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Full-Text Articles in English Language and Literature
Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory Of Fantasy Literature, Rich Paul Cooper
Radical Realms: A Materialist Theory Of Fantasy Literature, Rich Paul Cooper
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This dissertation offers a materialist theory of fantasy as the literature of estranged cognition, an entirely novel perspective that challenges all of the existing criticism on fantasy literature by proposing an outlook that emphasizes not impossibility, but infinite possibility. During the late-Victorian period, the form of the fairy tale shifted from the literary fairy tale to ‘fantasy.’ Three formal characteristics reveal that fantasy literature derives from the fairy tale: an indication, thematically or formally, that another dimension has been entered; the making and remaking of genres—stories—in dialectically overdetermined configurations; and a textual conflation between physics and ethics that results in …
Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee
Other Tomorrows: Postcoloniality, Science Fiction And India, Suparno Banerjee
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
In this dissertation I argue that science fiction as a genre intervenes in the history-oriented discourse of postcolonial Anglophone Indian literature and refocuses attention on the nation’s future—its position in global politics, its shifting religious and social values, its rapid industrialization, the clash between orthodoxy and modernity, and ultimately the dream of a multicultural nation. Anglophone Indian science fiction also indicates India’s movement away from a nation trying to negotiate the stigma of colonialism to a nation emerging as a new world power. Thus, this genre reconstructs the Indian identity not only in the domestic sphere, but also in a …
Synaptic Boojums: Lewis Carroll, Linguistic Nonsense, And Cyberpunk, Jennifer Kelso Farrell
Synaptic Boojums: Lewis Carroll, Linguistic Nonsense, And Cyberpunk, Jennifer Kelso Farrell
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Tracing a line from Lewis Carroll to 20th-century science fiction and cyberpunk, this project establishes an alternate genealogy based on the use of linguistic nonsense. Science fiction, rather than being merely a genre defined by specific narrative devices or character traits, is instead a language in and of itself. And like any language, it must be learned in order to be understood. Carroll used nonsense as a means of subverting conventional 19th-century opinions of language and, and by extension, society. Carroll was so successful at this that in 1937 American psychiatrist Paul Schilder discussed the dangers to a child's mind …
The Future In Feminism : Reading Strategies For Feminist Theory And Science Fiction, Alcena Madeline Davis Rogan
The Future In Feminism : Reading Strategies For Feminist Theory And Science Fiction, Alcena Madeline Davis Rogan
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
Contemporary feminist theory, especially in its more dialectical manifestations, is read in this study as describing a relationship between present and future. In this reading, the work of feminist theory contains a “present;” that is, an articulation of the specific problem or question that it addresses. The work of feminist theory also contains a “future,” either implicit or explicit, and often both. An explicit “future” in feminist theory states a praxis-model or specific call-to-arms that claims political effectuality; claims that its implementation might help to ameliorate, in some way, the status quo of sexual politics. An implicit “future” in feminist …
It Came From Outer Space: The Virus, Cultural Anxiety, And Speculative Fiction, Anne-Marie Thomas
It Came From Outer Space: The Virus, Cultural Anxiety, And Speculative Fiction, Anne-Marie Thomas
LSU Doctoral Dissertations
This study seeks to explore and interrogate the “viral reality” of the 1990s, in which the virus, heavily indebted to representations of AIDS for its metaphorical power, emerged as a prominent agent in science and popular culture. What becomes apparent in both fictional and non-fictional texts of this era, however, is that the designation of “virus” transcends specific and material viral phenomena, making the virus itself a touchstone for modern preoccupations with self and other. As constituted by the human body’s interaction with pathogenic agents, the binary of self and other may be deconstructed by an interrogation of the virus …