Becoming Other: Virtual Realities in Contemporary Science Fiction

The purpose of this thesis was to explore the boundary between human and other created by virtual worlds in contemporary science fiction novels. After a close reading of the three novels: Surface Detail, Existence, and Lady of Mazes, and the application of contemporary literary theories, the boundary presented itself and led to the discovery of where the human becomes other. The human becomes other when it becomes lost to the virtual world and no longer exists or interacts with material reality. Each of the primary texts exhibits both virtual reality and humanity in different ways, and each is explored to find where humanity falls apart. Overall, when these theories are applied to real life there is no real way to avoid the potential for fully immersive virtual worlds, but there are ways to avoid their alienating effects.

Making the Men of Tomorrow: American Science Fiction and the Politics of Masculinity, 1965 – 1974

Suggesting that the political diversity of American science fiction during the 1960s and early 1970s constitutes a response to the dominance of social liberalism throughout the 1940s and 1950s, I argue in Making the Men of Tomorrow that the development of new hegemonic masculinities in science fiction is a consequence of political speculation. Focusing on four representative and influential texts from the 1960s and early 1970s, Philip K. Dick’s The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch and Ubik, Robert A. Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress, and Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, this thesis explores the relationship between different conceptions of hegemonic masculinity and three separate but related political ideologies: the social ethic, market libertarianism, and socialist libertarianism. In the first two chapters in which I discuss Dick’s novels, I argue that Dick interrogates organizational masculinity as part of a larger project that suggests the inevitable infeasibility of both the social ethic and its predecessor, social liberalism. In the next chapter, I shift my attention to Heinlein’s The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress as a way of showing how, unlike Dick, other authors of the 1960s and early 1970s sought to move beyond social liberalism by imagining how new political ideologies, in this case market libertarianism, might change the way men see themselves. Having demonstrated how the libertarian potential of Heinlein’s novel is ultimately undermined by its insistent and uncompromising biological determinism, I then discuss how Le Guin’s The Dispossessed uses the socialist libertarianism of the moon Anarres to suggest a more egalitarian form of masculinity, one that makes possible, to some extent at least, a future in which men might embrace not only the mutual aid of socialism, but also the primacy of individual rights that is at the heart of all forms of libertarianism and liberalism.

Como escrever um filme de Ficção Científica, das teorias da narrativa ao género

Trabalho de projeto apresentado à Escola Superior de Comunicação Social como parte dos requisitos para obtenção de grau de mestre em Audiovisual e Multimédia.

Crises of In/Humanity: Posthumanism, Afrofuturism, and Science and/as Fiction

This thesis engages black critical thought on the human and its contemporary iterations in posthumanism and transhumanism. It articulates five categories of analysis: displace, interrupt, disrupt, expand, and wither. Each is meant to allude to the generative potential in different iterations of black thought that engages the human. Working through Sylvia Wynter’s theories of the rise of Man-as-human in particular, the project highlights how black thought on the human displaces the uncritical whiteness of posthumanist thought. It argues that Afrofuturism has the potential to interrupt the linear progression from human to posthuman and that Octavia Butler’s Fledgling proffers a narrative of race as a technology that disrupts the presumed post-raciality of posthumanism and transhumanism. It then contends that Katherine McKittrick’s rearticulation of the Promise of Science can be extended to incorporate the promise of science fiction. In so doing, it avers that a more curated conversation between McKittrick and Wynter, one already ongoing, and Octavia Butler, through Mind of My Mind from her Patternist series, expands our notions of the human as a category even at the risk of seeing it wither as a politic or praxis. It ends on a speculative note meant to imagine the possibilities within the promise of science fiction.

Telling tales, shaping stories : the creative practitioner and the artful life story

Norman K. Denzin (1989) claims that the central assumption of the biographical method—that a life can be captured and represented in a text—is open to question. This paper explores Denzin’s statement by documenting the role of creative writers in re-presenting oral histories in two case studies from Queensland, Australia. The first, The Queensland Business Leaders Hall of Fame, was a commercial research project commissioned by the State Library of Queensland (SLQ) in 2009, and involved semi-formal qualitative interviews and digital stories. The second is an on-going practice-led PhD project, The Artful Life: Oral History and Fiction, which investigates the fictionalisation of oral histories. Both projects enter into a dialogue around the re-presentation of oral and life histories, with attention given to the critical scholarship and creative practice in the process. Creative writers represent a life having particular preoccupations with techniques that more closely align with fiction than non-fiction (Hirsch and Dixon 2008). In this context, oral history resources are viewed not so much as repositories of historical facts, but as ambiguous and fluid narrative sources. The comparison of the two case studies also demonstrates that the aims of a particular project dictate the nature of the re-presentation, revealing that writing about another’s life is a complex act of artful ‘shaping’. Alistair Thomson (2007) notes the growing interdisciplinary nature of oral history scholarship since the 1980s; oral histories are used increasingly in art-based contexts to produce diverse cultural artefacts, such as digital stories and works of fiction, which are very different from traditional histories. What are the methodological implications of such projects? This paper will draw on self-reflexive practice to explore this question.

An obsession with storytelling : conducting oral history interviews for creative writing

Anna Hirsch and Clare Dixon (2008, 190) state that creative writers’ ‘obsession with storytelling…might serve as an interdisciplinary tool for evaluating oral histories.’ This paper enters a dialogue with Hirsch and Dixon’s statement by documenting an interview methodology for a practice-led PhD project, The Artful Life Story: Oral History and Fiction, which investigates the fictionalising of oral history. ----- ----- Alistair Thomson (2007, 62) notes the interdisciplinary nature of oral history scholarship from the 1980s onwards. As a result, oral histories are being used and understood in a variety of arts-based settings. In such contexts, oral histories are not valued so much for their factual content but as sources that are at once dynamic, emotionally authentic and open to a multiplicity of interpretations. How can creative writers design and conduct interviews that reflect this emphasis? ----- ----- The paper briefly maps the growing trend of using oral histories in fiction and ethnographic novels, in order to establish the need to design interviews for arts-based contexts. I describe how I initially designed the interviews to suit the aims of my practice. Once in the field, however, I found that my original methods did not account for my experiences. I conclude with the resulting reflection and understanding that emerged from these problematic encounters, focusing on the technique of steered monologue (Scagliola 2010), sometimes referred to as the Biographic Narrative Interpretative Method (Wengraf 2001, Jones 2006).

Writers as performers : developing reflexive and creative writing identities

Writing is a complex and learned activity in that it requires us to shape our thoughts into words and texts that are appropriate for the purpose, audience and medium of a variety of communicative forms. Writers must constantly make decisions about how to represent their subject matter and themselves through language. In this way, writing can be conceptualised as a performance whereby writers shape and represent their identities as they mediate social structures and personal considerations. In this paper I use theories of reflexivity and discourse to analyse interviews and writing samples of culturally and linguistically diverse Australian primary students for evidence of particular kinds of writing identities. Findings indicate a clear influence of particular teaching strategies and contexts on the writing identities of students. I argue that making students aware of their writing choices, the influences on, and the potential impact of those choices on themselves, their text and their audience, is a new imperative in the teaching of writing.

The reader-assembled narrative: Representing the random in print fiction

The growing interest in co-created reading experiences in both digital and print formats raises interesting questions for creative writers who work in the space of interactive fiction. This essay argues that writers have not abandoned experiments with co-creation in print narratives in favour of the attractions of the digital environment, as might be assumed by the discourse on digital development. Rather, interactive print narratives, in particular ‘reader-assembled narratives’ demonstrate a rich history of experimentation and continue to engage writers who wish to craft individual reading experiences for readers and to experiment with their own creative process as writers. The reader-assembled narrative has been used for many different reasons and for some writers, such as BS Johnson it is a method of problem solving, for others, like Robert Coover, it is a way to engage the reader in a more playful sense. Authors such as Marc Saporta, BS Johnson, and Robert Coover have engaged with this type of narrative play. This examination considers the narrative experimentation of these authors as a way of offering insights into creative practice for contemporary creative writers.

Science et fiction dans trois récits de voyage sur la Lune

Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal

Why do you write? Creative writing and the reflective teacher

Whether we write creatively or academically (or both) it takes time to understand the reasons why we ‘want’ to write, and the more we write the more we fully begin to appreciate why we write and why we have to write in the first place. From the age of nine, I kept a diary and now, 31 years later, I’m still writing down thoughts, opinions, feelings and aspirations. Nearly every day, I actively participate in recording my reflections. These reflections are part of an academic writing ritual that fuels research ideas and potential narratives associated with reflective teaching practices. I have discovered that the daily practice of imagining and writing compared to academic research and writing has more similarities than differences. Other creative writers who operate in higher education as learning and teaching academics have also taken note of ‘the similarity between the processes of writing fiction, and writing learning texts, not the contrasts’ (McVey, 2008, p. 290, emphasis). More specifically, I have come to realise that strengthening one’s use of the imagination via self-confessional writing exercises is a central ingredient in order to fulfill a well-rounded learning and teaching career.

Identidades em movimento: a representação feminina e as relações de gênero na obra de Angela Carter

Pós-graduação em Letras - FCLAS

Academic science, scientists and engineers /

Mode of access: Internet.

Dealing with the devil: a critical and creative look at the diabolical pact

This thesis is comprised of three parts: a critical dissertation, a creative work of fiction and a bridge piece that connects the two. The critical work is an examination of the Devil as a satirist in Faustian bargains. Through the usage of the Devil as a literary figure, his character has become a more secular being: a trickster rather than evil incarnate—a facilitator of sin rather than its originator. In the tragicomedy of pacts with the Devil, he acts as a mirror, reflecting mankind’s foibles and vanity, while elevating the reader in the process. The thesis considers the language, tone, purpose and conceits of several versions of the story. While the focus is primarily on American Literature, the influence of English, Scottish, French and German folklore and fiction are recognized as an essential component of the theme’s evolution. In the bridge piece, the pact with the Devil is literalized in a modern context; a corporate business of reaping souls is theorized in which techniques of persuasion are streamlined into an effective formula. Whether immersive or expository in approach, the portrayal of the supernatural depends on the literary principles of science fiction and fantasy in order to manipulate the reader and allow irrational concepts to obey rational laws. Such theories are cited to support how the Devil functions as a believable character. The novel, Could Be Much Worse, relates the story of an egocentric boss and his dependable employee, a scout who disguises himself as a taxi driver and seeks candidates who may succumb to temptation. Passengers’ monologues of desperation and pathos are interspersed throughout the protagonist’s day-to-day narrative. At times, the work is experimental, utilizing irregular storytelling techniques, alternative forms and conceits. Light-hearted, but nonetheless poignant, the story serves as a cautionary tale, illustrating the tedium of a bureaucratic job in a transmundane existence.