Estranging history: alterity and capitalism in speculative fiction

Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism, my dissertation attempts to achieve a non-hierarchical understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction. The objective of my thesis is to outline the political potential shared across the full spectrum of speculative fiction, along with its specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context of production. My main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an anamorphic perspective by which the novel interprets and interrogates and conceptualises historical reality in a totalising manner. Each chapter deals with texts that productively engage with their context of production and are exemplary of major currents in contemporary speculative fiction. Chapter 1 deals with China Miéville’s Bas-Lag trilogy and its metaphorical use of Weird manifestations to assert a Marxist understanding of economic crises and promote revolutionary praxis. Chapter 2 examines neo-slave narratives in Octavia Butler’s Kindred and Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad and argues that these novels implement speculative fiction tropes to render visible the afterlives of slavery in contemporary conditions of existence. Chapter 3 explores contemporary dystopian fiction in Jeff Noon’s Falling out of Cars and Mike McCormack’s Notes from a Coma, showing how the texts challenge cultural studies of postmodern schizophrenia. Chapter 4 analyses the use of social reproduction as the basis for patriarchal violence in the feminist narratives of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale and Anne Charnock’s Dreams Before the Start of Time

Four Festivals and a City: A critique of Actor-Network Theory as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of Flagship Festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004

This thesis is a critique of the suitability of Actor-Network Theory (ANT) as an approach to understanding the emergence and development of four flagship festivals in Kilkenny from 1964 to 2004. The thesis compares Kilkenny’s four catalyst festivals (The Kilkenny Beer Festival, Kilkenny Arts Week, The Confederation of Kilkenny Festival and the Cat Laughs Comedy Festival) and assesses the ability of the ANT approach to analyse the festival product, organisation, and power flow of each. It examines the ability of ANT to understand the socio-cultural impacts of the festivals on the city of Kilkenny, its tourism infrastructure and built heritage. Utilising two subtly different interpretations (Fox, 2000 and Porsander 2005) of Michael Callon’s phases of emergence (1986, 1991), ANT is used to trace the differences in the origins of these festival committees, their emergence or translation from, and into, other networks and the actor-networks that reach beyond Kilkenny. It highlights the multiple organisational variations in the festival committees that become visible through the selected approach and its suitability for interrogating the varying contexts and topologies of these city-changing festivals

Whiteface

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look

Whiteface

This study originates in the observation that improv comedy or improvised theater has such a vast majority of white people practicing it, while other improvisational or comedic art forms (jazz, freestyle rap, stand up) are historically grounded in and marked as Black cultural production. What it is about improv that makes it such a white space? Can an absence be an object of study? If so, what is there to study? Where should one look

The Art of Movies

Movie is considered to be an important art form; films entertain, educate, enlighten and inspire audiences. Film is a term that encompasses motion pictures as individual projects, as well as — in metonymy — the field in general. The origin of the name comes from the fact that photographic film (also called filmstock) has historically been the primary medium for recording and displaying motion pictures. Many other terms exist — motion pictures (or just pictures or “picture”), the silver screen, photoplays, the cinema, picture shows, flicks — and commonly movies

Refiguring Prose Style: Possibilities for Writing Pedagogy

For about two decades, say Johnson and Pace, the discussion of how to address prose style in teaching college writing has been stuck, with style standing in as a proxy for other stakes in the theory wars. The traditional argument is evidently still quite persuasive to some—that teaching style is mostly a matter of teaching generic conventions through repetition and practice. Such a position usually presumes the traditional view of composition as essentially a service course, one without content of its own. On the other side, the shortcomings of this argument have been much discussed—that it neglects invention, revision, context, meaning, even truth; that it is not congruent with research; that it ignores 100 years of scholarship establishing composition\u27s intellectual territory beyond service. The discussion is stuck there, and all sides have been giving it a rest in recent scholarship. Yet style remains of vital practical interest to the field, because everyone has to teach it one way or another. A consequence of the impasse is that a theory of style itself has not been well articulated. Johnson and Pace suggest that moving the field toward a better consensus will require establishing style as a clearer subject of inquiry. Accordingly, this collection takes up a comprehensive study of the subject. Part I explores the recent history of composition studies, the ways it has figured and all but effaced the whole question of prose style. Part II takes to heart Elbow\u27s suggestion that composition and literature, particularly as conceptualized in the context of creative writing courses, have something to learn from each other. Part III sketches practical classroom procedures for heightening students\u27 abilities to engage style, and part IV explores new theoretical frameworks for defining this vital and much neglected territory. The hope of the essays here—focusing as they do on historical, aesthetic, practical, and theoretical issues—is to awaken composition studies to the possibilities of style, and, in turn, to rejuvenate a great many classrooms.https://digitalcommons.usu.edu/usupress_pubs/1156/thumbnail.jp

Paradigm shift : how the evolution of two generations of home consoles, arcades, and computers influenced American culture, 1985-1995.

As of 2016, unlike many popular media forms found here in the United States, video games possess a unique influence, one that gained its own a large widespread appeal, but also its own distinct cultural identity created by millions of fans both here stateside and across the planet. Yet, despite its significant contributions, outside of the gaming's arcade golden age of the early 1980s, the history of gaming post Atari shock goes rather unrepresented as many historians simply refuse to discuss the topic for trivial reasons thus leaving a rather noticeable gap within the overall history. One such important aspect not covered by the majority of the scholarship and the primary focus of thesis argues that the history of early modern video games in the North American market did not originate during the age of Atari in the 1970s and early 1980s. Instead, the real genesis of today's market and popular gaming culture began with the creation and establishment of the third and fourth generation of video games, which firmly solidified gaming as both a multi-billion dollar industry and as an accepted form of entertainment in the United States. This project focuses on the ten-year resurrection of the US video game industry from 1985 to 1995. Written as a case study, the project looks into the three main popular hardware mediums of the late 1980s and 1990s through a pseudo-business, cultural, and technological standpoint that ran parallel with the current events at the time. Through this evaluation of the home consoles, personal computers, and the coin operated arcade machines, gaming in America transformed itself from a perceived fad into a serious multi-billion dollar industry while at the same time, slowly gained popular acceptance. Furthermore, this study will examine the country's love-hate relationship with gaming by looking into reactions towards a Japanese-dominated market, the coming of popular computer gaming, the influence of the bit-wars, and the issue of violence that aided in the establishment of the Entertainment Software Rating Board (ESRB). In order to undertake such a massive endeavor, the project utilizes various sources that include newspapers, magazine articles, US government documents, scholarly articles, video game manuals, commercials, and popular websites to complete the work. Furthermore, another vital source came from firsthand experience playing several of these popular video games from across the decades in question, which include such consoles as the Nintendo Entertainment System, Super Nintendo, Genesis, home computer, and several notable arcade titles. The project's goal and its four main chapters serves as a historical viewpoint of towards neglected video game industry during the third and fourth generation of gaming and the influence it possess in the United States... 'Paradigm Shift...' examines the often-overlooked early modern history of video games from 1985-1995 and how they would go on to become a larger part of American culture. Each chapter attempts to explain the growing influence gaming has had via home console, computer, and arcades in the US market, and in turn show the origins of today's modern gaming market... The significance of 'Paradigm Shift...' comes down to one word, acceptance. Despite the controversy it generated before and during the ten critical years of its rebirth, what the gaming industry did right was breaking the notion that video games were simply a popular craze. Unlike the second generation that only fed this belief, the third and fourth generation of gaming proved this assumption wrong. With countless successful launches of influential games across the decade, video games slowly gained the acceptance of both gamers and non-gamers alike allowing gaming to ingrain itself within the American culture. By 1995, the foundation of both the modern gaming industry and culture came into existence, and it would only become greater as the years progressed thanks to the efforts of Nintendo, Sega, and countless other developers and licensees that kept video games from falling to the wayside during this period of growth and uncertainty

Technology and Australia's Future: New technologies and their role in Australia's security, cultural, democratic, social and economic systems

Chapter 1. Introducing technology -- Chapter 2. The shaping of technology -- Chapter 3. Prediction of future technologies -- Chapter 4. The impacts of technology -- Chapter 5. Meanings, attitudes and behaviour -- Chapter 6. Evaluation -- Chapter 7. Intervention -- Conclusion - adapt or wither.This report was commisioned by Australian Council of Learned Academies