Leftist Constructs
by Diana Pho
Upcoming article for Overland Magazine
"Diana M Pho on steampunk and progressive politics" "Diana M Pho on steampunk and progressive politics"
On Being in the Moment By Ivy Helman
Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project
Time. We mark years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. We mark seasons. We mark life events. ... more Time. We mark years, months, days, hours, minutes and seconds. We mark seasons. We mark life events. We live our lives in time: both circular and linear. Time began before we did and time will continue after we cannot experience it any further. Some say we repeat time with rebirth. Others suggest that we only have one lifetime of which we should make the most. Still others suggest there is existence outside of time with concepts like infinity and eternal life.
No One Is Safe from the Parodist (Part 3) by Barbara Ardinger
Originally published on the Feminism and Religion project
Vader has lost the helmet and is now old and fat and speaks in a tenor voice. He’s obviously the smartest guy in the... more
Vader has lost the helmet and is now old and fat and speaks in a tenor voice. He’s obviously the smartest guy in the room.
I am not the first to mess with Shakespeare. In 1680, a hack named Nahum Tate rewrote King Lear to give it a happy ending (Cordelia marries Edgar and they assume the throne), and in 1699, Colley Cibber “adapted” Richard III. In the 19th and 20th centuries, Shakespeare’s plays were operacized, balletized, and Broadwayized (The Boys from Syracuse, West Side Story) In 1868, French operatic composer Ambroise Thomas wrote a Hamlet in which Ophelia sings a long aria and dies. After wild applause, she gets up and sings some more. I’ve seen this opera.
Space Jesuits and Galactic theocracy: Identifying four forms of dystopic Catholicism in Science Fiction
by Jim Clarke
A seminar presented at Saor Ollscoil na hEireann, 16th May 2012.
Viaje en el tiempo: el papel de la nostalgia en la ciencia-ficción de Iván Molina Jiménez
Este trabajo analiza la presencia de la nostalgia en dos cuentos de viaje en el tiempo del historiador y escritor... more Este trabajo analiza la presencia de la nostalgia en dos cuentos de viaje en el tiempo del historiador y escritor costarricense Iván Molina Jiménez. Primero explora las temáticas presentes en la obra de ciencia ficción de Molina Jiménez y luego se concentra en los cuentos “La miel de los mudos” e “Inmigrante frustrado”. El trabajo encuentra la presencia de una mirada nostálgica en esos cuentos que visualiza el pasado como un simulacro y fantasea con él. Se devela así una “nostalgia redentora” que visita el pasado en un intento extremo por permanecer en él, pero sin la posibilidad de los viajantes de quedarse ni de llevarse ese tiempo ido a su presente-futuro.
'The Shell I'm In': Illyria and Monstrous Embodiment
In Joss Whedon: The Complete Companion. Ed. Mary Alice Money. London: Titan, 2012.
“Android Gods: Philip K. Dick after Postmodernism”
published in: Textual Practice 25-4 (August 2011), 823-830.
The quest for the canonization of Philip K. Dick, with his inimitable combination of pulp bravado and intellectual... more The quest for the canonization of Philip K. Dick, with his inimitable combination of pulp bravado and intellectual sophistication, has long animated fans and critics. In the initial recognition awarded him within the science fiction (SF) community, concomitant with the establishment of science fiction studies as an academic sub-discipline in the 1970s, this frequently led to overly forceful readings of Dick’s work. Whilst they established the author’s reputation as a leading commentator on the alienation and commodification of post-war America, some Marxist critics also claimed Dick as one of their own when his political sensibilities were much closer to the anarcho-pacifism of the literary and bohemian Berkeley of the 1940s and early 1950s. In the same breath, Dick was declared a bona fide philosopher. In truth, Dick’s reading in Greek and Enlightenment thought never advanced much beyond encyclopaedia entries, and where imposed on his novels and short stories, it did little to alter what his acute literary sensibility had not already laid open in some of the most penetrating analyses of US capitalism in existence.
Surrealist Poetry Turns Lethal: Kawamata Chiaki’s “Death Sentences” Reviewed
Originally appeared at Vol. 1 Brooklyn in April, 2012.
Death Sentences is a very smart depiction of information as epidemic, spreading exponentially with little chance of... more Death Sentences is a very smart depiction of information as epidemic, spreading exponentially with little chance of being contained. “The Gold of Time” functions quite well as a metaphor for information’s infectious qualities and the futility of containment, especially in the digital age. What results is a Lawrence Lessig-ian denial of the concrete nature of intellectual property, a story that bears witness to the very phenomenon that Lessig’s Free Culture seeks to legitimize: here is information; it is viral and it cannot be stopped, period.
UnHoming Pigeons: the Postal Principle in Lynn Hershman Leeson & Hussein Chalayan
by Lynn Turner
published in Derrida Today, 5.1. 2012
In this article I bring together Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray’s engagements with Sigmund Freud’s vexed attempt to... more In this article I bring together Jacques Derrida and Luce Irigaray’s engagements with Sigmund Freud’s vexed attempt to step beyond the pleasure principle. Derrida’s speculations on the name, the house and the practice of Freud find him inadvertently rewriting the conditions of the autobiographical as that which erases as much as inscribes, while Irigaray requires a sexually different modelling of what we call language if the experience of the girl is to be addressed. Yet Irigaray uncannily repeats the teleological gesture of laying claim to a legacy, diagnosed in Freud by Derrida, even as this legacy is newly imagined as that of the feminine to which Freud remained blind. I then interweave these revised stakes of the fort-da game as they are expressed in two experimental films; Lynn Hershman Leeson’s feature Conceiving Ada (USA, 1997) and Hussein Chalayan’s short Absent Presence (UK/Turkey, 2005). One self-consciously concerns the recovery of ‘lost’ women from history (da!), the other investigates the treatment of the foreigner staged with an all-female cast (in which the instability of foreign objects can secure no fortification for the scientific subject). The films differently engage fantasies concerning genetics, and differently engage the projection of a legacy as teleological ambition. Privileging Derrida’s transformation of the pleasure into the postal principle as that which invokes ‘Tele–without telos’, I ask after the transmissibility of this ambition.
Viewpoints: SF Egypt at the Petrie Museum', Foundation Journal, 110, Winter 2011
Every day I go to work, I travel back in time. Admittedly this is restricted to Egypt and part of northern Sudan, but... more Every day I go to work, I travel back in time. Admittedly this is restricted to Egypt and part of northern Sudan, but the Nile Valley is a rich and complex area of endless fascination. Ancient Egypt has exerted a hold on western imagination since modern European exploration of the Nile Valley in the 1800s onwards. Stories told about Egypt – ancient and modern – have filtered our vision of the past in a manner that owes much to western conceptions around 'strangeness', superstition, the orient, power and awe. These visual filters also affect science fiction versions of Ancient Egypt.
Re-/deconstructing the Yellow Brick Road: Gender, Power and Tin Man
Accepted to _Colloquy: Text, Theory, Critique_, issue 23, June 2012.
Judy Garland’s Technicolor journey down the Yellow Brick Road is arguably one of the best loved and most watched films... more Judy Garland’s Technicolor journey down the Yellow Brick Road is arguably one of the best loved and most watched films in cinema history, and _The Wizard of Oz_ has been remade and adapted, its characters and tropes incorporated into other stories, many of which repeat the patriarchal ideologies of the MGM film. Sci Fi Channel mini-series _Tin Man_ presents a darker, futuristic ‘Oz’ story, that illustrates how a text can subvert the ideologies of its intertext without mocking or deriding it. As this paper will show, Tin Man does not simply transport Dorothy into a more modern setting, but subverts the patriarchal ideologies underpinning the perennially screened 1939 MGM film.Tin Man challenges patriarchal assumptions about gender, portraying a female hero who is strong, brave and assertive, but also embraces a more ‘feminine’ style of leadership, rather than performing as a male hero ‘in drag’. While stories celebrating ‘brother bonds’ abound, it is far more likely for sisters – literal and figurative – to be pitted against one another, frequently in competition for a man, if they are present at all. Tin Man also subverts this trend, emphasising the empowering nature of sisterhood: the main drive of the narrative is for the protagonist to rediscover her superpowers by remembering her past, reconnecting with her long-lost sister and joining together to defeat the true ‘big bad’ of the ‘O.Z.’. Through its relationship with The Wizard of Oz and other narratives, Tin Man exposes and subverts their patriarchal underpinnings, while arguable avoiding alienating fans of the MGM film.
Cyborgs
Written by Lindsey Rundlett. 2012.
A shortish paper about media and cultural representations of cyborgs A shortish paper about media and cultural representations of cyborgs
Download (.pdf) Mary Shelley Influenced And Eli Roth Approved: A Review Of “Hemlock Grove” By Brian McGreevy
Originally appeared on Vol. 1 Brooklyn in March, 2012.
Hemlock Grove is also a coming of age tale, mainly about young Peter Rumancek, the lupine loner new to a broken down... more Hemlock Grove is also a coming of age tale, mainly about young Peter Rumancek, the lupine loner new to a broken down town just outside Pittsburgh with a newly developed dead body problem. If Roman Godfrey is a creature of wealth and power culled from the mind of Bret Easton Ellis, than Peter Rumancek is but a hairier Holden Caulfield, a gypsy boy with a ponytail the world loves to pull.