Exploring the limits of the human through science fiction / Gerald Alva Miller, Jr.

Format:

Book

Author/Creator:

Miller, Gerald Alva.

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Science fiction--History and criticism--Theory, etc.

Science fiction.

Human beings in literature.

Critical theory.

Science fiction films--History and criticism.

Science fiction films.

Postmodernism.

Physical Description:

x, 238 pages ; 23 cm

Place of Publication:

New York : Palgrave MacMillan, [2012]

Summary:

Exploring the Limits of the Human through Science Fiction examines the genre of science fiction as its own form of critical theory and argues that it proves crucial to understanding the human in the postmodern era. Featuring chapters on novels, films, and anime, Gerald Alva Miller, Jr.'s scholarship intervenes in a diverse array of theoretical schools, including gender theory, psychoanalysis, political theory, and posthumanism. Through its engagement with different kinds of texts, this study represents a new way of approaching both science fiction and critical theory, and it uses both to question what it means to be human in the digital era. Book jacket.

Contents:

Part I Science Fictions of Estrangement

1 Variables of the Human: Gender and the Programmable Subject in Samuel R. Delany's Triton 33

2 The Human as Desiring Machine: Anime Explorations of Disembodiment and Evolution 65

Part II Science Fictions of the Present

3 The Eversion of the Virtual: Postmodernity and Control Societies in William Gibson's Science Fictions of the Present 99

4 The Spectacle of Memory: Realism, Narrative, and Time Travel Cinema 129.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN:

9781137262851

1137262850

OCLC:

795759266