Shapes of the Past and the Future: Darwin and the Narratology of Time Travel
TL;DR: The authors trace the development of time travel, from H. G.G. Wells's The Time Machine to post-modern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity.
Abstract: "'Scientific people/ proceeded the Time Traveller, after the pause required for the proper assimilation of this, 'know very well that Time is only a kind of Space'" (The Time Machine 268). What is at stake in treating time "as a kind of space," politically, philosophi cally, and narratologically? While time travel has often been dismissed as merely a popular science-fictional gimmick, it seems far more productive to regard it as an in scription of a specific ideology of temporality. The roots of this ideology are in the evolutionary debate of the fin-de-siecle but its contemporary offshoots have become part of postmodernity's problematic relationship with time and history. The post modern trouble with time finds its expression in the "spatial turn" in narrativity, which includes the topos of time travel (Smethurst 37). In this essay, I will trace the development of time travel, from H. G. Wells's The Time Machine to postmodern science fiction as a brief history of a-historicity. As opposed to most narrative conventions, time travel originates in a single text, H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895).1 In his first novel, Wells invents not just a new plot but a new chronotope. Chronotope, as Mikhail Bakhtin defines it, is the spa tial-temporal configuration of the narrative text, "the intrinsic connectedness of tem poral and spatial relationships that are artistically expressed in literature" (15). The
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TL;DR: In the work of H. G. Wells as mentioned in this paper, the author pointed out that eating is a reversible phenomenon that acquiesces to an Enlightenment tradition that follows Plato in cordoning off gustatory taste from the more "intellectual" senses of vision and hearing and confining appetite like "a wild animal" "as far as might be from the council chamber" of reason.
Abstract: The nineteenth-century novel is stuffed with meat--recall Catherine's refusal to eat her goose after Heathcliff's flogging in Wuthering Heights (1847), Pip's theft of pork pie for Magwitch in Great Expectations (1860-61), or Fred and Rosamond Vincy's quarrel over a grilled bone in Middlemarch (1871-72)--and if the subject has been largely passed over by critics in the field, we might attribute this neglect or resistance at least in part to the novel's own apparent tendency to separate bodily appetite from the more "refined" pursuits of knowledge and human understanding that would seem to inhere in the act of reading. For example, in the last of these texts, Fred begins reading a novel without ringing the bell to have his plate cleared away, and Rosamond rebukes him as "vulgar" (100), a judgment which insists on a division between food and book that acquiesces to an Enlightenment tradition that follows Plato in cordoning off gustatory taste from the more "intellectual" senses of vision and hearing (Korsmeyer 1-6, 12-18) and confining appetite like "a wild animal" "as far as might be from the council chamber" of reason (Plato 70e- 1, qtd. in Korsmeyer 14; see also Bourdieu 5-6). But while it might be comforting to imagine that eating is indeed truly separate from the "higher" functions of perception and cognition, the spread of evolutionary theory during the second half of the nineteenth century would render this separation at best unstable. As a closer look reveals, soon after Middlemarch evokes the division between reading and meat-eating, the novel gives us Tertius Lydgate, "a vigorous animal," going to the library to "hunt" for "a book which might have some freshness for him" (141). The text thus implies a collapse of book into prey, and approaches a working through of its own apparently taken-for-granted division of meat from information. Yet the collapse of this division remains safely metaphorical, and the meat remains dispersed throughout the text. It is not until the early fiction of H. G. Wells, more prepared at the century's close to test the full implications of the human as a "vigorous animal," that the former metaphor takes on extensive narrative force and the division between meat and knowledge is self-consciously and mercilessly taken to task. In the work of H. G. Wells, meat becomes both something capable of shaping narrative structure and the visceral evidence of an imperial culture in which social interest is inseparable from appetite and illumination is bound to carnage. In both The Time Machine (1895) and The Island of Doctor Moreau (1896), the seeker of information--the explorer, the scientist, the attentive conversationalist, even the reader of these books--is figured as a sublimated hunter of human meat. So while it is a commonplace in interdisciplinary work on cannibalism that in Western culture the cannibal has long been "a figure associated with absolute alterity and used to enforce boundaries between a civilized 'us' and savage 'them'" (Guest 2), to read early Wells is to find that late nineteenth-century British culture was already beginning to question the viability of a tidy separation between normative civilization and cannibalistic savagery. Indeed, The Time Machine and The Island of Doctor Moreau ruthlessly dismantle the possibility of holding cannibalism as an "outside" against which we can define our culture, suggesting that the "civilized" desire for knowledge is not essentially different than the cannibalistic hunger for flesh. The more general blurring, in the Victorian imagination, of the line between "civilization" and "savagery" owes much to the work of Charles Darwin(1) and Darwinian-influenced theories of degeneration (see Lankester, Lombroso, and Nordau). Degeneration theory regarded evolution as a reversible phenomenon, meaning that the so-called "civilized" races of humanity could never be entirely free from potential regressions to savagery and animalism. In the midst of proliferating concerns about the stability of the civilized Western subject, attempts to keep such anxieties at bay sprang up in force. …
12 citations
Abstract: espanolEn este trabajo analizamos las caracteristicas propias de la novela de aventuras y pruebas que Bajtin identifica como uno de los tres tipos esenciales de unidad novelesca. La exegesis de este cronotopo nos revela un esquema muy similar al que aparece en un popular subgenero de la ciencia ficcion, esto es, la space opera. Nuestra conclusion es que ambos cronotopos, el de aventuras y pruebas, y el de la space opera, son bastante similares, salvo por un aspecto muy relevante: la reversibilidad temporal, ausente en este ultimo como consecuencia de un menor protagonismo del suceso. Esto es consecuencia de una axiologia heroica mas propia de lo epico que de la novela, aspecto que tambien se analiza en el trabajo. EnglishIn this paper we analyze the characteristics of the adventure novel of ordeal, which Bakhtin identifies as one of the three essential types of novelistic unity. The exegesis of such chronotope reveals a pattern not unlike that which articulates a popular sub-genre of science fiction: space opera. Our conclusion is that both chronotopes are virtually identical except for a very relevant aspect, temporal reversibility, absent in space opera, because of a lesser protagonism of the event. This is the result of a heroic axiology that is more typical of the epic than of the novel, an aspect that is also analyzed in the paper.
7 citations
Cites background from "Shapes of the Past and the Future: ..."
...Gomel (2009) analiza el cronotopo en la novela de viajes en el tiempo, mientras que Pak (2016) lo estudia en novelas que incluyen el proceso de terraformación de planetas....
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TL;DR: In this paper, the authors propose a reading of Kindred, Octavia E. Butler's "grim fantasy" novel about a black woman in the 1970s inexplicably transported to antebellum Maryland, and connect the novel and its interlocutors to concrete utopianism.
Abstract: Anyone organizing against systems of extra-legal racialized violence will sometimes apprehend, in the course of their struggle, the true depth and strength of the structures they are up against. They might sense an essential immutability in these systems. They might then be overtaken with nausea when a subsequent and long-standing dilemma reveals one of its many faces: if one feels pessimistic about the dawn of racial emancipation, if one lacks faith in a racial time constituted by linear, progressive uplift, how then to imagine hope, resistance, and liberatory praxis? How does one anchor political claims when calls to acknowledge the seeming permanence of racism and other systemic forms of violence simultaneously risk constraining political imagination? 1 In what follows, I propose a reading of Kindred—Octavia E. Butler’s “grim fantasy” novel about a black woman in the 1970s inexplicably transported to antebellum Maryland— that responds to these questions. Readings of Kindred often tend towards two diametrically opposed interpretations that also correspond to two potential answers to this broader dilemma: The novel supposedly tells either a pessimistic, hopeless tale of historical determinism, wherein the protagonist can only facilitate a violence already fated to happen, or an optimistic narrative of triumphant heroism and autonomy. In contrast, I read Kindred with and through Ernst Bloch’s concept of concrete utopianism. In what follows, I connect the novel and its interlocutors to this idea, which reconceives the relationship between optimism and pessimism, affirmation and negation, and hope and despair. Building on this framework, the remainder of the essay argues that the presence of seemingly antagonistic interpretations of Kindred demonstrates the novel’s genius and suggests the presence of something else: concrete utopian movements that confound the
7 citations
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present a general theory of microfiction that focuses on the formal elements of the genre's poetics, arguing that a symmetry exists between microfiction's contracted spatialization, and the compression-and hence violation-of the reader's anticipation.
Abstract: This article presents a general theory of microfiction that focuses on the formal elements of the genre's poetics. My analysis argues that a symmetry exists between microfiction's contracted spatialization, and the compression-and hence violation-of temporal norms of the reader's anticipation. The violation of conventional reading anticipation makes microfiction seem not only to be new but also transgressive. Indeed, much microfiction is transgressive of prevailing ideologies of time that are premised on the existence of contingency and the efficacy of human agency. This article takes the work of Israeli microfiction author Alex Epstein as its touchstone while advancing a framework for a theory of the genre.(ProQuest: ... denotes non-US-ASCII text omitted.)INTRODUCTIONThis article offers a conception of microfiction that attempts to redress critical indifference to the genre in the United States and Israel by focusing on the work of Alex Epstein, contemporary Hebrew literature's major figure in the art of minimal narratives. Microfiction assumes many aliases in the United States, including minifiction, sudden fiction, minute stories, and flash fiction, among others.1 In Israel the prevailing term is ktsartsarim ("short-shorts" ...), following the use of the word in the title of a pioneering anthology (1999) edited by scholars Hanan Hever and Moshe Ron, 50 Yisraelim Ktsartsarim2 )50 ...). Recent decades have witnessed an abundance of ktsartsarim in Hebrew letters, including work by authors such as Yosl Birstein, Orly Castel-Bloom, Etgar Keret, Reuven Miran, and Alex Epstein, all of whom Hever and Ron include in their volume. While modern Hebrew literature contains scattered feuilletonist short-shorts and other ktsartsarim variants that predate the appearance of Hever and Ron's collection, the form can only properly be said to have emerged in the last two decades of the twentieth century.3 Despite the growing familiarity of the term ktsartsarim in Israel, I exclusively use the term "microfiction" to avoid terminological profusion, even at the risk of repetition and marginalizing the Hebrew.Alex Epstein was born in St. Petersburg in 1971 and immigrated with his family to Israel as a young boy. He began publishing poetry and prose in the early 1990s, but it took more than a decade for him to find his niche as a writer of microfiction. Since the early twenty-first century, Epstein has occupied a curious position in contemporary Hebrew literature. His work has received both popular and critical acclaim and been published by some of the leading houses in Israel. Yet Epstein's work resists-both formally and thematically-the realism and political engagement of the country's more celebrated authors. Epstein likewise remains somewhat aloof from the Tel Aviv literary scene, though he is even more distant from the Russian emigre community. His work cannot fairly be said to be marked by the concerns of the latter. However, there is a certain affinity of form between Epstein's microfiction and some pieces by Felix Krivin, a well-known author from the former Soviet Union who writes solely in Russian and who has resided in Israel since the late 1990s. While Epstein speaks Russian, he cannot read Russian literature with ease and has reported that he is unfamiliar with Krivin's work.4Several critics have noted that Epstein's work is more profoundly influenced by Hebrew translations of Latin American writers-especially Jorge Luis Borges, Julio Cortazar, Augusto Monterroso-than by Israeli or Russian literary traditions.5 In several important ways, Epstein may be considered an idiosyncratic Israeli talent. If his output can be said to be indicative of any wider trend in Hebrew letters, it would be in his rejection of the parochial in favor of a vibrant cosmopolitanism. This paper follows Epstein's creative lead by avoiding the inward-looking parameters-the sociopolitical and sociocultural-of much critical discourse on Hebrew literature. …
6 citations
TL;DR: This article examined the relationship between history and the writing of historical and speculative fiction through discussion of the methods writers use to build history into a novel, the writing techniques fiction authors use to indicate the past and the understanding of the author's relationship with history.
Abstract: This study examines the relationship between history and the writing of historical and speculative fiction through discussion of the methods writers use to build history into a novel, the writing techniques fiction authors use to indicate the past and the understanding of the author's relationship with history.
4 citations
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01 Jan 1991
TL;DR: In this paper, a wide-ranging survey of postmodernism is presented, from high art to low art, from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
Abstract: Now in paperback, Fredric Jameson’s most wide-ranging work seeks to crystalize a definition of ”postmodernism”. Jameson’s inquiry looks at the postmodern across a wide landscape, from “high” art to “low” from market ideology to architecture, from painting to “punk” film, from video art to literature.
6,317 citations
Book•
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01 Jan 1986
TL;DR: A brilliant and controversial book which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do the authors exist.
Abstract: ***30th Anniversary Edition*** Cover note: Each copy of the anniversary edition of The Blind Watchmaker features a unique biomorph. No two covers are exactly alike. Acclaimed as the most influential work on evolution written in the last hundred years, The Blind Watchmaker offers an inspiring and accessible introduction to one of the most important scientific discoveries of all time. A brilliant and controversial book which demonstrates that evolution by natural selection - the unconscious, automatic, blind yet essentially non-random process discovered by Darwin - is the only answer to the biggest question of all: why do we exist?
2,826 citations
2,171 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1995
TL;DR: In this groundbreaking and very accessible book, Dennett, the acclaimed author of Consciousness Explained, demonstrates the power of the theory of natural selection and shows how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of our place in the universe as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In this groundbreaking and very accessible book, Daniel C. Dennett, the acclaimed author of Consciousness Explained, demonstrates the power of the theory of natural selection and shows how Darwin's great idea transforms and illuminates our traditional view of our place in the universe. Following Darwinian thinking to its logical conclusions is a risky business, with pitfalls for everybody. Creationists and others who reject evolution are not the only ones to fall into the traps. Many who accept the validity of Darwin's conclusions hesitate before their implications and distort his theory, fearful that it is politically incorrect or antireligious, or that it robs life of all spirituality. Dennett explains the scientific theory of natural selection in vivid terms, and shows how it extends far beyond biology.
2,075 citations
Book•
01 Jan 1989
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history and find that it holds the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived.
Abstract: High in the Canadian Rockies is a small limestone quarry formed 530 million years ago called the Burgess Shale. It hold the remains of an ancient sea where dozens of strange creatures lived-a forgotten corner of evolution preserved in awesome detail. In this book Stephen Jay Gould explores what the Burgess Shale tells us about evolution and the nature of history.
1,901 citations