{"title":"Ready Player One and the Reassertion of US Economic and Technological Supremacy","authors":"Claire Stanford","doi":"10.1353/mfs.2022.0009","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract:This essay offers a geopolitical reading of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), focusing on the novel's often-overlooked Japanese characters. While the novel is set in 2045, its narrative is an allegory for present-day global economic tensions between a recession-era US and a rising Asia. By reducing the novel's Japanese characters to premodern and postmodern Japanese tropes (the samurai and the hikikomori [shut-in]), Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, and thus models a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism.","PeriodicalId":45576,"journal":{"name":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","volume":"75 1","pages":"201 - 218"},"PeriodicalIF":0.5000,"publicationDate":"2022-06-01","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"MFS-Modern Fiction Studies","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1353/mfs.2022.0009","RegionNum":3,"RegionCategory":"文学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"LITERATURE","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract:This essay offers a geopolitical reading of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One (2011), focusing on the novel's often-overlooked Japanese characters. While the novel is set in 2045, its narrative is an allegory for present-day global economic tensions between a recession-era US and a rising Asia. By reducing the novel's Japanese characters to premodern and postmodern Japanese tropes (the samurai and the hikikomori [shut-in]), Cline portrays Japan as an economic and technological threat that has been contained, and thus models a future in which American individualism wins out over Asian collectivism.
期刊介绍：
Modern Fiction Studies publishes engaging articles on prominent works of modern and contemporary fiction. Emphasizing historical, theoretical, and interdisciplinary approaches, the journal encourages a dialogue between fiction and theory, publishing work that offers new theoretical insights, clarity of style, and completeness of argument. Modern Fiction Studies alternates general issues dealing with a wide range of texts with special issues focused on single topics or individual writers.
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