the characteristics of an orientalised postmodernism, as it imagines a world in which multinational corporations characterised as Japanese zaibatsu control global economies, and the excess of accumulated garbage is figured in the trope of gomi. It is also postmodernised orientalism, in its nostalgic reconstruction of scenes from the residue of imperialism, its deployment of figures of “cross-ethnic representation” (Chow) like the Eurasian, and its expressions of a purely fantasmatic experience of the Orient, as in the evocation of cyberspace. In distinction from modern or Saidean orientalism, postmodern orientalism not only allows but is characterized by reciprocal causality. This describes uneven, paradoxical, interconnected and mutually implicated cultural transactions at the threshold of East-West relations. The thesis explores this by first examining cyberpunk’s unremarked relationship with countercultural formations (rock music), practices (drugs) and manifestations of Oriental otherness in popular culture. The emphasis in the remainder of the thesis shifts towards how cyberpunk maps new technologies onto physical and imaginative “bodies” and geographies: the figuration of the cyborg, prosthetic interventions, and the evolution of cyberspace in tandem with multimedia innovations such as videogames. Cyberpunk then can best be understood as a conjunction of seemingly disparate experiences: on the one hand the postmodern dislocations and vertiginous moments of estrangement offset by instances of intense connectivity in relation to the virtual, the relocation to the “distanceless home” of cyberspace. As such it is an ever-expanding phenomenon which has been productively fused with other youth-culture media, and one with specifically Japanese features (anime, visual kei, and virtual idols).
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Talpalaru, Margrit. "“What drives your own desiring machines?” Early twenty-first century corporatism in Deleuze-Guattarian theory, corporate practice, contemporary literature, and locavore alternatives." Phd thesis, 2011. http://hdl.handle.net/10048/1752.
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This dissertation identifies and investigates the characteristics of the early 21st-century social, economic, and political situation as intrinsically connected and grouped under the concept of corporatism. Starting from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s schizoanalysis of capitalism, this thesis argues that corporatism or corporate capitalism is immanent: an interconnected, networked, rhizomatic system that has been successful at overtaking biopower – life in all its forms, human and otherwise – and managing it, or even making it its business. Methodologically, this dissertation aims to move beyond negative into creative critique, whose role is the uncovering of imagined or real alternatives to the problems of corporatism.
Consequently, this dissertation is divided into four chapters that attempt to bring this methodology to life. Chapter 1 presents the theoretical basis of corporatism, modeled on the theories of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. Chapter 2 begins to exemplify corporatism by investigating three corporate examples. This chapter sheds light on the real-life functioning of three corporations, Hudson’s Bay Company, Walmart, and Unilever, while also connecting them to the theoretical genealogy of human social systems described by Deleuze and Guattari. Chapter 3 turns to literature as both a diagnostician of the contemporary corporatism, as well as an imaginative solution-provider. While not instrumentalizing literature, this chapter rather looks to three novels for both descriptions of the corporatist social machine and prescriptions on how to attempt to change it. The novels featured in this chapter are aligned with the creative critique methodology: from the negative and even reactionary critique of William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition, through the problems with the contemporary episteme illustrated by Margaret Atwood’s dystopic Oryx and Crake, to the alternative outlined by Scarlett Thomas in PopCo. Chapter 4 investigates real-life experiments in order to assess their viability in altering the present conditions of life. To this end, the last chapter couples theoretical Deleuze-Guattarian alternatives with two locavore books: Animal, Vegetable, Miracle: A Year of Food Life by Barbara Kingsolver, with Steven L. Hopp and Camille Kingsolver, and The 100-Mile Diet by Alisa Smith and J.B. MacKinnon.English
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Deng, Wei-Shin, and 鄧惟心. "Surveillance and Trauma in William Gibson’s Neuromancer and Pattern Recognition." Thesis, 2013. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/12090612143788799772.
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碩士國立暨南國際大學
外國語文學系
101
This thesis aims to highlight two obscure themes, surveillance and trauma as depicted in William Gibson’s Neuromancer (1984) and Pattern Recognition (2003). We are now living in the War on Terror since September 11th, 2001; however, Terror is not the only affects emerged from the ruins and ashes of the World Trade Center. By comparing the two novels with different time backgrounds, we can figure out how Gibson had focused on the two themes since the 1980s and represented them differently. In the chapter of surveillance, ideas of Michel Foucault’s panopticonism and George Orwell’s Big Brother surveillance are introduced to investigate traditional surveillance and hierarchal power relationship among the characters in Neuromancer; meanwhile, Kevin D. Haggerty and Richard V. Ericson’s concepts of “surveillant assemblage” and “rhizomatic surveillance” are appropriate to analyze the Internet surveillance and data-collecting surveillance as practiced in Pattern Recogntion. In both novels, surveillance abuses trigger the characters to perform trauma symptoms. In the chapter of trauma, Cathy Caruth’s notion that “trauma is the story of a wound that cries out” and Katherine Hayles’ “trauma of codes” are used to explores how the characters deal and compromise with their traumatic past meanwhile fixing their relationship with the reality and the other human.
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Chuo, Chun-wei, and 卓君威. "In Search of a Redefinition of Utopia in William Gibson's Neuromancer Trilogy." Thesis, 2002. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/28639445691398072688.
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碩士國立臺灣大學
外國語文學系研究所
90
Representing a tempting yet forever out of reach earthly paradise, Utopia has long been the source of both infinite hope and constant frustration for humanity. While the failure to achieve a perfect society has often been attributed to the incurably flawed human nature, one suspects the real problem may lie in the concept of perfection itself. After all, there can never be an absolute, universal idea of ‘the perfect condition,’ since the definition of perfection inevitably changes with context and the perspective it is viewed from. Therefore, as modern-day advancements in science and technology keep opening up previously undreamed of possibilities for the future, our visions of a perfect world are bound to be vastly different from those of the traditional utopianists. In his monumental Neuromancer trilogy, acclaimed science fiction writer William Gibson explores numerous implications that technologies concerning computers, neurosurgery and artificial intelligence bear for tomorrow’s human race, and while his works are by no means an outright celebration of technological wonderlands, they nevertheless exhibit certain traits that may fuel the imagination of anyone in search of a 21st century utopia. On the basis of a detailed analysis of Gibson’s novels, this thesis aims to point out the limitations of conventional utopias as well as venture a redefinition of the time-honored term in our digital age.
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Reilly, Geza Arthur George. ""What is a human, anyway?" : representations of posthumanism in Thomas Pynchon's V. and William Gibson's Neuromancer." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/20401.
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Reilly, Géza Arthur George. ""What is a human, anyway?" : representations of posthumanism in Thomas Pynchon's V. and William Gibson's Neuromancer." 2006. http://hdl.handle.net/1993/20401.
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Li, Hui-chun, and 李蕙君. "The Re/Shaping of the Posthuman, Cyberspace, and Histories in William Gibson’s Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties." Thesis, 2008. http://ndltd.ncl.edu.tw/handle/9huen2.
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碩士國立中山大學
外國語文學系研究所
96
Abstract: This thesis aims to explore how utopian desires re/shape the posthuman, cyberspace and histories by means of information technologies in William Gibson’s Idoru and All Tomorrow’s Parties, which construct a fragmented but subversive power by representing the world in a utopian text that allows the free play of ideology. Gibson uses utopian imagination to cobble together a near future that reflects his concern with information technologies and media over contemporary society. Utopian imaginations on the one hand open up possibilities and transform fixed ideas; on the other, utopian imaginations are easily turned into utopian desires that are subject to manipulation if utopian designers want to sell. I intend to discover how desires to realize a utopia (body, space, and history), which is the ultimate goal of utopian program, are being manipulated by utopian designers. I will mainly adapt and blend Katherine Hayles’s notion of the posthuman perspectives to challenge human possibilities, Donna Haraway’s notion of the cyborg as a blasphemy to Western traditions, Louis Marin’s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus to examine utopic expressions in William Gibson’s textual constructions of utopias, and Walter Benjamin’s notions of material historiography and history’s messianic power in tracing individual memories under a capitalist contextualized History. In Chapter One, I will argue that Idoru as well as Idoru metamorphosize from a dialectical structure into an informational pattern-random structure, from a commodity into a posthuman subjectivity. I will adopt Katherine Hayles’s concept of information narratives in explaining the re/shaping of Rei’s body and her concept of the posthuman to explicate the struggle between the posthuman and the transhuman. In Chapter Two I will argue that cyberspace serves as a utopia that brings forth the desire to transcend the flesh. This utopian desire is a transgressive discourse that breaks up the totality of a closed system. Moreover, cyberspace exposes the feedback looping of the discourses of capitalism and anti-capitalism. Respectively, by the representation of virtual Venice and the Walled City, these two utopias write proposals that project discourses of pleasure and criticism for achieving their programs. I will adopt Donna Haraway’s cyborg ontology in explaining cyberspace as a transgressive discourse and Louis Marin’s Disneyland analysis as an apparatus of utopic expressions and the limits of utopia. Next, in Chapter Three, I shall expose how Harwood the capitalist manipulates the world to fit into his utopian proposal: modernization of the city as a manifestation of a utopia by means of cyberspace as a network that connects people globally. To contravene Harwood, Idoru, Laney and the Walled City denizens collaborate to checkmate Harwood’s king. I will elaborate on the interactions between the universal history and the individual histories based on Walter Benjamin’s concept of history.
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Taylor, C. J. "Collapsible Time: Contesting Reality, Narrative And History In South Australian Liminal Hinterlands." Phd thesis, 2017. http://hdl.handle.net/1885/131791.
Full textAbstract:
My practice-led project explores the indexical lamination of memory, history, narrative and reality afforded by photography imbued with the illusion of spatial dimensionality. This thesis investigates the notion that far from freezing a ‘slice of time’ photography reanimates perception through sensation rendering duration flexible and elastic. Using the liminal landscape of South Australia as time’s stage, I contend that time is ‘collapsible’, constantly unfolding and repeating. In embracing this temporal flow, I submit that photomedia becomes our most compelling connection to time itself, as lived experience. It is this connection that can act as an ethical agent of change for the betterment of the landscape in which we live. The project includes work created in South Australia, the ACT, the United States and the Outer Hebrides and Shetland Islands of Scotland. It includes artefacts photographed in the Adelaide Civic Collection, The South Australian Museum and the National Museum of Australia.