Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Critical Theory and Science Fiction PDF Author: Carl Freedman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.

Critical Theory and Science Fiction

Critical Theory and Science Fiction PDF Author: Carl Freedman
Publisher: Wesleyan University Press
ISBN: 0819574546
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 233

Get Book Here

Book Description
Selected by Choice as an Outstanding Academic Book of the Year. This innovative cultural critique offers valuable insights into science fiction, thus enlarging our understanding of critical theory. Carl Freedman traces the fundamental and mostly unexamined relationships between the discourses of science fiction and critical theory, arguing that science fiction is (or ought to be) a privileged genre for critical theory. He asserts that it is no accident that the upsurge of academic interest in science fiction since the 1970s coincides with the heyday of literary theory, and that likewise science fiction is one of the most theoretically informed areas of the literary profession. Extended readings of novels by five of the most important modern science fiction authors illustrate the affinity between science fiction and critical theory, in each case concentrating on one major novel that resonates with concerns proper to critical theory. Freedman's five readings are: Solaris: Stanislaw Lem and the Structure of Cognition; The Dispossessed: Ursula LeGuin and the Ambiguities of Utopia; The Two of Them: Joanna Russ and the Violence of Gender; Stars in My Pocket Like Grains of Sand: Samuel Delany and the Dialectics of Difference; The Man in the High Castle: Philip K. Dick and the Construction of Realities.

Science Fiction

Science Fiction PDF Author: Patrick Parrinder
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317872657
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 261

Get Book Here

Book Description
First published in 1979. This volume presents Science Fiction as a coherent system, not as a collection of facts or random sequence of individual voices. The contributors are concerned with less with surveying the bare facts of the genre than with interpretating their significance. They attempt to establish the common properties of Science Fiction writing whether in the treatment of a theme or in SF of a given period or nationality.

Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction

Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction PDF Author: Gerald Alva Miller Jr.
Publisher: Springer
ISBN: 1137330791
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 385

Get Book Here

Book Description
Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and its uses both to question what it means to be human in digital era.

Speculations on Speculation

Speculations on Speculation PDF Author: James E. Gunn
Publisher: Scarecrow Press
ISBN: 9780810849020
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 404

Get Book Here

Book Description
Science fiction is a field of literature that has great interest and great controversy among its writers and critics. This book examines the roots, history, development, current status, and future directions of the field through articles contributed by well-respected science fiction writers, teachers, and critics. This book can be used as a textbook for courses in theory as well as courses in science fiction literature and science fiction writing.

Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism

Science Fiction, New Space Opera, and Neoliberal Globalism PDF Author: Jerome Winter
Publisher: University of Wales Press
ISBN: 1783169451
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 236

Get Book Here

Book Description
One of the few points critics and readers can agree upon when discussing the fiction popularly known as New Space Opera – a recent subgenre movement of science fiction – is its canny engagement with contemporary cultural politics in the age of globalisation. This book avers that the complex political allegories of New Space Opera respond to the recent cultural phenomenon known as neoliberalism, which entails the championing of the deregulation and privatisation of social services and programmes in the service of global free-market expansion. Providing close readings of the evolving New Space Opera canon and cultural histories and theoretical contexts of neoliberalism as a regnant ideology of our times, this book conceptualises a means to appreciate this thriving movement of popular literature.

Locating Science Fiction

Locating Science Fiction PDF Author: Andrew Milner
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 1846318424
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 257

Get Book Here

Book Description
A major, groundbreaking intervention into contemporary theoretical debates about SF. It effects a series of vital shifts in SF theory and criticism, away from prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement and towards the empirically grounded understanding of an amalgam of texts, practices and artefacts.

Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers

Science Fiction, Critical Frontiers PDF Author: NA NA
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
ISBN: 9781349628346
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 219

Get Book Here

Book Description
Science fiction has recently been identified as providing the narrative paradigm for postmodernity. This volume of essays combines theoretical discussions of the nature of science fiction, with specific studies of utopian and dystopian narratives. Alongside of this, the essays here address feminist and African American issues, the envisioning of radical alternative realities and futures, cyborgs, cyberpunk and cyber-space, age and aging, hybridity and monstrosity, and contemporary society and the postmodern condition.

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction

The Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction PDF Author: Edward James
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 9780521016575
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 330

Get Book Here

Book Description
Table of contents

The Postnational Fantasy

The Postnational Fantasy PDF Author: Masood Ashraf Raja
Publisher: McFarland
ISBN: 0786485558
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Get Book Here

Book Description
In twelve critical and interdisciplinary essays, this text examines the relationship between the fantastic in novels, movies and video games and real-world debates about nationalism, globalization and cosmopolitanism. Topics covered include science fiction and postcolonialism, issues of ethnicity, nation and transnational discourse. Altogether, these essays chart a new discursive space, where postcolonial theory and science fiction and fantasy studies work cooperatively to expand our understanding of the fantastic, while simultaneously expanding the scope of postcolonial discussions.

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory

Science Fiction and Cultural Theory PDF Author: Sherryl Vint
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781138814981
Category : Literature and society
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Get Book Here

Book Description
This book combines key theoretical statements that have become touchstones for work in the field with more recent theoretical inventions that showcase how theoretical paradigms central to science fiction such as posthumanism and mediation have become central to critical theory overall in the twenty-first century