Alien Imaginations: Science Fiction and Tales of Transnationalism

273 Pages·2015·1.72 MB·English

by  Ulrike Küchler

Alien Imaginations
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ii
Alien Imaginations
Science Fiction and Tales of
Transnationalism
Edited by Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and
Graeme Stout
Foreword by Dame Gillian Beer
Bloomsbury Academy
An Imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Inc
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iii
Bloomsbury Academic
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BLOOMSBURY and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
First published 2015
© Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, Graeme Stout, and Contributors, 2015
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in
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Library of Congress Cataloging- in-Publication Data
Alien imaginations : science fi ction and tales of transnationalism / [edited by]
Graeme Stout, Ulrike Kü chler, Silja Maehl.
pages cm
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-62892-115-1 (hardback)
1. Science fi ction fi lms—History and criticism. 2. Science fi ction, American—History
and criticism. 3. Science fi ction, English—History and criticism. 4. Alienation
(Social psychology) in motion pictures. 5. Alienation (Social psychology) in literature.
I. Stout, Graeme A., editor. II. Kü chler, Ulrike, editor. III. Maehl, Silja.
PN1995.9.S26A43 2015
809.3’8762--dc23
2014029816
ISBN: HB: 978-1-6289-2115-1
ePUB: 978-1-6289-2116-8
ePDF: 978-1-6289-2117-5
Typeset by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

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Contents
Notes on Contributors vii
Foreword Dame Gillian Beer, King Edward VII Professor Emeritus
at the University of Cambridge, UK xi
Acknowledgments xvii
Introduction Ulrike Küchler, Silja Maehl, and Graeme Stout 1
Part 1 Alien Language
1 “Was of the Worlds” J ohn Mowitt, Leeds University, UK 13
2 Alien Art: Encounters with Otherworldly Places and Inter- medial
Spaces Ulrike Küchler, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany 31
3 Assimilating Aliens: Imagining National Identity in Oskar Panizza’s
Operated Jew and Salomo Friedlaender’s O perated Goy
Joela Jacobs, University of Chicago, USA 57
4 Canned Foreign: Transnational Estrangement in Yoko Tawada
Silja Maehl, Brown University, USA 73
Part 2 Alien Anxieties
5 Human Subjects—Alien Objects? Abjection and the Constructions
of Race and Racism in D istrict 9 Andrew M. Butler, Canterbury
Christ Church University, UK 95
6 Th e Interplanetary Logic of Late Capitalism: Global Warming,
Forced Migration, and Cyborg Futures in Philip K. Dick’s Th e
Th ree Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch Andrew Opitz, Hawaii Pacifi c
University, USA 113
7 Migrants and the Dystopian State Matthew Goodwin, University
of Massachusetts Amherst, USA 129
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vi Contents
8 Meeting the Other: Cyborgs, Aliens, and Beyond
Bianca Westermann, Ruhr Universität Bochum, Germany 141
Part 3 Alien Identities
9 Space: Th e Final (Queer) Frontier—Th e Sexual Other in
Eleanor Arnason’s R ing of Swords Emilie McCabe, University
of Toronto, Canada 161
10 Alienation, Hybridity, and Liminality in Ray Bradbury and
Archie Weller Célia Guimarães Helene, Universidade
Presbiteriana Mackenzie, Brazil 181
11 Case Histories: Alienated Labor in William Gibson’s
Pattern Recognition and Zero History Jen Caruso,
Minneapolis College of Art and Design, USA 195
12 Control and Flow: Winterbottom’s Migratory Cinema
Graeme Stout, University of Minnesota, USA 209
13 “Th is is I, Hamlet the Dane!” Hamlet’s Migration and Integration
in the Dramatic Th eater as Cyberspace Gerrit K. Rößler,
University of Virginia, USA 227
Index 245
Notes on Contributors
Dame Gillian Beer was educated at St Anne’s College, Oxford. A Fellow at
Girton College, Cambridge, between 1965 and 1994, Gillian Beer began lecturing
at Cambridge in 1966 and became Reader in Literature and Narrative in 1971.
She was made Professor of English in 1989 and in 1994 became King Edward VII
Professor of English Literature and President of Clare Hall at Cambridge. She is
a Fellow of the British Academy and of the Royal Society of Literature, and a
Foreign Honorary Member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and
of the American Philosophical Society. Her books include Darwin’s Plots:
Evolutionary Narrative in Darwin, George Eliot and Nineteenth-Century Fiction
(1983), Virginia Woolf: the Common Ground (1996), and Open Fields: Science in
Cultural Encounter (1999). Exploring the relationship between the worlds of
literature and science in nineteenth century writing as well as the relations
between literature, science, and psychoanalysis, Gillian Beer has made major
contributions to the theory and practice of interdisciplinary studies.
Andrew M. Butler is a senior lecturer at Canterbury Christ Church University
and the author of S olar Flares: Science Fiction in the 1970s , as well as books on
Philip K. Dick, cyberpunk, Terry Pratchett, Postmodernism, and fi lm studies. He
has edited books on Ken MacLeod, Terry Pratchett, and Christopher Priest and
was the co- editor of Th e Routledge Companion to Science Fiction and Fift y Key
Figures in Science Fiction , as well as the journal E xtrapolation . His article,
“Th irteen Ways of Looking at the British Boom,” won the Pioneer Award. He is
the non- voting Chair of Judges for the Arthur C. Clarke Award. Currently, he is
researching the cognitive uncanny.
Jen Caruso earned a PhD in Comparative Literature with a specialization in
critical theory and modernist literature from the State University of New York at
Buff alo and an MA in Th eory and Criticism from the Center for the Study of
Th eory and Criticism at the University of Western Ontario. She is Assistant
Professor of Liberal Arts at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design and the
University of Minnesota. Her research interests include future- present science
fi ction, cultural responses to ecological crisis, and fashion in literature and fi lm.
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viii Notes on Contributors
Matthew Goodwin, PhD, is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at the
University of Massachusetts Amherst. His research and teaching interests are
centered on migration as represented in multiethnic and world literature, with
an emphasis on Latino/a literature. Other areas of interest include food and
immigration, digital culture, science fi ction, critical theory, and aesthetics. His
current book project explores US Latino/a science fi ction and digital culture.
Célia Guimarães Helene , MA, is an independent scholar and was an adjunct
professor of English Literature and Technical and Literary Translation at
Mackenzie Presbyterian University, São Paulo, Brazil until 2012. Prior to this, she
had been the coordinator of the language and translation courses at Mackenzie
Presbyterian University, São Paulo. Her research interests include American,
British, Irish, South African, and Australian literature.
Joela Jacobs is currently completing her PhD in Germanic Studies at the
University of Chicago. Her dissertation examines a persistent engagement with
the ambiguity of the human and non- human in literary grotesques of German
modernism from Oskar Panizza to Franz Kafk a. Joela’s main areas of research
within nineteenth- to twenty- fi rst-century literature and German fi lm are animal
studies, the history of science, posthumanism, the history of sexuality, biopolitics,
classifi cation systems and hybridity, theories of the monstrous, censorship, Jewish
identity, and multilingualism.
Ulrike Küchler is currently completing her PhD in Comparative Literature at
Freie Universität Berlin, Germany. She worked as a lecturer at Freie Universität
Berlin, Eberhard Karls Universität Tübingen, Germany, and Brown University,
USA, and was a visiting scholar at the University of Cambridge, UK. Her teaching
and research focuses on art and artifi cial life in science fi ction and on the relation
between aesthetics and new media. She has published on cultural history, science
fi ction, and media aesthetics. Her current projects examine the aesthetics of old
and new media and explore themes, modes, and forms of digital storytelling.
Silja Maehl is currently completing her PhD in German Studies at Brown
University. Her dissertation examines the role of bilingualism and translation in
the works of Georges-Arthur Goldschmidt and Yoko Tawada. She has published
on Yoko Tawada in the collection N ew Perspectives on German Women Writers
and the Spatial Turn (forthcoming with De Gruyter). Her main areas of interest
Notes on Contributors ix
are literary multilingualism, transnational writing, translation, psychoanalysis,
and twentieth- and twenty- fi rst-century literature.
Emilie McCabe , MA, is an independent scholar who lives and works in Toronto.
Th rough the lense of Michel Foucault’s theories of “technologies of power” and
“technologies of the self,” her research centers on the role that science fi ction plays in
the current understanding of human subjectivity. Due to the speculative nature of
the genre, science fi ction is uniquely able to lay bare the dominant discourses—such
as gender, technology, and language—that inform subjectivity while simultaneously
proposing new and diff erent ways of understanding what it means to be human.
John Mowitt holds the Leadership Chair in the Critical Humanities at the
University of Leeds. He was formerly professor in the department of Cultural
Studies and Comparative Literature at the University of Minnesota. His publica-
tions range widely over the fi elds of culture, politics, and theory. In 2008 he
collaborated with the composer Jarrod Fowler to transfi gure his book, P ercussion:
Drumming, Beating, Striking , from a printed to a sonic text/performance,
“ ‘Percussion’ as Percussion.” His R adio: Essays in Bad Reception appeared in
2011 from the University of California Press, and his current book, S ounds , is
also forthcoming from California. In addition, he is a senior co- editor of the
journal C ultural Critique .
Andrew Opitz is an assistant professor of English at Hawaii Pacifi c University.
His research interests include transatlantic literature, transpacifi c media studies,
and representations of utopian/dystopian communities in fantasy and science
fi ction. He has written for journals such as C omparative Literature, Cultural
Politics, Cultural Critique, Darkmatter , and A frican American Review , and has
recently started a research project examining former plantation economies and
debates about sustainability and food security in both Hawaii and the Caribbean.
Gerrit K. Rößler received his PhD in German literature and culture from the
University of Virginia in 2013 and is the director of the German Academic
International Network (GAIN) at the German Academic Exchange Service
(DAAD) in New York City. He worked as assistant adjunct professor at Queens
College, CUNY from 2011 to 2012. Currently, he is working on a book on utopian
imaginaries in radio drama. He has published a chapter on religious fundamen-
talism in American popular culture in Th e Politics of Post-9/11 Music: Sound,