Spelling suggestions: "subject:"daniken"" "subject:"kaniken""
1 |
The Construction of the Fringe Extraterrestrial of PostmodernitySmith, Andrew 08 1900 (has links)
This study focuses on the discourse that orders and creates a logic of the extraterrestrial during postmodernity, what I term "Fringe." Using Foucault's notion of discourse, I define and theorize Fringe and its formation during postmodernity, looking at the particular features of the historical moment post-1960 that contributed to the creation and regulation of a particular extraterrestrial. I then investigate historical conceptions of the extraterrestrial from Aquinas to Kant. This genealogy of the extraterrestrial reveals a rich history of the extraterrestrial and compares this history with Fringe. After this I discuss two precursors of Fringe discourse: the Society for Psychical Research and the writings of anomalous researcher Charles Fort. This investigation of pre-Fringe notions of the psychical in discourse shows how the SPR and Fort's work both created new ways of looking at and speaking about phenomena falling outside the purview of "normal science" and contributed to the formation of Fringe while also being distinguishable from it. Finally, I analyze two popular iterations of Fringe discourse—the ancient aliens hypothesis and the abduction narrative—as popularized in the works of Erich von Däniken and Whitley Strieber.
|
2 |
The attraction of sloppy nonsense: resolving cognitive estrangement in Stargate through the technologising of mythologyWhitelaw, Sandra January 2007 (has links)
The thesis consists of the novel, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis (Whitelaw and Christensen, 2006a) and an accompanying exegesis.
The novel is a stand-alone tie-in novel based on the television series Stargate Atlantis (Wright and Glassner), a spin-off series of Stargate SG-1 (Wright and Cooper) derived from the movie Stargate (Devlin and Emmerich, 1994). Set towards the end of the second season, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis begins with the discovery of life pods containing the original builders of Atlantis, the Ancients. The mind of one of these Ancients, Ea, escapes the pod and possesses Dr. Carson Beckett. After learning what has transpired in the 10,000 years since her confinement, the traumatised Ea releases an exogenesis machine to destroy Atlantis. Ea dies, leaving Beckett with sufficient of her memories to reveal that a second machine, on the planet Polrusso, could counter the effects of the first device. When the Atlantis team travel to Polrusso, what they discover has staggering implications not only for the future of Atlantis but for all life in the Pegasus Galaxy.
The exegesis argues that both science and science fiction narrate the dissolution of ontological structures, resulting in cognitive estrangement. Fallacy writers engage in the same process and use the same themes and tools as science fiction writers to resolve cognitive estrangement: they technologise mythology. Consequently, the distinction between fact and fiction, history and myth, is blurred.
The exegesis discusses cognitive estrangement, mythology, the process of technologising mythology and its function as a novum that facilitates the resolution of cognitive estrangement in both fallacy and science fiction narratives. These concepts are then considered in three Stargate tie-in novels, with particular reference to the creative work, Stargate Atlantis: Exogenesis.
|
Page generated in 0.0273 seconds