In Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), the term “clockwork” refers to the moral programming of delinquents. Drawing on Nadsat’s deconstructive moves, this paper uncovers a hitherto overlooked meaning of “clockwork,” one that foregrounds how our temporal condition constrains our ability to choose freely. Courtesy of the argot, the mortality that conditions choice emerges as a form of programming. As a result, free will acquires a “clockwork” dimension. The temporal meaning of “clockwork” not only does a great deal of justice to deconstruction’s grounding in cybernetics but, more importantly, offers new insights into the dystopian novella’s problematizing of free will.
{"title":"The Programming of Free Will in Anthony Burgess’s\u0000 A Clockwork Orange","authors":"Ayesha Iftikhar Ahmed","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.11","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.11","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In Anthony Burgess’s\u0000 A Clockwork Orange\u0000 (1962), the term “clockwork” refers to the moral programming of delinquents. Drawing on Nadsat’s deconstructive moves, this paper uncovers a hitherto overlooked meaning of “clockwork,” one that foregrounds how our temporal condition constrains our ability to choose freely. Courtesy of the argot, the mortality that conditions choice emerges as a form of programming. As a result, free will acquires a “clockwork” dimension. The temporal meaning of “clockwork” not only does a great deal of justice to deconstruction’s grounding in cybernetics but, more importantly, offers new insights into the dystopian novella’s problematizing of free will.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141677916","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}
This paper explores the interactions of nostalgic and gothic tendencies in Ray Bradbury’s representations of the home, a recurring symbol in his fiction of the postwar period and in the American cultural imagination of the time. Bradbury’s fiction complicates various ideals associated with and invested in the postwar American home, and paired stories often suggest different responses to specific domestic themes. The essay concludes by arguing that several Bradbury stories offer possible alternatives to the problematic ideal of the “detached,” “nuclear” family home. The argument thus also usefully recontextualizes a number of Bradbury’s best-known stories.
{"title":"Critiques of Domesticity in Ray Bradbury’s Cold War Fiction","authors":"John Miller","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.10","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.10","url":null,"abstract":"This paper explores the interactions of nostalgic and gothic tendencies in Ray Bradbury’s representations of the home, a recurring symbol in his fiction of the postwar period and in the American cultural imagination of the time. Bradbury’s fiction complicates various ideals associated with and invested in the postwar American home, and paired stories often suggest different responses to specific domestic themes. The essay concludes by arguing that several Bradbury stories offer possible alternatives to the problematic ideal of the “detached,” “nuclear” family home. The argument thus also usefully recontextualizes a number of Bradbury’s best-known stories.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141678660","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}
While glimpses of counternormative and potentially utopian radical sex practices abound in J. G. Ballard’s seminal work Crash (1973), the book ends in a miasma of psychopathic violence, thus precluding a utopian reading. However, in Ballard’s later novel The Unlimited Dream Company (1979), the utopian potential implied in the transgressive sexuality of Crash is brought to the forefront of the author’s work. In fusing the Freudian/Lacanian death drive with Herbert Marcuse’s erotic utopian impulses, The Unlimited Dream Company reveals Ballard as a writer more in tune with the possibilities of counternormative sexual utopias than perhaps previously thought.
{"title":"Nightmare Angels and Dreams of Flight: Transgressive Transcendence in J. G. Ballard’s\u0000 Crash\u0000 and\u0000 The Unlimited Dream Compan\u0000 y","authors":"Nathan Singleton","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.12","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.12","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 While glimpses of counternormative and potentially utopian radical sex practices abound in J. G. Ballard’s seminal work\u0000 Crash\u0000 (1973), the book ends in a miasma of psychopathic violence, thus precluding a utopian reading. However, in Ballard’s later novel\u0000 The Unlimited Dream Company\u0000 (1979), the utopian potential implied in the transgressive sexuality of\u0000 Crash\u0000 is brought to the forefront of the author’s work. In fusing the Freudian/Lacanian death drive with Herbert Marcuse’s erotic utopian impulses,\u0000 The Unlimited Dream Company\u0000 reveals Ballard as a writer more in tune with the possibilities of counternormative sexual utopias than perhaps previously thought.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141679287","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}
This article argues that Vandana Singh’s postcolonial short story “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” (2010) employs the anachronistic chronotope of the time loop in order to explore nonlinear, heterogenous temporalities and challenge imperialist paradigms of time, history, science, and death. The short story theorizes speculation as a collective endeavor fueled by a dialectic of hope and disappointment, an endeavor that encompasses both literary and academic work. Drawing on postcolonial studies’ questioning of temporality and history, I investigate how “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” interrogates the assumptions underlying the subject/object relation. Then I bring Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “statistical kinship” into dialogue with Singh’s work, exploring how the short story’s reconfiguration of death and failure gestures toward a potent yet controversial ethos of non-hegemonic universality.
{"title":"Death, History, and the Time Loop: The Subject/Object Relation in Vandana Singh’s “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra”","authors":"Shaoni C. White","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.13","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.13","url":null,"abstract":"This article argues that Vandana Singh’s postcolonial short story “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” (2010) employs the anachronistic chronotope of the time loop in order to explore nonlinear, heterogenous temporalities and challenge imperialist paradigms of time, history, science, and death. The short story theorizes speculation as a collective endeavor fueled by a dialectic of hope and disappointment, an endeavor that encompasses both literary and academic work. Drawing on postcolonial studies’ questioning of temporality and history, I investigate how “Somadeva: A Sky River Sutra” interrogates the assumptions underlying the subject/object relation. Then I bring Wai Chee Dimock’s concept of “statistical kinship” into dialogue with Singh’s work, exploring how the short story’s reconfiguration of death and failure gestures toward a potent yet controversial ethos of non-hegemonic universality.","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141680039","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}
Nnedi Okorafor’s Noor (2021) is an Africanfuturist exploration of the female cyborg body that parallels the ecological damage that out-of-control corporate capitalism is doing to the earth. This essay briefly summarizes the development of the noir cyborg through fiction, film, and feminist scholarship and then looks for further insight via Black feminist disability scholars Sami Schalk, Nirmala Ervelles, and Theri Alyce Pickens. It concludes with an exploration of Okorafor’s vision for ecologically healthy technological advancement along with ideas regarding human collaboration for peaceful change via sociologists Margaret Mead, adrienne maree brown, Deirdre Byrne, and John Paul Lederach.
{"title":"Nnedi Okorafor:\u0000 Noor\u0000 as Noir, Cyborg Hybridity, Identity, and Disability","authors":"Sandra J. Lindow","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.14","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.14","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Nnedi Okorafor’s\u0000 Noor\u0000 (2021) is an Africanfuturist exploration of the female cyborg body that parallels the ecological damage that out-of-control corporate capitalism is doing to the earth. This essay briefly summarizes the development of the noir cyborg through fiction, film, and feminist scholarship and then looks for further insight via Black feminist disability scholars Sami Schalk, Nirmala Ervelles, and Theri Alyce Pickens. It concludes with an exploration of Okorafor’s vision for ecologically healthy technological advancement along with ideas regarding human collaboration for peaceful change via sociologists Margaret Mead, adrienne maree brown, Deirdre Byrne, and John Paul Lederach.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.2,"publicationDate":"2024-07-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141679825","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}
In this paper, I present a critical reading of the space opera television series Babylon 5 ( B5 ) (1994–98) from a Millsian radical liberal perspective filtered through a flat ontology. I argue that B5 ’s world is nonmodern, where various entities and their “gravities” affect how social forms are structured. The legal and contractual aspects of governance and politics are discussed, focusing on the issue of race. Whilst Charles Mills’s critique of racial contracts is fruitful, his political theory remains all-too human. B5 illustrates that any future republic ought to be nonmodern and rhizomatic in character, including nonhumans as elements.
{"title":"Contractual Gravities","authors":"Eamon Reid","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.4","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.4","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 In this paper, I present a critical reading of the space opera television series\u0000 Babylon 5\u0000 (\u0000 B5\u0000 ) (1994–98) from a Millsian radical liberal perspective filtered through a flat ontology. I argue that\u0000 B5\u0000 ’s world is nonmodern, where various entities and their “gravities” affect how social forms are structured. The legal and contractual aspects of governance and politics are discussed, focusing on the issue of race. Whilst Charles Mills’s critique of racial contracts is fruitful, his political theory remains all-too human.\u0000 B5\u0000 illustrates that any future republic ought to be nonmodern and rhizomatic in character, including nonhumans as elements.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140704839","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}
The use of salvaged objects in post-apocalyptic narratives has primarily been addressed in relation to Evan Calder Williams’s concept of “salvagepunk”—a repurposing of objects in an idiosyncratic way that Williams sees as a form of capitalist critique. Such a reading, however, accommodates neither the frequent emphasis on the novelty or sublimity of such objects, nor their tendency to collapse into nostalgia and ultimately capitalist reification. Far more often than not, the break between pre-apocalyptic past and post-apocalyptic narrative present is less a profound rupture opening up the possibility of a reimagined Utopian future based on reconfigured social relations, and more an inconvenient and lamentable fissure that will eventually be bridged. Attending to a variety of primary texts such as Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (2014), David Macauley’s Motel of the Mysteries (1978), and Ruben Fleischer’s film, Zombieland: Double Tap (2019), this essay considers the ways in which salvaged items in post-apocalyptic narratives end up reaffirming the present status quo, once again proving the oft-cited maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.
{"title":"Love Letters From the Future","authors":"Jeffrey Andrew Weinstock","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.7","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.7","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 The use of salvaged objects in post-apocalyptic narratives has primarily been addressed in relation to Evan Calder Williams’s concept of “salvagepunk”—a repurposing of objects in an idiosyncratic way that Williams sees as a form of capitalist critique. Such a reading, however, accommodates neither the frequent emphasis on the novelty or sublimity of such objects, nor their tendency to collapse into nostalgia and ultimately capitalist reification. Far more often than not, the break between pre-apocalyptic past and post-apocalyptic narrative present is less a profound rupture opening up the possibility of a reimagined Utopian future based on reconfigured social relations, and more an inconvenient and lamentable fissure that will eventually be bridged. Attending to a variety of primary texts such as Emily St. John Mandel’s\u0000 Station Eleven\u0000 (2014), David Macauley’s\u0000 Motel of the Mysteries\u0000 (1978), and Ruben Fleischer’s film,\u0000 Zombieland: Double Tap\u0000 (2019), this essay considers the ways in which salvaged items in post-apocalyptic narratives end up reaffirming the present status quo, once again proving the oft-cited maxim that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than an end to capitalism.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140706629","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}
Science fiction has an extensive history of attempting to breach the communication boundary between humans and nonhuman animals by giving nonhuman animals some semblance of human language, with many uplift stories having them speak near-perfect English, their minds being filtered through a human linguistic framework, partly or wholly erasing their voice. Building on the examination of nonhuman animal gestural communication in Brian Massumi’s What Animals Teach Us about Politics (2014), this paper analyses how two works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” (1974) and Laura Jean McKay’s The Animals in That Country (2020) depict animal behavior in itself as being creative and language-like. Neither story offers a straightforward translation from nonhuman to human, each showing how human linguistic frameworks leave gaps for the untranslatable complexities in nonhuman animal gestures. This I suggest shows that further exploration of nonhuman animal communication in science fiction can allow us to move beyond ideas of human exceptionalism and logocentrism and can turn the hierarchical scale of communication into more of a spectrum with various communication types.
科幻小说在试图打破人类与非人类动物之间的交流界限方面有着广泛的历史，它赋予非人类动物一些人类语言的假象，许多向上的故事让它们说着近乎完美的英语，它们的思维被人类的语言框架过滤，部分或全部抹去了它们的声音。在布莱恩-马苏米（Brian Massumi）的《动物教会我们什么是政治》（What Animals Teach Us about Politics，2014）对非人类动物手势交流进行研究的基础上，本文分析了乌苏拉-勒奎恩（Ursula K. Le Guin）的《金合欢种子的作者》（'The Author of the Acacia Seeds' and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics）（1974）和劳拉-简-麦凯（Laura Jean McKay）的《那个国家的动物》（The Animals in That Country，2020）这两部作品是如何将动物行为本身描绘成具有创造性和语言性的。两个故事都没有提供从非人类到人类的直接翻译，每个故事都展示了人类语言框架如何为非人类动物姿态中无法翻译的复杂性留下空白。我认为，科幻小说中对非人类动物交流的进一步探索，可以让我们超越人类例外论和逻各斯中心主义的观念，并将交流的等级尺度转化为各种交流类型的频谱。
{"title":"“The Poetry of a Dingo’s Bite”","authors":"David Tierney","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.3","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.3","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Science fiction has an extensive history of attempting to breach the communication boundary between humans and nonhuman animals by giving nonhuman animals some semblance of human language, with many uplift stories having them speak near-perfect English, their minds being filtered through a human linguistic framework, partly or wholly erasing their voice. Building on the examination of nonhuman animal gestural communication in Brian Massumi’s\u0000 What Animals Teach Us about Politics\u0000 (2014), this paper analyses how two works, Ursula K. Le Guin’s “‘The Author of the Acacia Seeds’ and Other Extracts from the Journal of the Association of Therolinguistics” (1974) and Laura Jean McKay’s\u0000 The Animals in That Country\u0000 (2020) depict animal behavior in itself as being creative and language-like. Neither story offers a straightforward translation from nonhuman to human, each showing how human linguistic frameworks leave gaps for the untranslatable complexities in nonhuman animal gestures. This I suggest shows that further exploration of nonhuman animal communication in science fiction can allow us to move beyond ideas of human exceptionalism and logocentrism and can turn the hierarchical scale of communication into more of a spectrum with various communication types.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140705224","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}
Published in The New Yorker in May 2016, Ted Chiang’s short piece “Bad Character” has raised fervent debates on the linguistic properties of the Chinese writing system, as well as on the peculiar, if not perplexing, nature of the language itself. The mixed responses among scholars, from both the East and the West, towards Ted Chiang’s position against Chinese characters reflect the underlying entanglement of disparate discourses, including the universal language, orientalization/self-orientalization, language reform, Asian-American struggles, Chinese exceptionalism, and most importantly, the entrenched myth of Chinese ideograms. By situating Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” (1998) in the midst of the debate, this paper explores not only how Chiang broaches Chinese’s linguistic otherness through the science-fictional trope of alien communication, but also how the author dismantles the discursive baggage of Chinese ideograms by shifting toward technical description of linguistic details. Reading “Story” in joint with Liu Cixin’s seminal Three Body trilogy (2008–10) and a more recent work “Curse” (2015) by Chen Zijun, this paper further contends that a new trend can be discerned that seeks to depart from previous exploitations of Chinese’s otherness through orientalizing gestures and essentialist representations. Unlike their predecessors who either valorize or degrade the non-phonetic alien language allusive to allegedly ideographic Chinese, these authors refrain from setting up a hierarchy between human languages and their alien counterparts, channeling the utopian impulse of sf into treating language as a technical object that is perfectible through constant refinement of its linguistic configurations. The end product of these discursive efforts is a notion of linguistic utopianism, which not only harkens back to the generic affinity of sf to utopia as well as to the long-lived, ubiquitous quest for a perfect language, but also envisions a new ethics of alien communication through explicating the distinct technicality of each language for a non-hierarchical paradigm.
2016年5月发表于《纽约客》（The New Yorker）的蒋特德短文《坏字》（Bad Character）引发了关于中文书写系统的语言属性以及中文本身的特殊性（如果不是令人困惑的话）的热议。东西方学者对特德-蒋反对汉字的立场反应不一，这反映了不同论述之间的潜在纠葛，包括通用语言、东方化/自我东方化、语言改革、亚美斗争、中国例外论，以及最重要的、根深蒂固的中国表意文字神话。本文将蒋方舟（Ted Chiang）的短篇小说《你一生的故事》（1998）置于这场争论之中，不仅探讨了蒋方舟如何通过科幻小说中的外星交流特例来探讨汉语的语言他者性，还探讨了作者如何通过对语言细节的技术性描述来卸下汉语表意文字的话语包袱。本文将《故事》与刘慈欣开创性的 "三体 "三部曲（2008-10 年）和陈子君的最新作品《诅咒》（2015 年）结合起来阅读，进一步认为可以发现一种新的趋势，即试图摆脱以往通过东方化姿态和本质主义表述来利用汉语的他者性。与前辈们或颂扬或贬低所谓表意中文的非语音外来语不同，这些作者没有在人类语言和外来语之间建立等级制度，而是将语言作为一种技术对象，通过不断完善其语言配置，将其引向乌托邦式的冲动。这些话语努力的最终成果是一种语言乌托邦主义的概念，它不仅回溯了 SF 与乌托邦的一般亲缘关系，以及对完美语言的长期、无处不在的追求，而且还通过阐释每种语言的独特技术性，为非等级范式设想了一种新的外星交流伦理。
{"title":"Beyond the Myth of Chinese Ideograms","authors":"Yuheng Ko","doi":"10.3828/extr.2024.6","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3828/extr.2024.6","url":null,"abstract":"\u0000 Published in\u0000 The New Yorker\u0000 in May 2016, Ted Chiang’s short piece “Bad Character” has raised fervent debates on the linguistic properties of the Chinese writing system, as well as on the peculiar, if not perplexing, nature of the language itself. The mixed responses among scholars, from both the East and the West, towards Ted Chiang’s position against Chinese characters reflect the underlying entanglement of disparate discourses, including the universal language, orientalization/self-orientalization, language reform, Asian-American struggles, Chinese exceptionalism, and most importantly, the entrenched myth of Chinese ideograms. By situating Ted Chiang’s short story “Story of Your Life” (1998) in the midst of the debate, this paper explores not only how Chiang broaches Chinese’s linguistic otherness through the science-fictional trope of alien communication, but also how the author dismantles the discursive baggage of Chinese ideograms by shifting toward technical description of linguistic details. Reading “Story” in joint with Liu Cixin’s seminal\u0000 Three Body\u0000 trilogy (2008–10) and a more recent work “Curse” (2015) by Chen Zijun, this paper further contends that a new trend can be discerned that seeks to depart from previous exploitations of Chinese’s otherness through orientalizing gestures and essentialist representations. Unlike their predecessors who either valorize or degrade the non-phonetic alien language allusive to allegedly ideographic Chinese, these authors refrain from setting up a hierarchy between human languages and their alien counterparts, channeling the utopian impulse of sf into treating language as a technical object that is perfectible through constant refinement of its linguistic configurations. The end product of these discursive efforts is a notion of linguistic utopianism, which not only harkens back to the generic affinity of sf to utopia as well as to the long-lived, ubiquitous quest for a perfect language, but also envisions a new ethics of alien communication through explicating the distinct technicality of each language for a non-hierarchical paradigm.\u0000","PeriodicalId":42992,"journal":{"name":"EXTRAPOLATION","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2024-04-14","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140706175","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}
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