[PDF] The Seven Beauties Of Science Fiction eBook

Author : Istvan Csicsery-Ronay
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 337 pages
File Size : 12,96 MB
Release : 2012-10-01
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 0819571520

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This major critical work from one of the preeminent voices in science fiction scholarship reframes the genre as a way of understanding today’s world. As the application of technoscience increasingly transforms every aspect of life, science fiction has become an essential mode of imagining the horizons of possibility. Though the broad scope of science fiction may vary in artistic quality and sophistication, it shares a desire to imagine a collective future for the human species and the world. A strikingly high proportion of today’s films, commercial art, popular music, video games, and non-genre fiction are what Csicsery-Ronay calls “science fictional” —stimulating science-fictional habits of mind. We no longer treat science fiction as merely a genre-engine producing formulaic effects, but as a mode of awareness, which frames experiences as if they were aspects of science fiction. The Seven Beauties of Science Fiction describes science fiction as a constellation of seven diverse cognitive attractions that are particularly formative of science-fictionality. These are the “seven beauties” of the title: fictive neology, fictive novums, future history, imaginary science, the science-fictional sublime, the science-fictional grotesque, and the Technologiade, or the epic of technoscience’s development into a global regime.

Author : Roger Luckhurst
Publisher : Polity
Page : 321 pages
File Size : 16,97 MB
Release : 2005-05-06
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0745628923

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

Author : Darko Suvin
Publisher : Ralahine Utopian Studies
Page : 0 pages
File Size : 30,39 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Literary form
ISBN : 9783034319485

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Back in print for the first time since the 1980s, this book is a touchstone for literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Alongside the 1979 text, this edition contains three additional essays by Suvin that update and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface.

Author : Arthur B. Evans
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 787 pages
File Size : 47,61 MB
Release : 2010-08
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0819569550

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The best single-volume anthology of science fiction available—includes online teacher's guide The Wesleyan Anthology of Science Fiction features over a 150 years' worth of the best science fiction ever collected in a single volume. The fifty-two stories and critical introductions are organized chronologically as well as thematically for classroom use. Filled with luminous ideas, otherworldly adventures, and startling futuristic speculations, these stories will appeal to all readers as they chart the emergence and evolution of science fiction as a modern literary genre. They also provide a fascinating look at how our Western technoculture has imaginatively expressed its hopes and fears from the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century to the digital age of today. A free online teacher's guide at http://sfanthology.site.wesleyan.edu/ accompanies the anthology and offers access to a host of pedagogical aids for using this book in an academic setting. The stories in this anthology have been selected and introduced by the editors of Science Fiction Studies, the world's most respected journal for the critical study of science fiction.

Author : Franco Moretti
Publisher : Verso Books
Page : 141 pages
File Size : 34,65 MB
Release : 2020-05-05
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1789603315

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In this groundbreaking book, Franco Moretti argues that literature scholars should stop reading books and start counting, graphing, and mapping them instead. In place of the traditionally selective literary canon of a few hundred texts, Moretti offers charts, maps and time lines, developing the idea of "distant reading" into a full-blown experiment in literary historiography, in which the canon disappears into the larger literary system. Charting entire genres-the epistolary, the gothic, and the historical novel-as well as the literary output of countries such as Japan, Italy, Spain, and Nigeria, he shows how literary history looks significantly different from what is commonly supposed and how the concept of aesthetic form can be radically redefined.

Author : Andrea L. Bell
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 372 pages
File Size : 17,82 MB
Release : 2003-07-31
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 9780819566348

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The first-ever collection of Latin American science fiction in English.

Author : Lars Schmeink
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 280 pages
File Size : 50,39 MB
Release : 2016
Category : Literary Criticism
ISBN : 1781383766

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'Biopunk Dystopias' contends that we find ourselves at a historical nexus, defined by the rise of biology as the driving force of scientific progress, a strongly grown mainstream attention given to genetic engineering in the wake of the Human Genome Project (1990-2003), the changing sociological view of a liquid modern society, and shifting discourses on the posthuman, including a critical posthumanism that decenters the privileged subject of humanism. The book argues that this historical nexus produces a specific cultural formation in the form of "biopunk", a subgenre evolved from the cyberpunk of the 1980s. Biopunk makes use of current posthumanist conceptions in order to criticize contemporary reality as already dystopian, warning that a future will only get worse, and that society needs to reverse its path, or else destroy all life on this planet.

Author : Graham B. Slater
Publisher : Taylor & Francis
Page : 122 pages
File Size : 16,72 MB
Release : 2024-06-14
Category : Education
ISBN : 1040047734

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Horizons of the Future: Science Fiction, Utopian Imagination, and the Politics of Education examines the relationship between science fiction, education, and social change in the 21st century. Global capitalism is ecologically unsustainable and ethically indefensible; time is running out to alter the course of history if humanity is to have hope of a livable future beyond the next century. However, alternatives are possible, offering much more equality, care, justice, joy, and hope than the established order. Popular culture and schools are key sites of struggles to imagine such alternatives. Drawing on critical theory, cultural studies, and sociology, Slater articulates the promising connection between science fiction and the future of education. He offers cutting-edge engagement with themes, perspectives, and modes of imagination in science fiction that can be mobilized politically and pedagogically to envision and enact critical forms of education that cultivate new utopian ways of relating to self, society, and the future. This thought-provoking book will be of interest to scholars and students in the social sciences and education.

Author : Anindita Banerjee
Publisher : Wesleyan University Press
Page : 219 pages
File Size : 29,76 MB
Release : 2012
Category : Fiction
ISBN : 0819573345

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How science fiction forged a unique Russian vision of modernity distinct from Western models

Author : Trace Reddell
Publisher : U of Minnesota Press
Page : 649 pages
File Size : 22,47 MB
Release : 2018-10-16
Category : Performing Arts
ISBN : 1452957363

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A groundbreaking approach to sound in sci-fi films offers new ways of construing both sonic innovation and science fiction cinema Including original readings of classics like The Day the Earth Stood Still, 2001: A Space Odyssey, Star Wars, and Blade Runner, The Sound of Things to Come delivers a comprehensive history of sound in science fiction cinema. Approaching movies as sound objects that combine cinematic apparatus and consciousness, Trace Reddell presents a new theory of sonic innovation in the science fiction film. Reddell assembles a staggering array of movies from sixty years of film history—including classics, blockbusters, B-movies, and documentaries from the United States, Britain, France, Germany, Japan, and the Soviet Union—all in service to his powerful conception of sound making as a speculative activity in its own right. Reddell recasts debates about noise and music, while arguing that sound in the science fiction film provides a medium for alien, unknown, and posthuman sound objects that transform what and how we hear. Avoiding genre criticism’s tendency to obsess over utopias, The Sound of Things to Come draws on film theory, sound studies, and philosophies of technology to advance conversations about the avant-garde, while also opening up opportunities to examine cinematic sounds beyond the screen.