EXTRAPOLATION最新文献

{"title":"You've Found No Records","authors":"Jane Donawerth, K. Scally","doi":"10.3828/extr.2017.2","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2017.2","url":null,"abstract":"In Octavia Butler’s Kindred, Dana and Kevin travel to Maryland to try to find records of the events they experienced, but find little evidence. Their trip mirrors one Butler herself made in the 1970s to research the history behind her novel, although Butler found a great deal more than Dana did. This essay retraces Butler’s steps in research on Maryland’s Eastern Shore and in Baltimore at the Maryland Historical Society, speculating on what records she found that allowed her to embody in her novel her desire to make readers feel history, and exploring how she came to see African-American history as a story of heroism as survival.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/extr.2017.2","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45209284","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Perennial Rule of the Masses","authors":"Zachary Showers","doi":"10.3828/extr.2017.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2017.3","url":null,"abstract":"For Aldous Huxley, the two most distressing things about people unlike himself are their ignorance and their birthrates, both of which are threatening the intellectualism that Huxley most admires. Huxley’s own definition of Englishness is tied to intellectual and racial snobbery; people of his own race, status, and level of intelligence count as “English,” and he believes they are rapidly being overwhelmed by people of inferior quality from Asia, the Americas and the former colonies. Huxley’s dystopian novel Ape and Essence (1948) ostensibly satirizes runaway technology, religious fanaticism, and government control, but the nostalgic ideal of white English superiority is also very much evident. The novel focuses on Huxley’s prediction of horrible consequences when an ascendant lower class gains control. Ape and Essence portrays a society that has lost that which Huxley believes the intellectual elite protects—culture, tradition, and intelligence—and he does not allow the idea that the masses have the abil...","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/extr.2017.3","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44151888","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Interplanetary Diaspora and Fourth World Representation in Celu Amberstone’s “Refugees”","authors":"Joy Sanchez-Taylor","doi":"10.3828/EXTR.2017.5","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EXTR.2017.5","url":null,"abstract":"This work examines Celu Amberstone’s “Refugees” as an example of a science fiction text that creates a postcolonial consciousness through its embodiment of Fourth World theory. I argue that by bringing together the experiences of Indigenous and diasporic groups, Amberstone represents a postcolonial view of space colonization that focuses on the consequences of displacement and the experience of colonized peoples. Amberstone depicts a multitude of complex relations between the Benefactors, the originally settled human population of Tallav’Wahir, and the new human refugees to address issues of colonization while highlighting the resilience of diasporic and Indigenous peoples.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-21","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/EXTR.2017.5","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45400957","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Confronting Dystopia: The Power of Cognition in Neal Stephenson's Snow Crash and the Diamond Age","authors":"J. Lewis","doi":"10.3828/EXTR.2017.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EXTR.2017.4","url":null,"abstract":"Recuperating Dystopia-Thinking Big Among the RuinsRuined cities, broken institutions, and ecological, technological, political, and economic collapses mark nearly all texts labeled \"dystopic fiction.\" While the term dystopia is relatively unstable and fluid, the literal translation from the Greek as \"not-good-place\" is a useful start. For this essay, I will define dystopic fiction as any text that depicts the lead-up-to and/or after-effects of global cataclysms or the onset of totalitarianism in such a way as to offer little or no hope for humanity's short- or long-term survival. Examples of such dystopic texts that foster or advance such a definition include George Orwell's 1984 (1948), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADoES 1968), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). Although one could argue that both Orwell and McCarthy offer the slightest of hopes that Oceania's citizens will, one day, revolt against Big Brother and/or that the Boy will find solace with the stranger he meets after his father's death, neither outcome is in any way assured. And, certainly, few would want to visit Orwell's \"Oceania,\" Dick's Los Angeles, or McCarthy's American wasteland as these are certainly \"not-good-places,\" but dystopic fictions often go further to reveal futures we may well be creating today through disastrous environmental policies, continued threats of global thermonuclear or biological warfare, and the expansion of cybernetic technologies into the sentient.Neal Stephenson's novels, from The Big U (1984) to Seveneves (2015), are often labeled \"dystopic\" because they do often feature these kinds of calamities, but such marketing offers little use-value for understanding his significant contributions to contemporary science fiction. Stephenson's novels and public statements break with this loose definition of the dystopic at nearly every turn by offering scenarios where human creativity and cognition offer real hope against such potential disasters. As Fredric Jameson articulates in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1994) are better termed \"anti-Utopias\" as they reject what Jameson calls \"grand Utopian idea of wish-the abolition of property, the complementarity of desires, non-alienated labor, the equality of the sexes\" (145). Instead, Stephenson's early works often privilege such values as the accumulation of private property, unfettered capitalism, Victorian colonialism, and often rigidly defined gender roles, but both novels ultimately suggest that non-alienated labor, especially creative engineering and design work, is a potential salvation.Because his breakthrough novel Snow Crash details an America divided between those living in storage units and those who can afford to hide themselves inside privately secured housing developments controlled by oftenracist \"Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Enterprises\" or \"FOQNEs,\" it is easy to see why readers, critics, and booksellers group it with 1","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2017-04-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/EXTR.2017.4","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49483447","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Naked on the Deserts of Mars","authors":"G. Reger","doi":"10.3828/EXTR.2016.17","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EXTR.2016.17","url":null,"abstract":"When John Carter, hero of Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Princess of Mars, arrives on the Red Planet, he finds himself and all its inhabitants naked. In this paper, I place this trope of nudity into its contemporary social and cultural context and explore the multiple arenas within which it may have operated on its contemporary readers. Much more than simple titillation, depictions of public nudity in the later nineteenth- and early twentieth-century western imagination resonates in a complex and tense universe where barbarity, innocence, Edenic fantasies, and the American west collided, a space in which Richard Slotkin’s “man who knows Indians” comes to the fore with adaptive advantages that enable Carter to rise to Martian leadership—but also make him ultimately unsuited for decent society back home on Earth.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/EXTR.2016.17","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70509536","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Responsibilities of Kinship: The Amborg Gaze in Speculative Fictions about Apes","authors":"J. Gordon","doi":"10.3828/extr.2016.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2016.14","url":null,"abstract":"I consider four works of speculative fiction that demonstrate the shifting ways in which we think of our cousins the apes: Gustave Flaubert’s “Quidquid Volueris” (1837), Franz Kafka’s “A Report to an Academy” (1917), The One and Only Ivan by Katherine Applegate (2012), and We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves by Karen Joy Fowler (2013). Knitting together speculative fiction, primate studies, and ideas of the post-human with the present episteme of seeing the world in Venn diagrams, evaporating genres, and liminal zones, I want to examine how such works, despite their often significant differences, portray our relationships with and obligations to other primates in quite similar ways: by extending the meaning of personhood. The “zone of occult instability” of Franz Fanon, the “contact zone” of Mary Louise Pratt, and the “shatter zone” of Diane Loesch in postcolonial studies thus meet Brooks Landon’s “zone of possibility” and Scott Bukatman’s “contested border zone” in science fiction. These various zones...","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70509369","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Shakespeare, Survival, and the Seeds of Civilization in Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven","authors":"Philip Smith","doi":"10.3828/EXTR.2016.16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EXTR.2016.16","url":null,"abstract":"This paper will explore the role of Shakespeare in Emily St. John Mandel’s post-apocalyptic novel Station Eleven. The following analysis will demonstrate that the text takes up and recontextualizes Shakespeare’s depiction of religious, civil, and biological apocalypse, indicating a thematic continuation of Elizabethan apocalyptic works into the post-apocalyptic genre. Where Shakespeare’s works imagine an apocalypse as a return to an earlier, more violent time, St. John Mandel depicts a world which has been returned to primitivism but is now recovering modernity. She also grapples with Shakespeare’s recurring preoccupation with ephemerality in text and performance, and the possibility of survival through written and physical records. Station Eleven presents Shakespeare as containing the seed of civilization, an idea which is imbricated within the ideology of empire and restoration of British imperial power. The mobilization of Shakespeare is facilitated by simultaneous forward and backward momentum, a trop...","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/EXTR.2016.16","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70509493","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Robert. E. Howard, the American Frontier, and Borderlands in the Stories of Conan the Barbarian","authors":"J. V. Duinen","doi":"10.3828/EXTR.2016.18","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/EXTR.2016.18","url":null,"abstract":"Much has been written about the influence of the American frontier on Robert E. Howard and how this can be seen in his writings. An interesting focus for some of this work has been Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis and, more specifically, Richard Slotkin’s critique and reworking of this “frontier myth.” This article suggests that another critique of Turner’s thesis, that of Herbert Eugene Bolton’s borderlands theory, also offers a fruitful interpretative framework through which to view the Conan stories. To this end, it analyses specific Conan tales, with a particular focus on “Beyond the Black River,” to explore the ways in which the world of Conan exhibits borderlands traits. It concludes with some reflections on the implications this might have for the inception of the sword and sorcery genre more generally.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.3828/EXTR.2016.18","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70510000","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth","authors":"B. Robertson","doi":"10.5860/choice.51-6004","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.51-6004","url":null,"abstract":"The Future of Fantasy Criticism. Brian Attebery. Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014. 240 pp. ISBN 978-0-19-931607-6. $29.95 pbk.Reviewed by Benjamin J. RobertsonBrian Attebery's Stories about Stories: Fantasy and the Remaking of Myth is an important book about fantasy. Nonetheless, I hope that it does not define a program for fantasy criticism going forward to the detriment of other approaches and concerns. To be sure, Attebery solidifies his position as one the most important scholars of fantasy literature, a position he earned with his first two books, The Fantasy Tradition in American Literature: From Irving to Le Guin (1980) and especially Strategies of Fantasy (1992). Stories about Stories takes a broader view and makes a stronger claim for its significance than either of the previous books. Attebery calls for and models an approach focused on the particular interactions of various mythic traditions in fantasy texts, that is, the ways in which fantasy texts tell stories about stories by reframing traditional (often oral) narratives in contemporary contexts with surprising results. His method remains problematic, however.Prior to Stories about Stories, Attebery's lasting contribution to fantasy criticism and scholarship, aside from the fact that he is one of the main reasons there is such a field at all in its present form, had been his conceptualization of the \"fuzzy set\" as a means to understand genre. As described in Strategies of Fantasy, the fuzzy set (in the context of fantasy or sf or some other genre) is defined by, first, a center composed of a few texts which inarguably belong to the set (e.g., Tolkien, Lewis, and Le Guin), and second, by texts that enjoy greater or lesser degrees of \"family resemblance\" with those central ones. This concept allows critics to be less concerned with developing and maintaining firm borders between fantasy and related genres (especially, at the time, sf). Two recent studies of fantasy, Farah Mendlesohn's Rhetorics of Fantasy (2008) and Stefan Ekman's Here Be Dragons: Exploring Fantasy Maps and Settings (2013), take the fuzzy set as a starting point even as they add to or modify the concept.In Stories about Stories, Attebery underscores the logic of the fuzzy set while acknowledging its limitations: \"I still like this way of cutting through the Gordion knot of genre classification, but it does not account for all the historical and social dimensions of genre\" (33). With regard to fantasy, fuzzy sets do not account for the manner in which fantasy texts and authors draw upon and recontextualize myth. Attebery writes: \"I do not want to merely claim that one can find myth in fantasy, though that is certainly the case. Rather, I am looking at the way writers use fantasy to reframe myth: to construct new ways of looking at traditional stories and beliefs\" (2-3). He continues by arguing that \"instead of spending so much time simply identifying a parti","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71146208","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}

{"title":"Ray Bradbury Unbound","authors":"Rafeeq O. Mcgiveron","doi":"10.5860/choice.188079","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.5860/choice.188079","url":null,"abstract":"Ray Bradbury Completed. Jonathan R. Eller. Ray Bradbury Unbound. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2014. 324 pp. ISBN 978-0-25-203869-3. $34.95 hc.Reviewed by Rafeeq O. McGiveronJonathan R. Eller's Ray Bradbury Unbound completes a two-volume biography begun with Becoming Ray Bradbury in 2011. It is a readable and highly enlightening resource for any scholar or non-academic interested in the career of perhaps the most famous name in modern speculative fiction. Using an approach that falls somewhere between the more theoretical and encyclopedic Ray Bradbury: The Life of Fiction by Eller and William F. Touponce and a more popularly oriented \"straight\" biography like Sam Weller's The Bradbury Chronicles: The Life of Ray Bradbury, this wide-ranging and engagingly written book examines the evolution, ambitions, and struggles of Ray Bradbury's art from 1953 (after the publication of Fahrenheit 451) until the author's death in 2012. Eller draws on his own extensive research along with his numerous interviews with Bradbury to illuminate the work of the paradoxical man who wrote about rocket travel but would not drive an automobile or attempt commercial airline flight, whose great projects of adaptation for screen and stage often closed off his creation of new writing, and whose bold pronouncements sometimes masked personal insecurities.The book is divided into five sections comprised of easily digestible chapters of five to ten pages apiece. \"A Place in the Sun\" covers the period 1953-1954, when Bradbury worked on the screenplay for John Huston's motion picture Moby Dick (1956) and began his friendship with Renaissance art historian Bernard Berenson, who opened his eyes to the grander sweep of art. \"The End of the Beginning\" discusses the years 1954-1957, including Bradbury's further dabbling in writing for movies, television, and the stage; the release of The October Country (1955); and his professional growth under the friendly mentorship of Charles Laughton and Alfred Hitchcock. \"Dark Carnivals\" spans 1955-1959 and addresses the publication of Dandelion Wine, more often abortive projects in Hollywood, and a protracted suit against CBS for the plagiarism of Fahrenheit 451. \"Cry the Cosmos\" focuses on Bradbury at the beginning of the Space Age, foregrounding his adaptation of Leviathan '99 (1972) into a stage and radio play, the release of Something Wicked This Way Comes (1962), and his frustrations with Rod Serling and The Twilight Zone (1959-1964). Finally, \"If the Sun Dies\" shows Bradbury's ascendancy as a cultural figure in the last forty-odd years up to his death in 2012-a spokesman for space exploration, a lecturer and writer about writing, always an advocate for the poetic and the emotional in art over the coldly realistic.The book is not a mere timeline. The five broad periods of his post-Fahrenheit 451 career that Eller scrutinizes are defined by Bradbury's interests and achievements rather than simply the pages of the calendar. Naturally t","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2016-10-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"71026939","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}