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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Unless Someone Like You Cares A Whole Awful Lot: Apocalypse As Children’S Entertainment, Gerry Canavan
Unless Someone Like You Cares A Whole Awful Lot: Apocalypse As Children’S Entertainment, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
This article explores an unusual subset of children’s narrative, the apocalyptic environmentalist text, and argues that such texts perform the perverse ideological work of shifting blame for ecological crisis from its perpetrators (the parents’ generation) to its victims (the child who is now called upon to act). These texts transform the drama of innocence and experience that is paradigmatic of children’s narrative by destroying the child’s innocence through their very transmission, by informing them of a dire crisis they then become obliged to repair. The article’s primary examples are Captain Planet, The Lorax, WALL-E and The Butter Battle …
"A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration": Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, And Totality, Gerry Canavan
"A Dread Mystery, Compelling Adoration": Olaf Stapledon, Star Maker, And Totality, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
Using research undertaken at the Olaf Stapledon archive at the University of Liverpool, this article explores the tension between cosmopolitan optimism and cosmic pessimism that structures Stapledon's 1937 novel Star Maker, and asks whether the novel succeeds in solving the philosophical problems that first spurred Stapledon to write it. I conclude, unhappily, that it does not: while an impressive achievement, and despite a surface optimism, the book's confrontation with infinity, totality, and the sublime is ultimately depressive rather than generative of a felicitous cosmological order, requiring Stapledon to try again and again to somehow solve this philosophical conundrum in …
“I’D Rather Be In Afghanistan”: Antinomies Of Battle: Los Angeles, Gerry Canavan
“I’D Rather Be In Afghanistan”: Antinomies Of Battle: Los Angeles, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
This article reads Battle: Los Angeles (2011) against the grain to argue that the film possesses an antiwar undertow running unexpectedly counter to its surface-level pro-military politics. The article uses the antinomy structuring Battle: Los Angeles as the opportunity to explore the pro- and anti-war politics of science fiction alien invasion film more generally, as well as consider the role of cooperation with the military in Hollywood blockbusters. The article closes with a Jamesonian reading of “the army”: as a kind of utopia as registered by mainstream cultural texts like Battle: Los Angeles.
Review Of Darko Suvin's Defined By A Hollow: Essays On Utopia, Science Fiction And Political Epistemology, Gerry Canavan
Review Of Darko Suvin's Defined By A Hollow: Essays On Utopia, Science Fiction And Political Epistemology, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
This review considers Darko Suvin’s recent career anthology Defined by a Hollow with respect to debates about the relevance of Marxism and utopian critique in the context of a global neoliberal hegemony that (twenty years after Fukuyama) still imagines itself as the ‘end of history’. Suvin’s work suggests that the relationship between Marxism and aesthetics in such times is not simply a quirk of the academy, but is in fact a politically necessary conjoining of materialist praxis and quasi-religious inspiration.