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English 378G: Science and Fiction - Coggle Diagram
English 378G: Science and Fiction
Defamiliarization
Limitations of human...
physiology
Robert Hooke, “Of the Point of a Needle”
. Defamiliarizes audiences with a microscopic view of the point of a needle compared to what is visible by the human eye.
language
Glenn Ligon, “Study for Frankenstein #1”
Can be interpreted as the limitations of language when trying to express emotions. The repeating sentence reads: "Sometimes I wished to express my sensations in my own mode, but the uncouth and inarticulate sounds which broke from me frightened me into silence again," while the text gets less and less decipherable. One becomes defamiliarized with thoughts/emotions that exist outside the bounds of language.
scale
Blaise Pascal, excerpt from Pensées
. Defamiliarizes the audience by reminding them of the smallness of knowledge known by humans compared to knowledge contained in the universe: "let the earth appear to him a point in comparison with the vast circle described by the sun; and let him wonder at the fact that this vast circle is itself but a very fine point in comparison with that described by the stars in their revolution round the firmament" (1)
Ray and Charles Eames, Powers of Ten
. Defamiliarizes the audience with microscopic and macroscopic perspectives on our world
Milton,
Paradise Lost
. Defamiliarizes the audience with the notion of infinity: "Who shall tempt with wandering feet / The dark unbottomed infinite abyss" (129).
Primo Levi, “Observed from a Distance”
. Offers an alien's point of view in space of human movement on Earth. In describing the atomic bombs, Levi writes: "The end of the Anomalous Period was marked by two very bright explosions, occurring in Japan within 2 days of each other" (616).
Social Movement in Science Fiction
Scientific Innovation & Identity
Kathryn Crim, “Marx,
Silk Poems
, and the Pretext of
Qualities”
. Describes how domestication of silkworms, as a form of scientific innovation, has exacerbated exploitation of children and the working class
Jen Bervin,
Silk Poems
. Describes the perspective of domesticated silk worms: "Our / Short // Productive / Lives" (2)
Susan Stryker, “My Words to Victor Frankenstein Above the
Village of Chamounix: Performing Transgender Rage”
. Describes the issues with medical technology in perpetuating a binary gender system: "Though medical techniques for sex reassignment are capable of crafting bodies that satisfy the visual and morphological criteria that generate naturalness as their effect, engaging with those very techniques produces a subjective experience that belies the naturalistic effect biomedical technology can achieve" (242).
Alternate Realities
Rhiannon Graybill, “Introduction,” “Fuzzy, Messy, Icky,”
from
Texts after Terror
. Reimagines and redefines the rigid lines in which discourse around sexual violence takes place.
Elizabeth Young, “The United States of Frankenstein”
. Sees
Frankenstein
as an argument for abolition in Britain, thus imagining an abolition of slavery: "The novel's multivalent sources include British debates over slavery, abolition, and racial mixture...Examining
Frankenstein
in its British context highlights the importance of race to its history" (25).
Exploration of perspectives
Barbara Johnson, “My Monster / My Self”
. The thesis explores
Frankenstein
as a text to explore the relationship between parenthood and monstorousness
Mary Shelley,
Frankenstein
Offers the Creature's perspective as a being ostracized from society: "I found myself similar, yet at the same time strangely unlike the beings concerning whom I read...I sympathized with, and partly understood them, but I was unformed in the mind; I was dependent on none, and related to none" (89).
Victor LaValle, Dietrich Smith,
Destroyer
. Demonstrates justification for Josephine's wrath and (perceived) dangerous, inhuman creation: "Some will even blame you for our end. And for creating you, they'll label me mankind's enemy too.
The Destroyer
. And I will
welcome
the title" (ch. 5, pg. 13)
Anthropocentrism
Objectivity
Francis Bacon, selections from Novum Organum on the “idols
of the mind”: aphorisms XXXVIII-LX (pp. 469-79)
Idols of the Tribe raises the anthropocentric issue with stating an objective, universal truth; "all perceptions as well of the sense as of the mind are according to the measure of the individual and not according to the measure of the universe." (470)
Benjamin Labatut, “Prussian Blue,” from
When We Cease to
Understand the World
. Language of objectivity allows for a distanced way to consider our relationship with the environment: "a terrible verdure" (33)
Autonomy
Ursula K. Le Guin, “Direction of the Road”
. Complicates anthropocentric understanding of power dynamics between humans and nature: rather than humans doing things to the natural environment, the Oak does things to humans
Octavia Butler, Dawn
. Uses the word "colonization" to describe humans returning to Earth, implying that to have complete autonomy, humans must conquer the natural environment: "She did not understand why the Oankali had done some of what they had done, but she believed the basics...The Earth waiting to be recolonized by its people" (207). This argument is described in greater detail in my close reading.
Margaret Cavendish, “A Dialogue between an Oake, and a
Man Cutting Him Downe”
. Man believes human ingenuity and Nature are divine opposites, rather than him being a part of Nature: "But
Man
hath something more, which is
divine
. / He hath a
Mind
, doth to the
Heavens
aspire.../ which runs about / In every Corner to seek
Nature
out.../ A
Nature
is
divine
" (263)