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.
{"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}
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...
{"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}
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.
{"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}
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
{"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}
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.
当埃德加·赖斯·巴勒斯(Edgar Rice Burroughs)的《火星公主》(Princess of Mars)中的主人公约翰·卡特(John Carter)到达这颗红色星球时，他发现自己和所有火星居民都赤身裸体。在本文中，我将这种裸体的比喻置于当代社会和文化背景中，并探索它可能对当代读者产生影响的多重领域。19世纪末和20世纪初，西方对公共场合裸体的描写不仅仅是简单的挑逗，而是在一个复杂而紧张的宇宙中产生共鸣，在这个宇宙中，野蛮、天真、伊甸园般的幻想和美国西部发生了碰撞，理查德·斯洛特金的“了解印第安人的人”在这个空间中脱颖而出，具有适应优势，使卡特能够上升到火星的领导地位，但也使他最终不适合地球上的体面社会。
{"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}
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...
{"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}
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...
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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.
关于美国边疆对罗伯特·e·霍华德的影响，以及如何在他的作品中看到这一点，已经写了很多。其中一个有趣的焦点是弗雷德里克·杰克逊·特纳(Frederick Jackson Turner)的边疆理论，更具体地说，是理查德·斯洛特金(Richard Slotkin)对“边疆神话”的批判和重新诠释。本文认为，对特纳理论的另一种批判，即赫伯特·尤金·博尔顿的边疆理论的批判，也提供了一个富有成效的解释框架，通过这个框架来看待柯南的故事。为此，本文分析了具体的柯南故事，特别关注《黑河彼岸》(Beyond the Black River)，以探索柯南世界展现边疆特征的方式。它总结了一些反思的含义，这可能有剑和巫术类型的开始更普遍。
{"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}
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
幻想批评的未来。布莱恩Attebery。《关于故事的故事:幻想与神话再造》牛津:牛津大学出版社，2014。240页，ISBN 978-0-19-931607-6。pbk 29.95美元。布赖恩·阿特伯里的《关于故事的故事:幻想与神话的再造》是一部关于幻想的重要著作。尽管如此，我希望它不会定义一个幻想批评的程序，从而损害其他方法和关注。可以肯定的是，阿特伯里巩固了他作为幻想文学最重要的学者之一的地位，这一地位是他通过他的前两本书获得的，《美国文学中的幻想传统:从欧文到勒奎恩》(1980)和《幻想策略》(1992)。《关于故事的故事》比前两本书视野更开阔，更强调其重要性。阿特伯里呼吁并建立了一种方法，专注于幻想文本中各种神话传统的特殊互动，也就是说，幻想文本通过在当代语境中重构传统(通常是口头)叙事来讲述故事的方式，并产生了令人惊讶的结果。然而，他的方法仍然存在问题。在《关于故事的故事》之前，阿特伯里对奇幻文学批评和学术的持久贡献，除了他是这个领域以现在的形式存在的主要原因之一之外，还在于他将“模糊集”概念化，作为理解流派的一种手段。正如《幻想策略》(Strategies of Fantasy)所描述的那样，模糊集(在奇幻、科幻或其他类型的背景下)的定义是:首先，由几个无可争议地属于该集的文本组成的中心(例如托尔金、刘易斯和勒奎恩);其次，与这些中心文本或多或少具有“家族相似性”的文本。这一概念使得评论家们不太关心幻想和相关类型(特别是在当时的科幻小说)之间的界限。Farah Mendlesohn的《幻想修辞学》(2008)和Stefan Ekman的《Here Be Dragons: Exploring fantasy Maps and Settings》(2013)这两项关于幻想的最新研究都将模糊集作为起点，尽管它们对概念进行了添加或修改。在《关于故事的故事》中，阿特贝利强调了模糊集的逻辑，同时也承认了它的局限性:“我仍然喜欢这种打破类型分类难题的方式，但它并不能解释类型的所有历史和社会维度”(33)。关于幻想，模糊集不能解释幻想文本和作者对神话的借鉴和重新语境化的方式。阿特伯里写道:“我不想仅仅声称人们可以在幻想中找到神话，尽管事实确实如此。更确切地说，我关注的是作家如何用幻想来重新定义神话:构建看待传统故事和信仰的新方式。”他接着说，“与其花那么多时间在现代幻想作品中简单地识别一个特定的凯尔特神话，”评论家和学者们“应该看看幻想家是如何从神话中挪用、参与、歪曲和重建神话的。”(3)简而言之，《关于故事的故事》不仅关注幻想所借鉴的各种传统，还关注这种借鉴的本质。虽然第一项任务仍然是一个值得追求的目标，但后者要重要得多。阿特贝利在后面的章节中阐明了这一点。这本书的前几章聚焦于原型和早期幻想家，如霍普·莫里斯、查尔斯·威廉姆斯、乔治·麦克唐纳和c·s·刘易斯。阿特伯里呼吁人们关注幻想与高度现代主义之间的有趣关系，以及幻想在世俗世界中采用和重构基督教神话的方式。他的论点取决于第五章对殖民幻想的讨论。他认为，批评家不应该把神话的重制当作一种中立的行为;任何仅仅满足于指出文本A借鉴了神话B的学术研究都冒着假设这种中立的风险。．．．
{"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}
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
{"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}
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