Arts and Humanities Commons^™

From Recovery To Discovery: Ethnic American Science Fiction And (Re)Creating The Future, Daoine S. Bachran

English Language and Literature ETDs

My project assesses how science fiction by writers of color challenges the scientific racism embedded in genetics, nuclear development, digital technology, and molecular biology, demonstrating how these fields are deployed disproportionately against people of color. By contextualizing current scientific development with its often overlooked history and exposing the full life cycle of scientific practices and technological changes, ethnic science fiction authors challenge science’s purported objectivity and make room for alternative scientific methods steeped in Indigenous epistemologies. The first chapter argues that genetics is deployed disproportionally against black Americans, from the pseudo-scientific racial classifications of the nineteenth century and earlier through …

Women Of Color In Speculative Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography Of Authors, Rebecca M. Marrall

A Collection of Open Access Books and Monographs

Women of Color in Speculative Fiction: An Annotated Bibliography is tertiary electronic resource which focuses upon authors who are women of color (i.e., non-Caucasian) and who write speculative fiction for adult and young adult audiences. Examples of these authors include Octavia Butler, N. K. Jemisin, Daina Chaviano, Jewelle Gomez, and Malinda Lo. For some background, “speculative fiction” is an umbrella term for science fiction, fantasy, and some horror, all of which have literary and popular merit (Urbanski 2007). Historically, this field has been dominated by male authors of largely Caucasian descent; women and/or people of color have not been equitably …

Framing The Future: Imagining The City Through The Lens Of Film, Sofia Zavala Ferreira

Architecture Thesis Prep

With a great interest in the relationship between film and architecture, this project establishes its subject matter on the possibilities presented in science fiction cinema and speculative design. By extracting attributes from these that would influence design and architectural concerns, a bridge between the disconnected imagined and real, current and future, can be created through the creation of a speculative scenario and a narrative. It seeks to utilize cinematic design and storytelling conventions to successfully convey the desired atmosphere, architectural realities, and life conditions of a fictional city. By utilizing advanced digital techniques often used in cinema itself, including but …

Anachronism In Early French Futuristic Fiction, Arthur B. Evans

Global Language Studies Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

Surrealism And Science Fiction, Arthur B. Evans

Global Language Studies Faculty publications

No abstract provided.

"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 …

Digital Integration, Jacob C. Boccio

USF Tampa Graduate Theses and Dissertations

Artificial intelligence is an emerging technology; something far beyond smartphones, cloud integration, or surgical microchip implantation. Utilizing the work of Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, and Steven Shaviro, this thesis investigates technology and artificial intelligence through the lens of the cinema. It does this by mapping contemporary concepts and the imagined worlds in film as an intersection of reality and fiction that examines issues of individual identity and alienation. I look at a non-linear timeline of films involving machine advancement, machine intelligence, and stages of post-human development; Elysium (2013) and Surrogates (2009) are about technology as an extension of the self, …

Confessions Of A Media Literacy Scholar-Practitioner: Job Market Advantages, Research Agenda Challenges, And Theory-Driven Production, Christopher Boulton

Journal of Media Literacy Education

This essay explores how higher education’s move away from the liberal arts tradition of learning by thinking and towards more vocational “experiential” approaches has implications for media literacy educators’ career options, scholarly identities, and teaching strategies. Specifically, I consider my own negotiation of increasing administrative and student demands for “hands-on” production courses by confessing both my advantages on the job market and my post-hire challenges in articulating a clear research agenda. I then conclude with a case study of how I repurposed my scholar-practitioner identity and used critical theory to drive production by bringing film students into a cultural studies …

Mccarthyism And The Id: "Forbidden Planet" (1956) As A Veiled Criticism Of Mccarthyism In 1950s America, William Lorenzo

Dissertations, Theses, and Capstone Projects

Many American science fiction films of the 1950s served as political allegories commenting on the post-war fears of the nation. One major fear was the fear of communist infiltration: the Red Scare. In films of this era, the enemy walks as one of us. In most of these films, the alien other, the monster from without, takes on a familiar form. But at the height of all these fears comes the fear of the enemy from within, an enemy that winds up destroying us from the inside out, as can be seen in Forbidden Planet (1956). In this film, a …

One’S A Crowd: Gendered Language In Ursula Le Guin’S The Left Hand Of Darkness, Kayla Stephenson

Senior Capstone Theses

Deconstruction questions the very meaning of words put into an assigned use. Yet how can we imply meaning unto words that do not exist in our language? To have a word for an intended use is to have an implied concept behind it, and where there is no concept there can be no word. Consequently, to construct a concept outside of the realm of human and earthly possibility is to create something outside of the limits of the human language. Concerning gender, to imagine a third or a singular gender is to be unable to describe such a concept without …

Religion And Science Fiction, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

As announced by its title, this multidisciplinary book focuses on the intersection between religion and science fiction. Several perspectives are addressed by scholars from different disciplines: theology, literature, history, music, and anthropology. Thus, gathering a range of distinct voices and approaches, this work edited by James F. McGrath shows how multifaceted and multicultural the science's fiction treatment of religion is.

Explicit And Implicit Religion In Doctor Who And Star Trek, James F. Mcgrath

James F. McGrath

It has often been proposed that the original series of Star Trek reflected a modern, enlightenment perspective on religion, and that subsequent spinoffs like Deep Space Nine moved in a more post-modern direction. Doctor Who, the longest running science fiction show, provides an interesting basis for comparison. Both television shows offer similar tropes, and in both instances, the rhetoric that claims to explain away religion in scientific terms ends up treating it as literally true. Both shows depict our universe as populated with “natural gods” which are sometimes explicitly identified with the gods and demons of ancient human religious literature.

Husband Hunting In Africa, Marleen S. Barr

Publications and Research

This is a short story.

What Has Coruscant To Do With Jerusalem? A Response And Reflections At The Crossroads Of Hebrew Bible And Science Fiction, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

No abstract provided.

"Introduction" To Theology And Science Fiction, James F. Mcgrath

Scholarship and Professional Work - LAS

What is the difference between a god and a powerful alien? Can an android have a soul, or be considered a person with rights? Can we imagine biblical stories being retold in the distant future on planets far from Earth? Whether your interest is in Christianity in the future, or the Jedi in the present--and whether your interest in the Jedi is focused on real-world adherents or the fictional religion depicted on the silver screen--this book will help you explore the intersection between theology and science fiction across a range of authors and stories, topics and questions.

Throughout this volume, …

Heart Of The Machine, Lauren Liebowitz Mfa

All Student Scholarship

Rion lives as a roach in the down-below, sharing what little she has with other kids in need. An encounter with a dead body leaves her with what seems like someone else's memories in her head--Obsidian, one of the synthetic humanoid Protectors who battle against unknown, inhuman invaders. Rion's everyday struggle to survive and keep her friends safe is complicated by this unfamiliar, unwanted presence. As she searches for a cure or at least an explanation, she comes to the attention of different powers at play who want access to Obsidian's memories, at any cost. Soon she is fighting not …

The Entertainment Is Terrorism: The Subversive Politics Of Doing Anything At All, Joe Woods

Theses and Dissertations

When the body is observed through a certain combination of technologies, there can be subversive politics to doing anything at all. The nature of media and biopolitics has permitted for a set of systems aimed at total control of the human body; a power which can permeate all facets of life. This thesis is a collection of essays which argues that speculative fiction contains multitudes of approaches to biopolitical discourse, permitting the reader of the text to approach politics from their own set of experiences, but not allowing the political to be ignored. These chapters contain three separate but interrelated …

Brazilian Surrealism: The Art Of Walter Lewy, Glauco Adorno

LSU Master's Theses

Walter Max Lewy (1905 – 1995) was a Surrealist painter and graphic designer who worked in Brazil for most of his career. Born in Germany to a Jewish family, the artist was forced to flee Europe in the eve of the Second World War, finding a safe haven in the city of São Paulo. The city’s budding modern art scene provided solid ground for Lewy’s art to flourish. His achievements epitomize the global occurrence of Modernism, in its manifestations outside the traditional Western artistic centers of the world. This thesis is the first comprehensive analysis of Walter Lewy’s life and …

Global Homesickness In William Gibson’S Blue Ant Trilogy, Sean Scanlan

Publications and Research

This article explores theories of home, homesickness, and identity instability as they occur in William Gibson’s Blue Ant trilogy, which consists of three novels: Pattern Recognition (2003), Spook Country (2007), and Zero History (2010). In order to clarify this collision and underscore the importance of cultural and aesthetic codes of uneven globalization, this article offers a character study focused through the place-based intensities of global homesickness. Each character has a strained relationship with home: Cayce Pollard only feels at home while reading and writing in an online film forum; Hollis Henry wonders if she might be considered homeless, even though …

Science Fiction, Lisa Yaszek, Jason W. Ellis

Publications and Research

Literary and cultural critics call science fiction the premiere story form of modernity because it relates the adventures of educated men and women who use science and technology to reshape the material world and build new, hopefully better societies. As such, it is no surprise that many authors working in this popular genre explore how educated men and women might use science and technology to reshape the physical body and build new, hopefully better versions of humanity itself. Yet, lingering even in the most optimistic imaginings of a posthuman future is the doubt that these transformations will be evenly distributed …

Techno-Apocalypse: Technology, Religion, And Ideology In Bryan Singer’S H+, Edward Brennan

Books/Book chapters

This essay critically analyses the digital series H+. In the near future, adults who can afford them, have replaced tablets and cell phones with nanotechnology implants. The H+ implant acts as a medical diagnostic and can overlay the user's senses with a computer interface. The apocalypse comes in the form of a computer virus which infects the H+ network and instantly kills one third of humanity. The series represents the anxiety and religiosity that surrounds the possible social consequences of digital technology. It also explores the tensions and intersections between technology and faith. This essay makes the case, however, that …

The Past Of Japanese Science Fiction And Fantasy Movies, Aaron Gerow

Aaron Gerow