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Humanity’s Transhuman Future and the Ethics of the Other in Dan Simmons’ Hyperion Cantos

Author(s): Mariusz Marszalski / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

Dan Simmons’ series of books – Hyperion, The Fall of Hyperion, Endymion and The Rise of Endymion – extrapolates from the present of an increasing impact of bio- and nanotechnologies on our species to the yet unknown future of an evolution towards the transhuman and the posthuman. The ontological dimension of such a hypothetical evolution of humankind has been sometimes more and sometimes less enthusiastically treated by such trans- and post-humanity critics as Vernor Vinge, Hans Moravec, Ray Kurzweil, Nick Bostrom, Michio Kaku and Katherine Hayles. The objective of this paper is to draw attention to ethical issues brought up by Simmons that ensue from the fact that the conjectural bifurcation of mankind into the old style and new style humans (including man-created AI independent entities) would position the latter as the former’s Other. Historically, moral obligations of members of a particular group or culture toward one another have been predicated on the idea of sameness which privileges those who are like us and disprivileges those who are different. Would the relationship of sameness still hold if humanity underwent a radical ontological shift, becoming at least in its part its own Other? As Simmons suggests, it would not, which would have to lead to a war of attrition, each against all. The author of The Hyperion Cantos speculates on the above mentioned problem positing that humanity’s salvation lies in changing the attitude of confrontation to one of consensus and, in a Levinasian manner, rejecting the exclusive ethics of sameness while embracing the all-inclusive ethics of alterity.

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Why Zombies Matter: The Undead as Critical Posthumanist

Author(s): Dale Knickerbocker / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2015

This paper poses two questions: why have we brought back the living dead so many times in so many different forms, and what is the cultural significance of its most recent resuscitation? With respect to the latter query, I propose three ideas: first, that the zombie has become the biotechnological equivalent of the science-fictional cyborg, as they both express the same anxieties and thus fulfill a similar cultural function. Second, as humans converted into another species, they are posthuman, and their genocidal war on humanity is homologous to the science-fictional Terminators and apocalyptic cyborgs and artificial intelligences. In the same way, the heralded “zombie apocalypse” is a fictional historical evolutionary turning point homologous to John Von Neumann‘s and Vernor Vinge‘s “technological singularity.” Third, the change in rationalization of zombification from the supernatural to the scientific in the 1960s signified a reaction against instrumental reason, technoscience, modernity, and the values of Humanism. This is evident in recent iterations in which the zombie is the result of a plague cause by genetic experimentation. I conclude that this millennial zombie is the poster child for an antihumanist, critical posthumanism. Finally, in response to the first query, I will propose seven theses explaining this monster’s durability and mutability based on these observations.

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Zobrazení vědomí fikčních postav v prózách Arnošta Lustiga

Author(s): Ingrid Chytilová / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2015

The study focuses on characters in Arnošt Lustig’s prose. It primarily focuses on the consciousness in fictional characters. As a theoretical basis we chose publications Poetics (2001) Shlomith Rimmon-Kenan, Story and Discourse (2008) Seymour Chatman, Individuals in the Narrative Worlds Uri Margolin and Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction Dorrit Cohn. Aristotle’s concept of mimetic character, as an imitation of human beings, which followed formalist and structuralist poetics, consisted mainly of subordination “acting person” storyline. The relation of the characters to the storyline, so in the case of Lustig’s character is superiority characters story, because in narrative occupy a dominant position. We are interested in the interior world of the characters in autor´s prose. We observe consciousness of characters, emotions and experiences in the fictional world. The aim of the study observes ways of presenting the characters in the narrative, both from the point of view of the narrator, so from the perspective of the characters. Uri Margolin Individuals in the Narrative Worlds provides information that the person in the narrative can be regarded as a series of temporary conditions attached to each other.

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Jak se dělá fikce slovy?

Author(s): Bohumil Fořt / Language(s): Czech Issue: 1/2014

The review of: Jiří Koten: Jak se dělá fikce slovy? Host: Brno, 2013

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The Two Cultures Revisited. Stanisław Lem’s His Master’s Voice

Author(s): Dominika Oramus / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

I would like to take, as my starting point, the famous 1959 lecture of C. P. Snow, The Two Cultures, where science fiction is by and large ignored, and see how the consecutive points Snow is making are also discussed in the following decades of the 20th century by other philosophers of science, among them Stanisław Lem, Steven Weinberg, and Jonathan Gottschall. In 1959 Snow postulated re-uniting the two cultures through the reform of education. In the 1960s and 1970s Lem did not believe in any reform, but prophesied that science left alone would procure the final war and, probably, the self-inflicted technological death of the West. I am then going to juxtapose Snow’s argument with a science fiction novel concerned with the same civilizational crisis: Stanis law Lem’s His Master’s Voice.

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In the Shadow of Mnemosyne: The Poetics of Debt in Fiction and Testimony

Author(s): Kujtim Rrahmani / Language(s): English Issue: 2/2019

This essay aims to thematize the poetic and cultural-historical image of debt, embodied as memorial discourse in both fictional and nonfictional literature. The poetics of debt are forged within the melting pot of mythic and historical images, political and cultural aspects, and poetic and testimonial temporalities – but always sheltered in the shadow of Mnemosyne. Thus, memory remains a permanent umbrella for the different faces of debt. Debt is interrogated within the arc of authors Danilo Kiš and Zef Pllumi, two leading literary and cultural personalities in 20th-century south-eastern Europe. Their views provide a geopoetic and cultural background for a theoretical discussion of literary and cultural facets of debt. It is argued that because debt entails memory, obligation, and care for others, it is a distinguishing mark of the human psyche. The theorizing prelude will be followed by literary and confessional pieces of authors but, in the end, a theorizing observation on the subject will take place.

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Reflexe antisemitismu v meziválečných prózách Egona Hostovského

Author(s): Milan Hanyš / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2020

This study analyses images of antisemitism in the interwar prose works Ghetto v nich (The Ghetto in Them, 1928), Případ profesora Körnera (The Case of Professor Körner, 1932) and Dům bez pána (House Without a Master, 1937), focusing on Hostovský’s representation of antisemitism at various levels (social, cultural and psychological), which is present to various degrees of explicitness in his works. It is generally the case in these prose works that Hostovský’s characters recognize and live out their Jewish identity whenever they experience exclusion and face hatred. Racial stereotypes and antisemitic prejudices go through the minds of non-Jews and Jews alike, and have a fundamental importance in the creation of the contradictory identity and selfunderstanding of Hostovský’s characters. The novels Případ profesora Körnera and Dům bez pána in particular show that the affirmation of Jewish tradition and identity may in certain situations be an indication of escape from responsibility and the dilemmas of human existence. In these prose works, assimilation, a return to the traditions of the ancestors or an attempt at individual emancipation are not adequate responses to antisemitism and the problems of life in a modern society. The only possible solution proves to be mutual solidarity among people who overcome their socially and culturally determined status by combining their strengths and strenuously endeavouring to achieve mutual comprehension.

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Příbuzenství v pohybu

Author(s): Marcin Filipowicz / Language(s): Czech Issue: 5/2020

This study aims to analyse the representation of adoption in the novels of contemporary Czech prose writers Tereza Boučková (Rok kohouta, Year of the Rooster, 2007), Viktorie Hanišová (Anežka, 2015) and Dita Táborská (Malinka, 2017) within the context of cultural changes in the perception of kinship. The texts under review are examined from the standpoint of literary anthropology, taking special account of the category of literary representation. This study also reflects the pragmatics of literature, endeavouring to consider any influence of the literary representation of adoption on the creation of a society-wide normative climate for the various forms of socialbehavioural kinship. The basis for this is the finding that Czech literary prose over the last two decades has often sought answers to the issues surrounding the dynamic transformation of kinship and family structures. The old hegemonic model of the heterosexual couple bringing up their biological offspring has been “forced” to give up some of its social and cultural space to newly arising forms of family coexistence. One of the poles of conflict between the high visibility of biologically reproduced kinship and social-behavioural kinship is currently that of adoption. This study attempts to answer the questions over why these prose writers generally paint a negative picture of adoption, and why this subject has for so long been a blank space in Czech literary prose, and not least, whether in this case literature is just another medium that reinforces prejudices against adoption, playing a role in the social stigmatization both of adopted children and adoptive parents.

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Memoria recentă: sfârșitul și începutul istoriei

Author(s): Roxana Rogobete / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 1/2021

Starting from several post-1989 novels (The Heaven of the Hens by Dan Lungu, The Bride and Groom of Immortality by Radu Aldulescu, Coming from an Off-Key Time by Bogdan Suceavă), the study aims to analyze the metamorphoses of history in post-communism’s literary memory. From the satire of conspiracies and bigotry, to the radiography of the marginalized and the miserable world, to the humorous peddling, the three texts depict a return to the story and narrative – which at the same time involves the need for legitimizing practices of identity in post-1989 period. Assumed with playfulness or distortion, the novels offer chronicles of the times that cannot evoke freedom: the intertwining of the “real” shows the societal stereotypes that are still perpetuated in the “everyday of memory”.

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Wielands Frösche, Raabes Gänse: Tierisches in Christoph Martin Wielands Roman "Geschichte der Abderiten" und in Wilhelm Raabes Erzählung "Die Gänse von Bützow"

Author(s): Stefan Lindinger / Language(s): German Issue: 22/2022

In diesem Beitrag wird die Rolle von Tieren in zwei intertextuell aufeinander bezogenen Erzählwerken untersucht, in denen jene den Menschen im Sinne einer satirischen Spiegelung gegenübergestellt sind. Die Parallele zur Gesellschaft (in beiden Fällen eine provinzielle Kleinstadt) bildet jeweils ein Tierkollektiv: (quakende) Frösche und (schnatternde) Gänse, auf deren Tradition in Literatur- und Kulturgeschichte zunächst kurz eingegangen wird. Sowohl in Christoph Martin Wielands "Geschichte der Abderiten" (1774-1780/1781) als auch in Wilhelm Raabes "Die Gänse von Bützow" (1866/1869) liegt der Schwerpunkt der Handlung auf dem Verhalten einer wetterwendischen und potentiell revolutionären Volksmasse, die zu den Tieren auf mehrfache Weise in Beziehung gesetzt wird.

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Tier-Mensch-Verhältnisse in den Kinderbüchern von Else Günther

Author(s): Halime Yeşilyurt,Ali Osman Öztürk / Language(s): German Issue: 22/2022

Im Laufe der Zeit änderte sich die Bedeutung der Tiere für die Menschen, d.h. sie wurden mal als Freund oder niedliches, treues Lebewesen, mal als gemein oder wertlos angesehen. Mal wurden sie als Handelsware unterschätzt, mal als Besitzobjekt oder Erziehungsmittel überschätzt. Bei Else Günther, einer der bekanntesten und viel gelesenen Kinderbuchautorinnen der Nachkriegszeit, sind die Tiere beliebte Figuren der Handlung, in der es meistens um wirklichkeitsnahe Situationen aus dem ganz normalen Alltag des menschlichen Lebens geht. In ihren Kinderromanen spielen die Tiere eine besondere Rolle für die Sozialisierung der Kinder und Jugendlichen. Im vorliegenden Artikel werden die Facetten der Mensch-Tier-Beziehung untersucht bzw. welche Rolle die Tiere bei der Wahrnehmung des Anderen spielen.

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Literatura română în contextul cultural slovac

Author(s): Jana Páleníková / Language(s): Romanian Issue: 4/2011

Romanian literature in the Slovak context. In her paper, the author focuses on the reception of the Romanian literature after 1989, i.e. after the social and political changes occurred both in Romania and Slovakia which were of significant impact upon it, as the editorial policy, which had seen to regularity in translating from the so called “small” or ‘friendly’ literatures, ceased to exist, thus making translating ideologically independent and giving other literature than that of official or canon character its chance as well. In the first part the author introduced several factors which help create the reception environment and influence the ways of receiving a foreign author. The second part is devoted to commented introductions of particular book and magazine translations according to individual literary types and genres, and in chronological order.

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Échos, répétitions, échecs. La psychanalyse du couple dans le film Échos de Dumitru Grosei

Author(s): Alexandra Noemina Câmpean / Language(s): French Issue: 1/2022

Review of the film Échos by Dumitru Grosei (2015, 18 minutes, with Dana Ciobanu and Alexandru Rusu, Alternative Cinema Moldavia)

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"Lumberjanes" e "Hilda", serie a fumetti scout tra ecocritica ed ecofemminismo

Author(s): Dalila Forni / Language(s): Italian Issue: 1/2022

Among the forms of children’s literature that deal with the complex relationship between humanity and nature, comics can offer various insights on the topic for boys and girls. In particular, children’s stories have recently revitalized the scout movement, interpreting it through new values related to identity, gender and ecology. This paper will consider two comic book series on scouting, Hilda (Luke Pearson, 2011–2019) and Lumberjanes (Noelle Stevenson, 2014–2020). Both works tell the story of a diverse group of characters involved in scouting activities: the stories, developed in natural settings, portray the growth of young and peculiar characters who, through constant contact with the environment, show a strong respect for both nature and the peer group, in a peaceful and adventurous coexistence with the environment and the different forms of life that inhabit it. The essay aims to develop a first state of the art that highlights new interpretative strands in this literary genre through an ecocritical and ecofeminist lens. The study explores the two works in a comparative perspective, so as to show how comic book narratives can present interesting ecological and egalitarian dynamics, in this case through the experience of scouting.

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“Do you think it is a Pandemic?” Apocalypse, Anxiety and the Environmental Grotesque in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl

Author(s): Sanchar Sarkar,Swarnalatha Rangarajan / Language(s): English Issue: 1/2022

Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Windup Girl (2009), set in the post fossil-fuel, post turbo-capitalist country of Thailand, portrays the shocking after effects of bioengineering and gene-hack modifications in food crops. The narrative depicts a country tottering on the brink of an agricultural apocalypse on account of food production being severely affected by crop driven anomalies and rogue diseases such as “cibiscosis” and “blister rust” transmitted by variants of mutating pests. Natural seed stock becomes completely supplanted by the new genetically engineered seeds which become sterile after a single seasonal cycle of sowing and harvesting. The native population of Thailand is adversely affected by the pandemic scenario, which becomes aggravated by an expedient “scientocracy” that is at the heart of the neocolonial enterprises of American megacorporations and calorie companies like Agrigen, PurCal and Redstar who hail gene hacking as the new future of food resources and market profiteering. The consumption of the gene-hacked produce spreads through crops and affects the human body in unimaginable ways thereby resulting in a considerable rise of health issues including digestive and respiratory failures. This paper intends to articulate the idea of a pandemic, its historical understanding and affective influences in the context of a post techno-fossil fuel economy set in Thailand. It will analyse the idea of epidemiological colonialism; diseases introduced by colonising forces that reshape the natives’ existing environment thereby bringing forth a deep pandemic anxiety that percolates the collective memory of the Thai people. It also highlights how the novel portrays the conflict between traditional ecological knowledge systems and modern extractive enterprises that acts as a catalyst to hasten the destruction of sustainable systems of agriculture and food production that have endured the impact of climate change and ecological fallout. The paper will study the relevance of the pandemic as an agency of ecocatastrophe and its function in an eco-speculative science fictional narrative. Finally, the paper looks into the concept of the posthuman android, genetically modified humans in a “technologiade”, a society reconfigured by technoscience to resist the impact of environmental collapse, and explores how this trope is incorporated in Bacigalupi’s narrative to celebrate human striving for hope and survival in an imagined environmental future marked by a self-created agro-scientific grotesqueness.

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"And they all lived happily ever after": The Failure of a Happy Ending in The Piano (1993) and Barbe Bleue (2009)

Author(s): Yidan Hu / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

Jane Campion’s The Piano (1993) and Catherine Breillat’s Barbe Bleue (2009) are film adaptations of the tale Bluebeard, both of which have a seemingly bright closure — “and they all lived happily ever after”. “They”, as the female, are in the becoming process since “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” (de Beauvoir 1956: 273), which changes the nature of the film denouement. By looking at the female protagonists Ada McGrath in The Piano and Marie-Catherine in Barbe Bleue, this research aims to deal with how female “decisions” in attempting to accomplish themselves in the face of a crisis affect the understanding of the film’s ending. First, female characterisation and plot development are investigated with the construction of women’s feelings and perceptions at a given moment, influencing the subsequent outcomes. Second, the significance of narrative techniques is expounded with audience’s affective interaction with characters. The conclusion reached is that in both films, repressed female temperament allows women to make judgements and choices that predetermine the tragic core of the happy ending. The significance of this study is to draw attention to the plight of women in the undercurrent, to make it possible for the silent cries behind the beautiful fantasies to be heard.

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Between Two Worlds: Shakespeare the Ordinary Man and Artist

Author(s): Ana-Maria Iftimie / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

Jude Morgan’s novel, The Secret Life of William Shakespeare, is a work of biofiction that deals with the playwright’s life from shortly before he met Anne Hathaway up to the year 1603, highlighting private aspects such as the relationships with his family and friends – and even his rivals. At the same time, the novel offers an insight into the Elizabethan world in which William Shakespeare lived and rose to fame, actually a pretext to bring to the foreground timeless issues which characterise today’s world as well. The portrayal offered by Morgan is, therefore, one that aims to reconcile the two personas of the Bard – the family man and the poet and playwright. The present paper aims to analyse how those aspects are put forward by the novel, relying on features of postmodernism and the biographical novel, as the author attempts to fill in the gaps in Shakespeare’s life narrative. What is more, emphasis is laid on the relative concept of ‘truth’ and how it is deconstructed in the shaping of this particular version of Shakespeare’s story.

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Displaced: Canadian Mindscapes in Margaret Atwood's Alias Grace

Author(s): Lidia-Mihaela Necula / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

Simply put, hyperreality is used to denote something that does not yet exist in the sense of being undeniably demonstrable. According to Jean Baudrillard in Simulacra and Simulation (1981), hyperreality is a state where reality has been replaced by simulacra, meaning that what is real and what is fictional is indistinguishable. Equally, hyperreality starts as soon as one replaces the question of ‘if’ by ‘when’. Therein, in Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace, it becomes quite difficult to establish whether or not Grace Marks is innocent, pure and wrongly accused of the horrible murders of her employer Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper, Nancy Montgomery. Likewise, Grace's memory (which, strangely enough, is referred to in terms of its absence rather than its presence since she is supposedly suffering from amnesia) is some sort of virtual reality, an entire world in itself, where Grace can appear to be anything she wants to be. By constantly overlapping the Canadian landscape, Grace’s subconscious enables a window into the world within, one of the past, the present and the future, some sort of interface between three different psychological entities with their corresponding and symbolic representations of the landscape. The present paper looks into the novel from behind the lens of the Canadian landscape (although scarce in occurrences) as a metonymy of hyperreal mindscapes: doubly displaced both geographically (she is an Irish immigrant), and mentally (she seems to be manifesting a form of multiple personality disorder), Grace simultaneously exists in hyperreal mindscapes, mimicking and replicating, stating and questioning, challenging readers who are left adrift in a textual world where the boundaries between reality and representation become blurred.

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Discursive Intertextuality, Parody, and Mise en Abyme in A.S. Byatt's Short Stories

Author(s): Francesca Pierini / Language(s): English Issue: 12/2022

This essay analyses three short stories from A.S. Byatt's collection Elementals: Stories of Fire and Ice (1998) in light of several self-reflexive strategies. The short narratives Crocodile Tears and Baglady will be discussed from the perspective of “discursive intertextuality,” a literary practice that foregrounds a discursive element established and detectable across genres. Christ in the House of Martha and Mary will be examined from the standpoint of intertextuality and mise en abyme. Once again, the study of this narrative will hinge on the discursive aspects of mise en abyme as a meta-generic approach put in place not to indefinitely reiterate “the same” concept, but to show the potentially endless possibilities of interpretation a text may offer its readers. Across these short stories, the opposition between fire and ice gets reworked in corresponding dichotomous sets: North vs. South, West vs. Orient, contemplative vs. active life. The specific goal this article sets itself to achieve is to show the contrasting trajectories at play in these short stories. Dense with contrasting and intersecting meta-generic paths, such narratives perform and make visible a double register of devotion/affection and questioning/deconstruction of genre norms in relation to established Anglophone discursive tropes.

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