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English Language and Literature Commons™
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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Science Fiction And Utopia In The Anthropocene, Gerry Canavan
Science Fiction And Utopia In The Anthropocene, Gerry Canavan
English Faculty Research and Publications
This article takes up science-fictional visions of the future against the “deep time” of the Anthropocene in order to explore the possibilities for utopia that remain in an era that only seems capable of producing necrofuturological dread. The piece surveys a wide range of contemporary literature and film; the key prose authors discussed are Octavia E. Butler, Margaret Atwood, Ernest Callenbach, and Kim Stanley Robinson. These texts are used to identify patterns of thought that have become habitual in the cultural moment of the Anthropocene, and they are explored as critiques of, alternatives to, and lines of flight away from …
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 …