Pub Date : 2018-11-30DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.2.25-44
Vesna Lazović
Based on a corpus comprising online bank advertisements shown in the UK and Serbia, this paper aims at describing the most frequent ways of creating puns and classifying them based on their predominant structure. The function of puns in advertising is explained from the perspective of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (1995) and the behavioural AIDA model. This paper also tries to reveal whether the formal and semantic aspects of lexical units are exploited in British and Serbian bank offers, and whether there are any language- and culture-specific features in terms of punning.
{"title":"How to P(l)ay with Words? The Use of Puns in Online Bank Advertisements in English and Serbian in Light of Relevance Theory","authors":"Vesna Lazović","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.2.25-44","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.2.25-44","url":null,"abstract":"Based on a corpus comprising online bank advertisements shown in the UK and Serbia, this paper aims at describing the most frequent ways of creating puns and classifying them based on their predominant structure. The function of puns in advertising is explained from the perspective of Sperber and Wilson’s relevance theory (1995) and the behavioural AIDA model. This paper also tries to reveal whether the formal and semantic aspects of lexical units are exploited in British and Serbian bank offers, and whether there are any language- and culture-specific features in terms of punning.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"285 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-11-30","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"88904589","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-25DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.17-28
M. Gadpaille
Margaret Atwood’s short prose piece, “Three Novels I Won’t Write Soon,” poses a conundrum for anyone seeking to place it within a genre. With features of science fiction, speculative fiction and a postmodern prose poem, the text addresses the topic of climate change and its concomitant fiction without offering closure. After examining and attempting to resolve the issue of genre, the paper aligns Atwood’s discourse of indeterminacy with the parallel discourse of climate change as expressed in science writing, in order to account for this text’s unusual structural and stylistic features.
玛格丽特·阿特伍德(Margaret Atwood)的短篇散文《我不会很快写的三部小说》(Three novel I Won’t Won Soon Write)给任何想把它归入某种体裁的人提出了一个难题。具有科幻小说,投机小说和后现代散文诗的特点,文本解决了气候变化及其相关小说的主题,但没有提供结尾。在研究并试图解决体裁问题之后,本文将阿特伍德的不确定性话语与科学写作中表达的气候变化平行话语结合起来,以解释这篇文章不同寻常的结构和风格特征。
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Pub Date : 2018-06-25DOI: 10.4312/elope.15.1.99-110
Urša Vogrinc Javoršek
The analysis of three recent British novels: Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (1996), Iain Banks’ Transition (2009) and China Miéville’s The City & the City (2009) strives to uncover structural parallelisms and the inherent evolution in their development, plot structuring and presentation. It is centred on the exhibited relation to the structure and general mechanics of space. The interpretations of space are based on Foucault’s heterotopias, the rhizome of Deleuze and Guattari, and Certeau’s absent space, which show how the active force of space and the complexity of the genre identity are interconnected, and how they interact with the social and political engagement of the works and their wider cultural and social context. These seminal works of the British Boom provide a rich source material for an outline of the process of interplay of genre identity and political engagement, and an overview of how this interplay affects their plot, style and the protagonists.
本文通过对尼尔·盖曼的《Neverwhere》(1996)、伊恩·班克斯的《Transition》(2009)和中国·米姆萨维尔的《City & The City》(2009)这三部英国小说的分析,试图揭示结构上的相似性以及它们在发展、情节结构和表现上的内在演变。它集中于展示与空间结构和一般力学的关系。对空间的解读以福柯的异托位、德勒兹和瓜塔里的根茎、塞托的缺席空间为基础,展示了空间的积极力量和类型认同的复杂性是如何相互联系的,以及它们如何与作品的社会和政治参与及其更广泛的文化和社会背景相互作用。这些英国繁荣时期的开创性作品为流派认同和政治参与相互作用的过程提供了丰富的素材,并概述了这种相互作用如何影响它们的情节、风格和主角。
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Pub Date : 2018-06-25DOI: 10.4312/elope.15.1.111-125
Pablo Gómez Muñoz
This article argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century science fiction (SF) cinema has begun to show particular interest in transnational interactions and cosmopolitan concerns. The article focuses on one of the most representative groups of this trend: dystopias that explore the transnational systems that shape deeply unequal societies. The first part of the article provides an overview of the different transnational issues that contemporary dystopias deal with. The article then presents the film Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013) as a representative example of this trend. The analysis of Elysium sheds light on several socioeconomic and territorial processes that are shaping the development of neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century: extraterritorial operations, market incorporation, and the reorganization and superposition of borders. The article concludes that Elysium and similar films at first appear to criticize a set of structures and practices that prevent large numbers of people from living in decent conditions, but eventually reproduce the same circumstances and hierarchies that they appear to denounce.
{"title":"Dystopias Go Global: The Transnational Reorganization of Territories and Societies in Elysium","authors":"Pablo Gómez Muñoz","doi":"10.4312/elope.15.1.111-125","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/elope.15.1.111-125","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that at the turn of the twenty-first century science fiction (SF) cinema has begun to show particular interest in transnational interactions and cosmopolitan concerns. The article focuses on one of the most representative groups of this trend: dystopias that explore the transnational systems that shape deeply unequal societies. The first part of the article provides an overview of the different transnational issues that contemporary dystopias deal with. The article then presents the film Elysium (Neill Blomkamp, 2013) as a representative example of this trend. The analysis of Elysium sheds light on several socioeconomic and territorial processes that are shaping the development of neoliberal globalization in the twenty-first century: extraterritorial operations, market incorporation, and the reorganization and superposition of borders. The article concludes that Elysium and similar films at first appear to criticize a set of structures and practices that prevent large numbers of people from living in decent conditions, but eventually reproduce the same circumstances and hierarchies that they appear to denounce.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"1 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"70577184","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
“[W]hat if they gave an apocalypse and nobody noticed?” was the question that Brooks Landon (1991, 239) proposed as the central thematic concern of the 1980s cyberpunk – a movement which today represents a landmark in the development of the science fiction genre. Diverse as they are in their focus and scope, the contributions to this issue of ELOPE, dedicated to the position and role of speculative fiction, and especially science fiction, in a world which is increasingly becoming speculative and science fictional, invariably demonstrate that an apocalypse did indeed take place and went by largely unnoticed.
{"title":"On the Apocalypse that No One Noticed","authors":"Mojca Krevel","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.9-16","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.9-16","url":null,"abstract":"“[W]hat if they gave an apocalypse and nobody noticed?” was the question that Brooks Landon (1991, 239) proposed as the central thematic concern of the 1980s cyberpunk – a movement which today represents a landmark in the development of the science fiction genre. Diverse as they are in their focus and scope, the contributions to this issue of ELOPE, dedicated to the position and role of speculative fiction, and especially science fiction, in a world which is increasingly becoming speculative and science fictional, invariably demonstrate that an apocalypse did indeed take place and went by largely unnoticed.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"15 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"73151417","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-25DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.51-67
Anamarija Šporčič
As an example of jean Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, contemporary science fiction represents a convenient literary platform for the exploration of our current and future understanding of gender, gender variants and gender fluidity. The genre should, in theory, have the advantage of being able to avoid the limitations posed by cultural conventions and transcend them in new and original ways. In practice, however, literary works of science fiction that are not subject to the dictations of the binary understanding of gender are few and far between, as authors overwhelmingly use the binary gender division as a binding element between the fictional world and that of the reader. The reversal of gender roles, merging of gender traits, androgynous characters and genderless societies nevertheless began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper briefly examines the history of attempts at transcending the gender binary in science fiction, and explores the possibility of such writing empowering non-binary/genderqueer individuals.
{"title":"The (Ir)Relevance of Science Fiction to Non-Binary and Genderqueer Readers","authors":"Anamarija Šporčič","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.51-67","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.51-67","url":null,"abstract":"As an example of jean Baudrillard’s third order of simulacra, contemporary science fiction represents a convenient literary platform for the exploration of our current and future understanding of gender, gender variants and gender fluidity. The genre should, in theory, have the advantage of being able to avoid the limitations posed by cultural conventions and transcend them in new and original ways. In practice, however, literary works of science fiction that are not subject to the dictations of the binary understanding of gender are few and far between, as authors overwhelmingly use the binary gender division as a binding element between the fictional world and that of the reader. The reversal of gender roles, merging of gender traits, androgynous characters and genderless societies nevertheless began to appear in the 1960s and 1970s. This paper briefly examines the history of attempts at transcending the gender binary in science fiction, and explores the possibility of such writing empowering non-binary/genderqueer individuals.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"38 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"79849945","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-11DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.83-97
Heather Duncan
This essay examines three contemporary genre narratives that explore the concept of life after death: an amateur digital “creepypasta” posted on Reddit, an episode of the television series Black Mirror, and Paul La Farge’s 2017 novel The Night Ocean. Using these narratives to explore nearfuture death rituals, transhumanist consciousness preservation, and the role of genre fiction in exposing the instability of narratives and the distributed nature of agency in digital environments, I argue that coping with the unprecedented complexity of life in the digital age requires a reevaluation of what constitutes the self, the human, and the extent to which the narratives that inform these boundaries are permeable and capable of acting with their own agency.
{"title":"Human “ish”: Voices from Beyond the Grave in Contemporary Narratives","authors":"Heather Duncan","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.83-97","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.83-97","url":null,"abstract":"This essay examines three contemporary genre narratives that explore the concept of life after death: an amateur digital “creepypasta” posted on Reddit, an episode of the television series Black Mirror, and Paul La Farge’s 2017 novel The Night Ocean. Using these narratives to explore nearfuture death rituals, transhumanist consciousness preservation, and the role of genre fiction in exposing the instability of narratives and the distributed nature of agency in digital environments, I argue that coping with the unprecedented complexity of life in the digital age requires a reevaluation of what constitutes the self, the human, and the extent to which the narratives that inform these boundaries are permeable and capable of acting with their own agency.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"20 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"87905719","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-06-11DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.69-81
A. Leach
Iain M. Banks has been at the forefront of the space opera science fiction scene since the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, in 1987. Upon Banks’ death in 2013, the culture series became a complete body of work. Whilst some criticism has focused on the social and political implications of the culture universe, little has engaged with the philosophical concepts that underpin it in relation to the current debate regarding our posthuman future. This paper seeks to show how Banks problematises the relationship between the human and posthuman through an exploration of the representation of the posthuman body. Furthermore, it also seeks to address the implications of current concepts of what it means to be human by exploring the relationship between the posthuman and form of Artificial Intelligence that Banks presents. to illustrate these arguments, three culture texts will be discussed: The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and “The State of the Art” (1989).
{"title":"Iain M. Banks – Human, Posthuman and Beyond Human","authors":"A. Leach","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.69-81","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.69-81","url":null,"abstract":"Iain M. Banks has been at the forefront of the space opera science fiction scene since the publication of the first Culture novel, Consider Phlebas, in 1987. Upon Banks’ death in 2013, the culture series became a complete body of work. Whilst some criticism has focused on the social and political implications of the culture universe, little has engaged with the philosophical concepts that underpin it in relation to the current debate regarding our posthuman future. This paper seeks to show how Banks problematises the relationship between the human and posthuman through an exploration of the representation of the posthuman body. Furthermore, it also seeks to address the implications of current concepts of what it means to be human by exploring the relationship between the posthuman and form of Artificial Intelligence that Banks presents. to illustrate these arguments, three culture texts will be discussed: The Player of Games (1988), Excession (1996), and “The State of the Art” (1989).","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"21 1","pages":""},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"72769293","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-25DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.29-49
V. Kennedy
When Wile E. coyote goes off a cliff, instead of falling in a parabolic arc, he comes to a halt in mid-air, hangs there until he realizes that he is no longer on solid ground, then falls. Many critics and, indeed, the creators of the cartoons themselves, describe this as “cartoon physics,” which breaks the rules that appear to govern the real world, but several principles of modern physics are in fact depicted here. He is both falling and not falling; when he is able to observe his situation, the laws of quantum physics catch up with him. This, and the principle of relativity, govern the apparent paradoxes of the cartoon world. Although the coyote was, according to his creators, conceived as a parody of a modern scientist and played for laughs, he illustrates several paradoxes of modern science and the unease with which these are widely viewed. These cartoon physics have become a meme that has developed in later animated cartoons and live-action science fiction films, and is now even a part of modern-day science textbooks.
{"title":"The Gravity of Cartoon Physics; or, Schrödinger’s Coyote","authors":"V. Kennedy","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.29-49","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.29-49","url":null,"abstract":"When Wile E. coyote goes off a cliff, instead of falling in a parabolic arc, he comes to a halt in mid-air, hangs there until he realizes that he is no longer on solid ground, then falls. Many critics and, indeed, the creators of the cartoons themselves, describe this as “cartoon physics,” which breaks the rules that appear to govern the real world, but several principles of modern physics are in fact depicted here. He is both falling and not falling; when he is able to observe his situation, the laws of quantum physics catch up with him. This, and the principle of relativity, govern the apparent paradoxes of the cartoon world. Although the coyote was, according to his creators, conceived as a parody of a modern scientist and played for laughs, he illustrates several paradoxes of modern science and the unease with which these are widely viewed. These cartoon physics have become a meme that has developed in later animated cartoons and live-action science fiction films, and is now even a part of modern-day science textbooks.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"15 1","pages":"29-49"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-25","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44753476","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2018-04-18DOI: 10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.129-131
Ljubica Matek
The fact that Iva Polak’s monograph Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction is the first volume in Peter Lang’s World Science Fiction Studies series, edited by Sonja Fritzsche, is symbolic of the actual novelty and relevance of Polak’s work. It is, in fact, the first book-length study in English dedicated to the analysis of Australian Aboriginal fiction from the point of view of the theory of the fantastic.
{"title":"Australian Aboriginal SF – Blending Genre and Literary Fiction: A Review of Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction by Iva Polak","authors":"Ljubica Matek","doi":"10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.129-131","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.4312/ELOPE.15.1.129-131","url":null,"abstract":"The fact that Iva Polak’s monograph Futuristic Worlds in Australian Aboriginal Fiction is the first volume in Peter Lang’s World Science Fiction Studies series, edited by Sonja Fritzsche, is symbolic of the actual novelty and relevance of Polak’s work. It is, in fact, the first book-length study in English dedicated to the analysis of Australian Aboriginal fiction from the point of view of the theory of the fantastic.","PeriodicalId":37589,"journal":{"name":"ELOPE: English Language Overseas Perspectives and Enquiries","volume":"15 1","pages":"129-131"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2018-04-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43260785","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}