DOCSLIB.ORG

Deleuze and Contemporary Dystopia

Total Page：16

File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb

Download full-text PDF Read full-text
Deleuze and Contemporary Dystopia DELEUZE AND CONTEMPORARY DYSTOPIA A THESIS SUBMITTED TO THE GRADUATE SCHOOL OF SOCIAL SCIENCES OF MIDDLE EAST TECHNICAL UNIVERSITY BY RAHİME ÇOKAY NEBİOĞLU IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY IN THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH LITERATURE AUGUST 2018 Prof. Dr. Tülin Gençöz Director I certify that this thesis satisfies all the requirements as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Bilal Kırkıcı Head of Department This is to certify that we have read this thesis and that in our opinion it is fully adequate, in scope and quality, as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nil Korkut Naykı Supervisor Examining Committee Members Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz (METU, FLE) Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nil Korkut Naykı (METU, FLE) Prof. Dr. Ronald Bogue (UGA, COMPLIT) Assist. Prof. Dr. Elif Öztabak Avcı (METU, FLE) Assist. Prof. Dr. Selen Aktari Sevgi (Başkent U.., AMER) 2 I hereby declare that all information in this document has been obtained and presented in accordance with academic rules and ethical conduct. I also declare that, as required by these rules and conduct, I have fully cited and referenced all material and results that are not original to this work. Name, Last name: Rahime ÇOKAY NEBİOĞLU Signature: iii ABSTRACT DELEUZE AND CONTEMPORARY DYSTOPIA Çokay Nebioğlu, Rahime Ph.D., Department of English Literature Supervisor: Assoc. Prof. Dr. Nil Korkut Naykı August 2018, 279 pages The turn of the new millennium has seen the rise of late capitalism and witnessed a radical change in the structure of the contemporary world, which initiated a new social formation that is seemingly more flexible and liberating yet indeed more controlling. This dissertation looks at contemporary dystopia in the light of these recent changes, arguing that there is now a new moment in the history of dystopia. This new moment suggests that, just like the contemporary world itself, contemporary dystopia has gradually moved towards the plane of immanence where it has become both a re-presentation of the current dystopian reality and an exploration of ways of affirmative resistance. This dissertation explores these aspects of contemporary dystopia through Deleuzian philosophy, which widely discusses and interprets contemporary societies’ movement from a transcendent to an immanent position. Thus, this study aims to reinterpret the history of dystopia from a Deleuzian perspective and create a new theoretical framework and critical tools for the analysis of contemporary dystopia. This dissertation also engages in a Deleuzian analysis of Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy (2000-2013) and China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station (2000) in order to see how this new theoretical framework applies to contemporary examples of dystopia. Keywords: contemporary dystopia, Deleuze and Guattari, immanence, late capitalism, schizoanalysis iv ÖZ DELEUZE VE ÇAĞDAŞ DİSTOPYA Çokay Nebioğlu, Rahime Doktora, İngiliz Edebiyatı Danışman: Doç. Dr. Nil Korkut Naykı Ağustos 2018, 279 sayfa Yeni milenyumun gelişi, geç kapitalizmin yükselişine ve bu yükselişle birlikte çağdaş toplumun sosyal oluşumundaki radikal değişikliğe tanıklık ederek, eskisine göre daha esnek ve özgürlükçü görünse de eskisinden çok daha etkili ve denetleyici yeni bir toplum oluşumunu beraberinde getirdi. Bu çalışma, son dönemde gerçekleşen bu değişimler ışığında çağdaş distopyayı incelemekte ve sosyal yapıdaki bu değişimlerle distopya tarihinde yeni bir döneme girilmiş olabileceğini savunmaktadır. Bu yeni dönem, tıpkı çağdaş toplumda olduğu gibi, çağdaş distopyanın da içkinlik düzlemine doğru ilerleyerek, hem halihazırdaki gerçekliğin bir temsili olduğu hem de bu distopik gerçekliğe karşı olumlu direniş yollarının arandığı bir girişime dönüşmesi olarak düşünülebilir. Bu çalışma, çağdaş distopyadaki bu özellikleri, çağdaş toplumun aşkınlıktan içkinliğe doğru yönelimini inceleyen ve yorumlayan Deleuzyen felsefe ışığında incelemektedir. Buna dayanarak, bu tez distopya tarihini Deleuzyen bir bakış açısıyla yeniden yorumlayarak çağdaş distopyaya yeni bir kuramsal çerçeve ve inceleme yolları yaratmayı amaçlamaktadır. Bunun yanı sıra Margaret Atwood’un MaddAddam üçlemesi ve China Mieville’in Perdido Sokağı İstasyonu gibi çağdaş çalışmaları bu yeni kuramsal çerçeve ışığında Deleuzyen incelemelerini yapmayı amaçlamaktadır. Anahtar kelimeler: çağdaş distopya, Deleuze ve Guattari, içkinlik, geç kapitalizm, şizoanaliz v To My Parents… vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS First and foremost, I would like to thank my supervisor Assoc. Prof. Nil Korkut Naykı for her generosity and guidance as I began this doctoral research. Without her academic support, deep knowledge and curiosity for new horizons in literature and critical theory, this study would not have been possible. I am also indebted to the members of my dissertation committee, Assist. Prof. Dr. Elif Öztabak Avcı and Assist. Prof. Selen Aktari Sevgi for their time, efforts, insights and participation in this study. We all watched how this study evolved into its current form with their contributions. I also owe a huge debt of gratitude to Prof. Dr. Ronald Bogue for his support, recommendations and comments on my research from the very beginning of this academic adventure I undertook in Deleuze scholarship. His boundless energy and passion for Deleuze studies have been a source of inspiration for this study. I would also like to express my gratitude to Deleuze Studies and Utopian Studies Society and their members for providing me with every opportunity to share and discuss my ideas in conferences, seminars and talks. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Nursel İçöz for her detailed reading of my work, her benevolent teaching and academic counselling throughout my academic career. I would like to express my heartfelt thanks to my academic sponsors at Duke University, Prof. Dr. Kenneth Surin and Prof. Dr. Markos Hadjioannou, for welcoming me so warmly, generously giving their time to read this study and offering invaluable comments and suggestions. I would also like to thank Prof. Dr. Elizabeth Grosz, Prof. Dr. Fredrick Jameson and Prof. Dr. Michael Hardt for all their support throughout my time at Duke. It has been the most productive and festive time of my Ph.D. studies. I am also deeply grateful for Assoc. Prof. Dr. Zekiye Antakyalıoğlu for her constant encouragements and support all the way through my undergrad years. It vii was after her philosophy classes that I became attracted to Deleuzian philosophy and pursued my interest so far as to turn it into a doctoral research. There are many people whom I owe my sincere thanks for their moral support in all steps of my academic endeavour. I would like to thank Yağmur Demir for being a shoulder of support, an ear to listen, and a true friend to share my loudest laughs and deepest worries. I would also like to extend my thanks to Kübra Kangüleç Coşkun for her constant support, encouragement and friendship. Finally, a very sincere thank you to my dear friends, Pelin Doğan, Burcu Çevik, Şule Gönül and Elzem Nazlı for having faith in me and supporting me in the most stressful times. I am deeply grateful to my late, beloved Dad, my Mum and my brothers. The infinite love and support I have received from them over the years has been my primary source of motivation. Finally, my heartfelt thanks to my husband, Fevzi Nebioğlu, for his unwavering love, encouragement and patience as I spent many long days and nights completing this dissertation. He was always around at times I thought that it is impossible to continue, he helped me to keep things in perspective. I greatly value his contribution and deeply appreciate his belief in me. It is my fortune to gratefully acknowledge the financial support of The Scientific and Technological Research Council of Turkey (TUBİTAK). I am thankful to TUBİTAK for funding my doctoral studies and for their generous support to the many who are able to pursue their studies thanks to their scholarships only. I am also happy to express my gratitude to the Turkish Fulbright Commission for awarding me with the Ph.D. dissertation research grant. My gratitude also extends to many other who participated in the running of the Fulbright programme. viii TABLE OF CONTENTS PLAGIARISM ....................................................................................................... iii ABSTRACT ........................................................................................................... iv ÖZ............................................................................................................................ v DEDICATION ....................................................................................................... vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS .................................................................................... vii TABLE OF CONTENTS ....................................................................................... ix CHAPTER 1. INTRODUCTION .......................................................................................... 1 2. A DELEUZIAN INQUIRY INTO CONTEMPORARY DYSTOPIA ........ 16 2.1 Mapping the Traditional Definitions of Utopia and Dystopia ........... 17 2.2 A Deleuzian Look at the Historical Trajectory of Dystopia .............. 29 2.2.1 Transcendent Dystopia .......................................................... 29 2.2.2 Transgressive Dystopia ......................................................... 37 2.2.3 Immanent Dystopia ..............................................................
Load more

Recommended publications
  • Individuation in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Island
    Maria de Fátima de Castro Bessa Individuation in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island: Jungian and Post-Jungian Perspectives Faculdade de Letras Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte 2007 Individuation in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Island: Jungian and Post-Jungian Perspectives by Maria de Fátima de Castro Bessa Submitted to the Programa de Pós-Graduação em Letras: Estudos Literários in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Mestre em Letras: Estudos Literários. Area: Literatures in English Thesis Advisor: Prof. Julio Cesar Jeha, PhD Faculdade de Letras Universidade Federal de Minas Gerais Belo Horizonte 2007 To my daughters Thaís and Raquel In memory of my father Pedro Parafita de Bessa (1923-2002) Bessa i Acknowledgements Many people have helped me in writing this work, and first and foremost I would like to thank my advisor, Julio Jeha, whose friendly support, wise advice and vast knowledge have helped me enormously throughout the process. I could not have done it without him. I would also like to thank all the professors with whom I have had the privilege of studying and who have so generously shared their experience with me. Thanks are due to my classmates and colleagues, whose comments and encouragement have been so very important. And Letícia Magalhães Munaier Teixeira, for her kindness and her competence at PosLit I would like to express my gratitude to Prof. Dr. Irene Ferreira de Souza, whose encouragement and support were essential when I first started to study at Faculdade de Letras. I am also grateful to Conselho Nacional de Desenvolvimento Científico e Tecnológico (CNPq) for the research fellowship.
    [Show full text]
  • The Dawn in Erewhon"
    University of Pennsylvania ScholarlyCommons CUREJ - College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal College of Arts and Sciences December 2007 Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's "The Dawn in Erewhon" Patrick Dillon [email protected] Follow this and additional works at: https://repository.upenn.edu/curej Recommended Citation Dillon, Patrick, "Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's "The Dawn in Erewhon"" 10 December 2007. CUREJ: College Undergraduate Research Electronic Journal, University of Pennsylvania, https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/23. Revised version, posted 10 December 2007. This paper is posted at ScholarlyCommons. https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/23 For more information, please contact [email protected]. Dimensions of Erewhon: The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport's "The Dawn in Erewhon" Abstract In "The Dawn in Erewhon", the concluding novella of Tatlin!, Guy Davenport explores the myth of Orpheus in the context of two storylines: Adriaan van Hovendaal, a thinly veiled version of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and an updated retelling of Samuel Butler's utopian novel Erewhon. Davenport tells the story in a disjunctive style and uses the Orpheus myth as a symbol to refer to a creative sensibility that has been lost in modern technological civilization but is recoverable through art. Keywords Charles Bernstein, Bernstein, Charles, English, Guy Davenport, Davenport, Orpheus, Tatlin, Dawn in Erewhon, Erewhon, ludite, luditism Comments Revised version, posted 10 December 2007. This article is available at ScholarlyCommons: https://repository.upenn.edu/curej/23 Dimensions of Erewhon The Modern Orpheus in Guy Davenport’s “The Dawn in Erewhon” Patrick Dillon Introduction: The Assemblage Style Although Tatlin! is Guy Davenport’s first collection of fiction, it is the work of a fully mature artist.
    [Show full text]
  • Thinking Like Grass, with Deleuze in Education?1
    Thinking like Grass, with Deleuze in Education?1 XIAO-JIU LING York University Any beginning is difficult. To begin to talk about Gilles Deleuze is particularly difficult. For one thing, he is a philosopher of immense learning which is tightly tied to his rich studies in French or European intellectual history. He confessed to Michel Cressole in his 1973 letter: “I belong to a generation, one of the last generations, that was more or less bludgeoned to death with the history of philosophy… I myself ‘did’ history of philosophy for a long time, read books on this or that author” (Neg., p. 5-6). Indeed, this aspect of his learning is evident in any of his writings. Hence, for someone like me who had meager background in philosophy and in French literature, to start to read Deleuze was and still is a difficult endeavour. Secondly, Deleuze was an experimenter, a player [joueur]. Not only did he play with canonical works handed down from the past in the western philosophical tradition, ranging from his earlier studies on and with work of Hume, Nietzsche, then Kant, Bergson, Spinoza, and later Leibniz (in the order of his related publications), but he also experimented with thinking beyond the traditional boarders of philosophy. In his own words, he “compensated in various ways” (Neg., p. 5-6) in finding new rules to philosophizing. In this effort, he drew sources from and critiqued in the domain of Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies Volume 7 Number 2 2009 Journal of the Canadian Association for Curriculum Studies psychoanalysis, literature (most notably Proust, Sacher-Masoch and Kafka) as well as other areas of the arts, such as painting, theatre and cinema.
    [Show full text]
  • Individuality and Utopian Desire in Post-Darwinian Literature
    Island Studies Journal, 12(2), 2017, pp. 267-280 Dreaming of islands: individuality and utopian desire in post-Darwinian literature Niall Sreenan University College London, United Kingdom [email protected] ABSTRACT: This paper conducts an exploration of the post-Darwinian literary and philosophical imaginary through the topos of the island. Drawing upon philosophical reflections by Gilles Deleuze on the nature of material islands and their psychic function as fantasies of transcendence, I argue that the island takes on new significance in a post-Darwinian world by offering an image of human independence that is unavailable under the regime of biological evolution. By conducting comparative readings of Michel Houellebecq’s The Possibility of an Island, Aldous Huxley’s Island, Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, and H.G. Wells’ The Island of Dr Moreau, instigated by the critical apparatus developed with my reading of Deleuze, I establish the existence of a genealogy of post-Darwinian narratives in which the island facilitates a specifically utopian dream of individual autonomy, which is bound up with the ideology of capitalism. Taken together, I argue, these works emphasise the importance and complex position of the island in the post-Darwinian imaginary. In these works, islands neither allow for simplistic affirmations of such utopian, capitalist fantasies of human sovereignty nor deterministic pessimism, but explore critically these ideas as they co-exist in tension. Keywords: Aldous Huxley, Charles Darwin, desert islands, Gilles Deleuze, Michel Houellebecq, Samuel Butler, Utopia https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.34 © 2017 ― Institute of Island Studies, University of Prince Edward Island, Canada.
    [Show full text]
  • Dark Deleuze
    Forerunners: Ideas First from the University of Minnesota Press Original e-works to spark new scholarship FORERUNNERS IS A thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital works. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship. Ian Bogost The Geek’s Chihuahua: Living with Apple Andrew Culp Dark Deleuze Grant Farred Martin Heidegger Saved My Life John Hartigan Aesop’s Anthropology: A Multispecies Approach Akira Mizuta Lippit Cinema without Reflection: Jacques Derrida’s Echopoiesis and Narcissism Adrift Reinhold Martin Mediators: Aesthetics, Politics, and the City Shannon Mattern Deep Mapping the Media City Jussi Parikka The Anthrobscene Steven Shaviro No Speed Limit: Three Essays on Accelerationism Sharon Sliwinski Mandela’s Dark Years: A Political Theory of Dreaming Dark Deleuze Dark Deleuze Andrew Culp University of Minnesota Press Minneapolis Dark Deleuze by Andrew Culp is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License. Published by the University of Minnesota Press, 2016 111 Third Avenue South, Suite 290 Minneapolis, MN 55401-2520 http://www.upress.umn.edu The University of Minnesota is an equal-opportunity educator and employer. Contents Abbreviations Introduction The Extinction of Being Advancing toward Nothing Breakdown,
    [Show full text]
  • From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present
    From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present The Harvard community has made this article openly available. Please share how this access benefits you. Your story matters Citation Thomson, Jennifer Christine. 2013. From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945- Present. Doctoral dissertation, Harvard University. Citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:11125030 Terms of Use This article was downloaded from Harvard University’s DASH repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to Other Posted Material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#LAA From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present A dissertation presented by Jennifer Christine Thomson to The Department of the History of Science In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the subject of History of Science Harvard University Cambridge, Massachusetts May 2013 @ 2013 Jennifer Christine Thomson All rights reserved. Dissertation Advisor: Charles Rosenberg Jennifer Christine Thomson From Wilderness to the Toxic Environment: Health in American Environmental Politics, 1945-Present Abstract This dissertation joins the history of science and medicine with environmental history to explore the language of health in environmental politics. Today, in government policy briefs and mission statements of environmental non-profits, newspaper editorials and activist journals, claims about the health of the planet and its human and non-human inhabitants abound. Yet despite this rhetorical ubiquity, modern environmental politics are ideologically and organizationally fractured along the themes of whose health is at stake and how that health should be protected.
    [Show full text]
  • The Missing Subject of Accelerationism | Mute 04/03/2015 22:23
    The Missing Subject of Accelerationism | Mute 04/03/2015 22:23 ARTICLES THE MISSING SUBJECT OF ACCELERATIONISM By Simon O'Sullivan , 12 September 2014 Politics / AntiCapitalist / Philosophy / Media / Space Travel http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism Page 1 of 20 The Missing Subject of Accelerationism | Mute 04/03/2015 22:23 As with utopian modernism and its attempt to separate Geist from Reason, today’s accelerationists have run into the old problem of differentiating their version of progress from that of capitalist development itself. In his review of the #Accelerate reader, Simon O’Sullivan identifies the crux of the problem as the absent theory of the subject 1. Accelerationism: Left vs. Right http://www.metamute.org/editorial/articles/missing-subject-accelerationism Page 2 of 20 The Missing Subject of Accelerationism | Mute 04/03/2015 22:23 Terminators and Replicants aside, what kind of subject is implied, or called forth, by the recently re-animated politico-philosophical idea of accelerationism (defined in the Introduction to the recently published #Accelerate: The Accelerationist Reader as ‘the insistence that the only radical political response to capitalism is … to accelerate its uprooting, alienating, decoding, abstractive tendencies’ (p.4))?[i] On the face of it what has become known as left accelerationism involves something more immediately recognisable: a communist subject, or a subject that is the product of collective enunciation. In the ‘Manifesto for Accelerationist Politics’ (MAP) by Nick Srnicek and Alex Williams, first published online and one of the key texts of the aforementioned Reader, we can recognise a call of sorts for a ‘new’ kind of (human) subject, the result of the knitting together of ‘disparate proletarian identities’ (p.360), and one capable of ‘abductive experimentation’ in to how best to act in the world (p.361).
    [Show full text]
  • Improving on Nature: Eugenics in Utopian Fiction
    1 Improving on Nature: Eugenics in Utopian Fiction Submitted by Christina Jane Lake to the University of Exeter as a thesis for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English, January 2017 This thesis is available for Library use on the understanding that it is copyright materials and that no quotation from the thesis may be published without proper acknowledgement I certify that all material in this thesis which is not my own work has been identified and that no material has previously been submitted and approve for the award of a degree by this or any other university. (Signature)............................................................................................................. 2 3 Abstract There has long been a connection between the concept of utopia as a perfect society and the desire for perfect humans to live in this society. A form of selective breeding takes place in many fictional utopias from Plato’s Republic onwards, but it is only with the naming and promotion of eugenics by Francis Galton in the late nineteenth century that eugenics becomes a consistent and important component of utopian fiction. In my introduction I argue that behind the desire for eugenic fitness within utopias resides a sense that human nature needs improving. Darwin’s Origin of Species (1859) prompted fears of degeneration, and eugenics was seen as a means of restoring purpose and control. Chapter Two examines the impact of Darwin’s ideas on the late nineteenth-century utopia through contrasting the evolutionary fears of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon (1872) with Edward Bellamy’s more positive view of the potential of evolution in Looking Backward (1888).
    [Show full text]
  • A Thousand Plateaus and Philosophy
    Chapter 13 7000 BC: Apparatus of Capture Daniel W. Smith I Te ‘Apparatus of Capture’ plateau expands and alters the theory of the state presented in the third chapter of Anti-Oedipus, while at the same time providing a fnal overview of the sociopolitical philosophy developed throughout Capitalism and Schizophrenia. It develops a series of challeng- ing theses about the state, the frst and most general of which is a thesis against social evolution: the state did not and could not have evolved out of ‘primitive’ hunter-gatherer societies. Te idea that human societies progressively evolve took on perhaps its best-known form in Lewis Henry Morgan’s 1877 book, Ancient Society; Or: Researches in the Lines of Human Progress from Savagery through Barbarism to Civilization (Morgan 1877; Carneiro 2003), which had a profound infuence on nineteenth-century thinkers, especially Marx and Engels. Although the title of the third chap- ter of Anti-Oedipus – ‘Savages, Barbarians, Civilized Men’ – is derived from Morgan’s book, the universal history developed in Capitalism and Schizophrenia is directed against conceptions of linear (or even multilinear) social evolution. Deleuze and Guattari are not denying social change, but they are arguing that we cannot understand social change unless we see it as taking place within a feld of coexistence. Deleuze and Guattari’s second thesis is a correlate of the frst: if the state does not evolve from other social formations, it is because it creates its own conditions (ATP 446). Deleuze and Guattari’s theory of the state begins with a consideration of the nature of ancient despotic states, such as Egypt or Babylon.
    [Show full text]
  • Daniel W. Smith
    DANIEL W. SMITH “Knowledge of Pure Events” A Note on Deleuze’s Analytic of Concepts What is the relation between philosophical concepts and events? This is a complex problem in Deleuze’s philosophy, leading to a number of complex questions. Deleuze has famously defined philosophy as the creation of concepts, as “knowledge through pure concepts.”1 What is at issue here is not a theory of concepts as such, but the type of knowledge produced by the pure concepts of philosophy. One can certainly think without concepts, Deleuze says, but as soon as there are concepts in this sense, there is philosophy. “So long as there is a time and a place for creating concepts, the operation that undertakes this will always be called philosophy, or will be indistinguishable from philosophy, even if it is called something else.”2 Philosophical concepts, however, are defined by Deleuze in terms of events: “The concept speaks the event, not the essence or the thing.”3 At one level, this definition appeals to the traditional opposition between essences and events or accidents: concepts will henceforth express events and not essences. “For a long time one made use of concepts in order to determine what a thing is (essence). On the contrary, we are interested in the circumstances of the thing: in what case, where and when, how, etc.? For us, the concept must express the event, and no longer essence.”4 Or, as Deleuze writes at one point, “One can conserve the word essence, if one wishes, but only on the condition of saying that essence is precisely the accident or the event.”5 But this manifest distinction between essence and event conceals a more subtle distinction between a pure event and an actualized event: philosophical concepts, says Deleuze, express pure events.
    [Show full text]
  • China Mieville's Perdido Street Station
    Unnatural London: The Metaphor and The Marvelous in China Mieville’s Perdido Street Station Alexandre Veloso de Abreu* Abstract This paper explores allegorical and unnatural elements in China Miéville’s novel Perdido Street Station, starting with a parallel between the fictional city New Crobuzon and London. Fantasy literature examines human nature by means of myth and archetype and science fiction exploits the same aspects, although emphasizing technological possibilities. Horror is said to explore human nature plunging into our deepest fears. We encounter the three elements profusely in the narrative, making it a dense fictional exercise. In postclassical narratology, unnatural narratives are understood as mimetical exercises questioning verisimilitude in the level of the story and of discourse. When considered unnatural, narratives have a broader scope, sometimes even transcending this mimetical limitation. Fantastical and marvelous elements generally strike us as bizarre and question the standards that govern the real world around us. Although Fantasy worlds do also mirror the world we live in, they allow us the opportunity to confront the model when physically or logically impossible characters or scenes enhance the reader’s imagination. Elements of the fantastic and the marvelous relate to metaphor as a figure of speech and can help us explore characters’ archetypical functions, relating these allegorical symbols to the polis. In Miéville’s narrative, such characters will be paralleled to inhabitants of London in different temporal and spatial contexts, enhancing how the novel metaphorically represents the city as an elaborate narrative strategy. Keywords: Fantastic. Novel. China Miéville. Perdido Street Station. Londres não-natural: metáfora e o maravilhoso no romance Estação Perdido da China Mieville Resumo Este artigo explora elementos alegóricos e não naturais no romance Perdido Street Station (Estação Perdido), de China Miéville, começando com um paralelo entre a cidade fictícia New Crobuzon e Londres.
    [Show full text]
  • Science Fiction & Fantasy Book Group List 2010 to 2020.Xlsx
    Science Fiction & Fantasy Book List 2010-2020 Date discussed Title Author Pub Date Genre Tuesday, August 17, 2010 Eyes of the Overworld Jack Vance 1966 Fantasy Tuesday, September 21, 2010 Boneshaker Cherie Priest 2009 Science Fiction/Steampunk Tuesday, October 19, 2010 Hood (King Raven #1) Steve Lawhead 2006 Fantasy/Historical Fiction Tuesday, November 16, 2010 Hyperion (Hyperion Cantos #1) Dan Simmons 1989 Science Fiction Tuesday, December 21, 2010 Swords and Deviltry (Fafhrd and the Gray Mouser #1) Fritz Leiber 1970 Fantasy/Sword and Sorcery Tuesday, January 18, 2011 Brave New World Aldous Huxley 1931 Science Fiction/Dystopia Tuesday, February 15, 2011 A Game of Thrones (A Song of Ice and Fire, Book 1) George R.R. Martin 1996 Fantasy Tuesday, March 15, 2011 Hull Zero Three Greg Bear 2010 Science Fiction Tuesday, April 19, 2011 The Lies of Locke Lamora (Gentleman Bastard, #1) Scott Lynch 2006 Fantasy Tuesday, May 17, 2011 Never Let Me Go Kazuo Ishiguro 2005 Science Fiction/Dystopia Tuesday, June 21, 2011 The Name of the Wind (The Kingkiller Chronicle #1) Patrick Rothfuss 2007 Fantasy Tuesday, July 19, 2011 Old Man's War (Old Man's War, #1) John Scalzi 2005 Science Fiction NO MEETING Tuesday, August 16, 2011 Wednesday, September 07, 2011 Something Wicked This Way Comes (Green Town #2) Ray Bradbury 1962 Fantasy Wednesday, October 05, 2011 Altered Carbon (Takeshi Kovacs #1) Richard Morgan 2002 Science Fiction Wednesday, November 02, 2011 Prospero's Children Jan Siegel 1999 Fantasy Wednesday, December 07, 2011 Replay Ken Grimwood 1986 Science Fiction/Time Travel Wednesday, January 04, 2012 Raising Stony Mayhall Daryl Gregory 2011 Fantasy/Horror/Zombies Wednesday, February 01, 2012 The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress Heinlein, Robert 1966 Science Fiction Wednesday, March 07, 2012 Talion: Revenant Michael A.
    [Show full text]