The Science Fiction Of Poetics And The Avant Garde Imagination

How the tropes of science fiction infuse and inform avant-garde poetics and many other kindred arts This insightful, playful monograph from Golston does exactly what it advertises: modeling poetics based on how poetry (and some parallel artistic endeavors) has filtered through a century-plus of science fiction. This is not a book about science fiction in and of itself, but it is a book about the resonances of science-fiction tropes and ideas in poetic language. The germ of Golston's project is a throwaway line in Robert Smithson's Entropy and the New Monuments about how cinema supplanted nature as inspiration for many of his fellow artists: "The movies give a ritual pattern to the lives of many artists, and this induces a kind of 'low budget' mysticism, which keeps them in a perpetual trance." Golston charts how the demotic appeal of sci-fi, much like that of the B-movie, cross-pollinated into poetry and other branches of the avant garde. Golston creates what he calls a "regular Rube Goldberg machine" of a critical apparatus, drawing on Walter Benjamin, Roman Jakobson, and Gilles Deleuze. He starts by acknowledging that, per the important work of Darko Suvin to situate science fiction critically, the genre is premised on cognitive estrangement. But he is not interested in the specific nuts and bolts of science fiction as it exists but rather how science fiction has created a model not only for other poets but also for musicians and landscape artists. Golston's critical lens moves around quite a bit, but he begins with familiar enough subjects: Edgar Rice Burroughs, Mina Loy, William S. Burroughs. From there he moves into more "alien" terrain: Ed Dorn's long poem Gunslinger, the discombobulated work of Clark Coolidge. Sun Ra, Ornette Coleman, and Jimi Hendrix all come under consideration. The result of Golston's restless, rich scholarship is the first substantial monograph on science fiction and avant-garde poetics, using Russian Formalism, Frankfurt School dialectics, and Deleuzian theory to show how the avant-garde inherently follows the parameters of sci fi, in both theme and form.

The Poetics of the Avant-garde in Literature, Arts, and Philosophy presents a range of chapters written by a highly international group of scholars from disciplines such as literary studies, arts, theatre, and philosophy to analyze the ambitions of avant-garde artists. Together, these essays highlight the interdisciplinary scope of the historic avant-garde and the interconnectedness of its artists. Contributors analyze topics such as abstraction and estrangement across the arts, the imaginary dialogue between Lev Yakubinsky and Mikhail Bakhtin, the problem of the “masculine ethos” in the Russian avant-garde, the transformation of barefoot dancing, Kazimir Malevich’s avant-garde poetic experimentations, the ecological imagination of the Polish avant-garde, science-fiction in the Russian avant-garde cinema, and the almost forgotten history of the avant-garde children’s literature in Germany. The chapters in this collection open a new critical discourse about the avant-garde movement in Europe and reshape contemporary understandings of it.

Science-fiction criticism. Focuses on literary & scientific material.

Are we living in a post-temporal age? Has history come to an end? This book argues against the widespread perception of postmodern narrativity as atemporal and ahistorical, claiming that postmodernity is characterized by an explosion of heterogeneous narrative "timeshapes" or chronotopes. Chronological linearity is being challenged by quantum physics that implies temporal simultaneity; by evolutionary theory that charts multiple time-lines; and by religious and political millenarianism that espouses an apocalyptic finitude of both time and space. While science, religion, and politics have generated new narrative forms of apprehending temporality, literary incarnations can be found in the worlds of science fiction. By engaging classic science-fictional conventions, such as time travel, alternative history, and the end of the world, and by situating these conventions in their cultural context, this book offers a new and fresh perspective on the narratology and cultural significance of time.

For nearly two thousand years, the future was a realm reserved for prophets, poets, astrologers, and practitioners of deliberative rhetoric. Then in 1659 the French writer Jacques Guttin published his romance Epigone, which carried the subtitle "the history of the future century." Unlike the stories of space travel that were popular at the time, or the tales of travel to distant earthly lands which had long been a familiar literary genre, Guttin's romance described human societies displaced by time as well as by space and heroes not of his own day but of a future age. Paul Alkon's Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the earliest works of prose fiction set in future time, the forgotten writings of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries that are the precursors of such well-known masterpieces of the form as H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984. The first secular story to break the imaginative barrier against tales of the future, Epigone marked the emergence of a form unknown to classical, medieval, or renaissance literature. Guttin's courageous displacement of narrative into future time was followed by writers such as Samuel Madden, Louis-Sebastien Mercier, Cousin de Granville, Mary Shelley, and Emile Souvestre, who wrote books with such titles as Memoirs of the Twentieth Century, The Year 2440, The Last Man, and The World As It Will Be. Most extraordinary, though, may be Felix Bodin's great metafictional Le roman de l'avenir, "the novel of the future." Both a narrative of the future and a poetics of the new genre, this book identified in the previous isolated works set in future time a situation rarely encountered in literary history, in which the possibility for a new form clearly existed without yet being altogether achieved. In the introduction to his uncompleted novel, Bodin presented his vision of the futuristic novel as a literature of realism, morality, and fantasy. His remarkably astute attempt to define the aesthetics of a major transformation in the relation between literature and time still stands as the basis for the poetics of futuristic fiction. Tracing the early literary history of what became a major form of modern fiction, Origins of Futuristic Fiction examines the key works of the earliest writers of the genre not for what they betray of past expectations but for what they reveal about the formal problems that needed to be resolved before tales of the future could achieve their full power in the works of later novelists.

Back in print for the first time since the 1980s, this book is a touchstone for literary and theoretical criticism of science fiction and related genres. Alongside the 1979 text, this edition contains three additional essays by Suvin that update and reconsider the terms of his original intervention, as well as a new introduction and preface.

From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of The Handmaid's Tale At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with the literary form we have come to know as "science fiction,” a relationship that has been lifelong, stretching from her days as a child reader in the 1940s, through her time as a graduate student at Harvard, where she worked on the Victorian ancestor of the form, and continuing as a writer and reviewer. This book brings together her three heretofore unpublished Ellmann Lectures from 2010: "Flying Rabbits," which begins with Atwood's early rabbit superhero creations, and goes on to speculate about masks, capes, weakling alter egos, and Things with Wings; "Burning Bushes," which follows her into Victorian otherlands and beyond; and "Dire Cartographies," which investigates Utopias and Dystopias. In Other Worlds also includes some of Atwood's key reviews and thoughts about the form. Among those writers discussed are Marge Piercy, Rider Haggard, Ursula Le Guin, Ishiguro, Bryher, Huxley, and Jonathan Swift. She elucidates the differences (as she sees them) between "science fiction" proper, and "speculative fiction," as well as between "sword and sorcery/fantasy" and "slipstream fiction." For all readers who have loved The Handmaid's Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Year of the Flood, In Other Worlds is a must. Note: The electronic version of this title contains over thirty additional, illuminating eBook-exclusive illustrations by the author.

The Poetics of Science Fiction uniquely uses the science of linguistics to explore the literary universe of science fiction. Developing arguments about specific texts and movements throughout the twentieth-century, the book is a readable discussion of this most popular of genres. It also uses the extreme conditions offered by science fiction to develop new insights into the language of the literary context. The discussion ranges from a detailed investigation of new words and metaphors, to the exploration of new worlds, from pulp science fiction to the genre's literary masterpieces, its special effects and poetic expression. Speculations and extrapolations throughout the book engage the reader in thought-experiments and discussion points, with selected further reading making it a useful source book for classroom and seminar.