Suchergebnisse

ABSTRACT
Marjorie Barnard (1897–1987) and Flora Eldershaw (1897–1956) were prolific Australian authors who co-wrote, under the pseudonym "M. Barnard Eldershaw," five novels and four works of nonfiction published between 1929 and 1947. Their final collaboration, a future fiction entitled Tomorrow and Tomorrow, first appeared in Melbourne in 1947 and was reissued by the London feminist publisher Virago in 1983. Lyman Tower Sargent's bibliography of Australian utopian fiction describes the novel thus: "Dystopia. Public opinion sampling used to limit liberty." This is a reasonable enough shorthand description of the novel's frame narrative, set in the "Tenth Commune" located somewhere in what is now the Riverina district on the border of New South Wales and Victoria, at some time in the twenty-fourth century. This article will argue, however, that the Tenth Commune is closer to a flawed eutopia than an outright dystopia; and that the novel's truly dystopian content lies in its core narrative, Knarf's novelistic account of mid-twentieth century Australia, which culminates in a quasi-apocalyptic destruction by fire of the city of Sydney. The extraordinary violence of this account will be contrasted to the essentially nonviolent character of the Tenth Commune and both will be situated in relation to Barnard's growing involvement in the pacifist Peace Pledge Union.

Since the death of Pierre Bourdieu, the leading contemporary sociologist of literature has arguably been Franco Moretti. Moretti's distinctive contribution to the field has been his attempt to apply Immanuel Wallerstein's world-systems theory to literary studies. Although Wallerstein traces the origins of the modern world-system back to the 16th century, Moretti focuses on the much shorter period since the late 18th century. This is also the historical occasion for the initial emergence of modern science fiction (SF). Andrew Milner has previously sketched out an ambitious model of the 'global SF field', which identified an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores; longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries; and a periphery comprising essentially the rest of the world. This article attempts to apply that model to the analysis of contemporary climate fiction.

ABSTRACT
There are no independently Australian translations of Thomas More's Utopia. Nor is there any equivalent in Australia to the Society for Utopian Studies in North America or the Utopian Studies Society in Europe. Nor are there any extant formal research groups or undergraduate or graduate courses in utopian studies. There are, however, distinctively Australian traditions of utopian writing, both eutopian and dystopian, and also a limited field of Australian utopian studies, essentially the work of individual scholars. This article attempts a brief description of both.

This introduction to a special issue of Thesis Eleven devoted to science fiction begins by exploring the way the genre has been handled by German and French critical theory and their Anglophone equivalents. It proceeds to a discussion of the historical sociology of the genre and, thence, to an account of what it terms the dialectic of science fiction endangerment. Finally, it concludes with a brief overview of the various contributions to the issue.

Intro -- ‎Contents -- ‎Acknowledgements -- ‎List of Figures and Tables -- ‎Figures -- ‎Tables -- ‎Introduction -- ‎Part 1. Sociology of Literature -- ‎Chapter 1. Sociology and Literature -- ‎Chapter 2. The 'English' Ideology: Literary Criticism in England and Australia -- ‎Chapter 3. The Protestant Epic and the Spirit of Capitalism -- ‎Chapter 4. On the Beach: Apocalyptic Hedonism and the Origins of Postmodernism -- ‎Chapter 5. Loose Canons and Fallen Angels -- ‎Chapter 6. Dissenting, Plebeian, but Belonging Nonetheless: Bourdieu and Williams -- ‎Chapter 7. Deconstructing National Literature: Comparative Literature, Cultural Studies and Critical Theory -- ‎Chapter 8. It's the Conscience Collective, Stupid: Philosophical Aesthetics and the Sociology of Art -- ‎Chapter 9. Science Fiction and the Literary Field -- ‎Chapter 10. World Systems and World Science Fiction -- ‎Part 2. Cultural Materialism -- ‎Chapter 11. Considerations on English Marxism -- ‎Chapter 12. Literature, History and Post-Althusserianism -- ‎Chapter 13. The Revolutions in Favour of Capital -- ‎Chapter 14. Cultural Materialism, Culturalism and Post-Culturalism: The Legacy of Raymond Williams -- ‎Chapter 15. Cultural Studies and Cultural Hegemony: Comparing Britain and Australia -- ‎Chapter 16. Class and Cultural Production: The Intelligentsia as a Social Class -- ‎Chapter 17. Left Out? Marxism, the New Left and Cultural Studies -- ‎Chapter 18. From Media Imperialism to Semioterrorism -- ‎Part 3. Science Fiction -- ‎Chapter 19. Utopia and Science Fiction in Raymond Williams -- ‎Chapter 20. Darker Cities: Urban Dystopia and Science Fiction Cinema -- ‎Chapter 21. Postmodern Gothic: Buffy, The X-Files and the Clinton Presidency -- ‎Chapter 22. Framing Catastrophe: The Problem of Ending in Dystopian Fiction

As developed by Immanuel Wallerstein and various co-thinkers, world-systems analysis is essentially an approach to economic history and historical sociology that has been largely indifferent to literary studies. This indifference is perhaps surprising given that the Annales school, which clearly influenced Wallerstein's work, produced a foundational account of the emergence of modern western literature in Lucien Febvre and Henri-Jean Martin's L'apparition du livre (1958). More recently, literary scholars have attempted to apply this kind of analysis directly to their own field. The best-known instances are probably Pascale Casanova's La republique mondiale des lettres (1999), Franco Moretti's Distant Reading (2013) and the Warwick Research Collective's Combined and Uneven Development (2015). More recently still, Andrew Milner in Australia and Jerry Määttä in Sweden have sought to apply "distant reading" more specifically to the genre of science fiction. Milner's model of the "global SF field" identifies an original Anglo-French core, supplemented by more recent American and Japanese cores, longstanding Russian, German, Polish and Czech semi-peripheries, an emergent Chinese semi-periphery, and a periphery comprising the rest of the world. This essay attempts to apply that model to what Adam Trexler has termed "Anthropocene fictions" and Daniel Bloom "cli-fi", which we treat here as a significant sub-genre of contemporary science fiction.

Despite the occasional upsurge of climate change scepticism amongst conservative politicians and journalists, there is a near-consensus amongst scientists that current levels of atmospheric greenhouse gas are sufficient to alter global weather patterns to possibly disastrous effect. Like the hole in the ozone layer as described by Bruno Latour, global warming is a 'hybrid' natural-social-discursive phenomenon. And science fiction (SF) seems to occupy a critical location within this nature/culture nexus. This paper takes as its subject matter what Daniel Bloom dubs 'cli-fi'. It seeks to describe how a genre defined in relation to science finds itself obliged to produce fictional responses to problems actually thrown up by contemporary scientific research. It argues against the view that 'catastrophic' SF is best understood as a variant of the kind of 'apocalyptic' fiction inspired by the Christian Book of Revelation, or Apokalypsis, on the grounds that this tends to downplay the historical novelty of SF as a genre defined primarily in relation to modern science and technology. And it examines the narrative strategies pursued in both print and audio-visual SF texts that deal with anthropogenic climate change.