“Evidences of Decadent Humanity”: Antianthropocentrism in Early Science Fiction

2014 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 45-65 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bryan L. Moore
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Aldo Leopold ◽  
World War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Land Community

Early science fiction (SF) is noted for, among other things, its conservatism and lack of interest in ecology. Brian Stableford, a well-known SF writer and critic, writes that "there are very few early stories with ecological themes" (1993, 395). This article shows that, in fact, many early SF works (those written between the Enlightenment and World War II) employ ecological themes, especially as applied to questioning our anthropocentrism. These works suggest that humans are but one species among many, that we are not the end of nature/history, that the natural world may be better off without us, and, in some cases, that humanity is fated to go extinct, the result of its own hubris. Such views are undoubtedly pessimistic, yet these works may also be read as warnings for humans to seek a more humble view of ourselves as members of what Aldo Leopold calls the land community.

Nature Behind Barbed Wire

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Connie Y. Chiang
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Civil Liberties ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Japanese Americans ◽  
Japanese American ◽  
World War ◽  
Us History ◽  
War Relocation Authority ◽  
The Social ◽  
Japanese Ancestry

The mass imprisonment of over 110,000 people of Japanese ancestry during World War II was one of the most egregious violations of civil liberties in US history. Removed from their homes on the temperate Pacific Coast, Japanese Americans spent the war years in ten desolate camps in the nation’s interior. Although scholars and commentators acknowledge the harsh environmental conditions of these camps, they have turned their attention to the social, political, or legal dimensions of this story. Nature Behind Barbed Wire shifts the focus to the natural world and explores how it shaped the experiences of Japanese Americans and federal officials who worked for the War Relocation Authority (WRA), the civilian agency that administered the camps. The complexities of the natural world both enhanced and constrained the WRA’s power and provided Japanese Americans with opportunities to redefine the terms and conditions of their confinement. Even as the environment compounded their feelings of despair and outrage, they also learned that their willingness (or lack thereof) to transform and adapt to the natural world could help them endure and even contest their incarceration. Ultimately, this book demonstrates that the Japanese American incarceration was fundamentally an environmental story. Japanese Americans and WRA officials negotiated the terms of confinement with each other and with a dynamic natural world.

scholarly journals Aristocratic libraries in Slovakia – status, research, history

2021 ◽  
Vol 15 (3) ◽  
pp. 427-441
Author(s):  
Michaela Sibylová
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Public Libraries ◽  
Adverse Impact ◽  
World War ◽  
The Past ◽  
Research History ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Status ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Times

The author has divided her article into two parts. The first part describes the status and research of aristocratic libraries in Slovakia. For a certain period of time, these libraries occupied an underappreciated place in the history of book culture in Slovakia. The socialist ideology of the ruling regime allowed their collections (with a few exceptions) to be merged with those of public libraries and archives. The author describes the events that affected these libraries during and particularly after the end of World War II and which had an adverse impact on the current disarrayed state and level of research. Over the past decades, there has been increased interest in the history of aristocratic libraries, as evidenced by multiple scientific conferences, exhibitions and publications. The second part of the article is devoted to a brief history of the best-known aristocratic libraries that were founded and operated in the territory of today’s Slovakia. From the times of humanism, there are the book collections of the Thurzó family and the Zay family, leading Austro-Hungarian noble families and the library of the bishop of Nitra, Zakariás Mossóczy. An example of a Baroque library is the Pálffy Library at Červený Kameň Castle. The Enlightenment period is represented by the Andrássy family libraries in the Betliar manor and the Apponyi family in Oponice. 

scholarly journals Towards a Poetics of Strangeness: Experiments in Classifying Language of Technological Novelty

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Simeone ◽  
Advaith Gundavajhala Venkata Koundinya ◽  
Anandh Ravi Kumar ◽  
Ed Finn
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Virtual Worlds ◽  
Golden Age ◽  
Margaret Atwood ◽  
Special Relationship ◽  
William Gibson ◽  
World War ◽  
The Future ◽  
Bruce Sterling

The trajectory of science fiction since World War II has been defined by its relationship with technoscientific imaginaries. In the Golden Age of the 1930s and 1940s, writers like Isaac Asimov and Robert Heinlein dreamed of the robots and rocket ships that would preoccupy thousands of engineers a few decades later. In 1980s cyberpunk, Vernor Vinge, William Gibson, and Bruce Sterling imagined virtual worlds that informed generations of technology entrepreneurs. When Margaret Atwood was asked what draws her to dystopian visions of the future, she responded, "I read the newspaper." This is not just a reiteration of the truism that science fiction is always about the present as well as the future. In fact, we will argue, science fiction is a genre defined by its special relationship with what we might term "scientific reality," or the set of paradigms, aspirations, and discourses associated with technoscientific research.

Zwischen nationalem Anspruch und lokalpolitischen Zwängen: Entstehungs- und Rezeptionsbedingungen der Kasseler Opern Louis Spohrs

2011 ◽  
Vol 52 (1-4) ◽  
pp. 311-321
Author(s):  
Wolfram Boder
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Personal Life ◽  
World War ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung ◽  
Definition Of ◽  
The City ◽  
German Opera

In 1823 Louis Spohr published an article entitled “Aufruf an deutsche Komponisten” (Appeal to German Composers) in the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung (AMZ). He did so for the purpose of encouraging young German composers to contribute to the genre of German opera. But he probably had other intentions, too. He was determined to promote his latest opera Jessonda, which he mentioned as a model for his ideas of German opera. Thus one could say that the project of “German opera” was in some aspects merely a marketing strategy.A closer look at Jessonda reveals that Spohr did certainly not think along nationalist lines. In a way its dramaturgy depicts Kant’s definition of the Enlightenment and aims at a united and enlightened mankind. So did Spohr in his personal life. And by so doing he became very popular with the liberal citizens in Kassel, the city in which he worked as “Hofkapellmeister” from 1822 to 1857. This popularity in some cases misguided him. The liberal and enlightened ideas of Spohr are so prominent in his operas that they became increasingly neglected in the 1870s when chauvinistic tendencies became more prominent. This development culminated in the 1940s when the Nazis banned Jessonda from the German stage. They did however try to make it suitable for their ideas of German opera. As Spohr’s original did resist to this violation, the “Reichsstelle für Musikbearbeitungen” commissioned an amended version. Luckily the end of World War II terminated these efforts.

A Bright New Future, With Monsters

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Steffen Hantke
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Cold War ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Korean War ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
World War ◽  
The Korean War ◽  
Science Fiction Films ◽  
The 1950S ◽  
The Cold War

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's key themes. This book focuses on American science fiction films of the 1950s, many of which are fondly remembered, yet critically dismissed. It argues that it is through the intersection of past and present, of unresolved trauma superimposed upon present anxieties, that 1950s science fiction films acquire topical relevance within their historical context. Science fiction films from the 1950s are a belated response to the national trauma of World War II and the Korean War projected onto the unsettling experience of the Cold War. With much of the critical work on the Cold War aspects of the films already delivered by other scholars, this book will weigh in on the side of the argument that has, as yet, remained critically neglected—the side of past trauma: on World War II and the Korean War, and their troubling legacy in the first decade of the American Century.

scholarly journals Emigration in Estonian Literature: “Self” and “Other” in the Context of European Literature

2018 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 341
Author(s):  
Anneli Mihkelev
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
World War I ◽  
Science Fiction ◽  
Traumatic Experience ◽  
Historical Narratives ◽  
World War ◽  
New Paradigm ◽  
Common People ◽  
Political Terror ◽  
National Ideology

The experience of emigration generated a new paradigm in Estonian culture and literature. After World War II Sweden became a new homeland for many people. Estonian culture and literature suddenly became divided into two parts. The political terror imposed restrictions on literature in homeland and the national ideology limited literature in the initial years of exile. Both were closed communities and were monolingual systems in a cultural sense because these systems avoided dialogue and the influence of other signs. It was a traumatic experience for nation and culture where the totalitarian political power and trauma have allied. The normal cultural communication was destroyed. But the most important thing at this time was memory, not just memory but entangled memory, which emigrants carried with them to the new homeland and which influenced people in Estonia. The act of remembering becomes crucial in the exile cultures.Estonian literature in exile and in the homeland presents the fundamental images of opening or closing, escaping or staying, and of flight or fight. Surrealism as well as fantasy and science fiction as the literary styles reveal what is hidden in the unconscious of a poet or a person or even in the collective memory of a nation. Surrealism has played a certain role in our literature, but it has been different from French surrealism, it is a uniquely Estonian surrealism. At the same time Estonia was already a new homeland for many refugees from Russia who had escaped during the Revolution of 1917 and World War I. August Gailit and Oskar Luts wrote about that issue in different literary works. Luts entangled different memories in his novel Tagahoovis (In the Backyard, 1933): the memories of Estonians and the memories of Russian emigrants. He also entangled historical narratives about World War I, the Russian revolution and the young Estonian state in the 1920s. Luts wrote about common people who interpret historical narratives. The novel was also published in exile in 1969 in Toronto.

NATURAL HISTORIES: LEARNING FROM ANIMALS IN T.H. WHITE'S ARTHURIAN SEQUENCE

2000 ◽  
Vol 4 (2) ◽  
pp. 146-163
Author(s):  
Debbie Sly
Keyword(s):  
World War Ii ◽  
Natural History ◽  
Historical Context ◽  
Natural World ◽  
Animal Behaviour ◽  
World War ◽  
Natural Histories ◽  
The Relationship ◽  
Human Limitation ◽  
Ideological Construction

AbstractThis paper examines the changes T.H. White made to The Sword in the Stone between its first publication in 1938 and subsequent appearance as the first part of the Once and Future King in 1958. These changes are related to the immediate historical context of World War II, and also to the wider context of children's literature dealing with the relationship between the child and the ''natural world''. Rather than seeing White's texts as reflecting a post-Enlightenment idealisation, placing both child and nature beyond the bounds of culture and human limitation, the essay argues that even in the first version White's medieval worldview is constructed from a sophisticated and deliberately anachronistic medley of discourses including medieval codes of hunting and chivalry, Renaissance tragedy and Victorian natural history. These combine to create an exclusively male world, which is analysed as part of the ideological construction of a masculine relationship to the environment based on a ''natural'' nstinct to hunt and kill. White's growing pacifism leads to the insertion in the later version of episodes replacing this relationship with models of cooperative animal behaviour, and even introducing a female mentor for the hero.

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