This thesis explores the depictions of the relationship between utopia and ideology by looking at metaphors of the wall in of utopian and dystopian science fiction, such as Ursula K. Le Guin’s The Dispossessed, George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and the Strugatsky brothers' Roadside Picnic. The wall is an image symbolising the ambiguity between ideology and utopia: the wall could be perceived to be the barrier protecting utopia while it is in fact the symbol for ideological restrictions and containment which are generating dystopia. The thesis looks at how these novels engage with the theme of the wall: it is used as an image altering history, constricting space and as a linguistic barrier. The characters' presence in and experience of the worlds is restricted by the ideological walls, and an alternate reality is created. The thesis looks at how the novels create such alternate, ideological realities and how the wall becomes the entity altering time, history, space and language. This alternate reality is used as an image of stability, but this takes on negative connotations: it becomes a constrictive force, embodying Fredric Jameson's idea that science fiction creates images of “world reduction”, caging the characters' desires, disabling the utopian impulse. The thesis therefore instigates the possibility of utopia: the wall negates all possibility of change and denies the hopes of the utopian impulse; however the characters' desire to regain humanity by destroying the ideological walls offers hope and opens up utopia, thus concluding that utopia is change and progress.

The Green Dress Whose Girl is Sleeping is a collection of poetry written over a five year period, which demonstrates my interests in formal and linguistic experiment through the themes of death and love. The speakers frequently struggle to accept either, with many of the love poems maintaining a sense of anticipated loss, and many of the death poems reverting to memory and joy as an expression of grief. At the centre of the collection is a series of sonnets, “Our Terraced Hum”, which creates a narrative of observed experience through the premise that the speaker is watching people from a neighbouring block of terraced flats. Meanwhile several science fiction poems permeate the collection, universalising experiences such as love and death to develop a sense of shared experience throughout human histories and territories. In particular, poems such as “Nan, Come from the Water” and “On Her Return from Afghanistan” maintain an autobiographical element to explore the personal impact of a family death, and the varying coping mechanisms people create. The deaths of strangers and animals are also prominent in a number of pieces in this collection, as found in poems such as “How to Kill a Blackbird” and “Heading to a Corner Shop on a Winter’s Day”, whilst major global disasters such as the 2011 tsunami in Japan, and the 2001 attacks on the World Trade Centre in New York city are the focus of “Sendai-shi” and “Towers”. Poems such as “Kiting”, “House Plant” and “Ghazal Jigsaw” interrogate love as a form of power struggle in romantic relationships, whilst experimentations in form and language become a medium for aesthetic and intellectual stimulation in pieces such as “Star”, “The Promise” and “26 One Word Poems”. A focus on specific events and reactions through varying poetic structures and tropes – surreal, autobiographic, fantastic or otherwise – I hope amalgamates to form a more complete and inclusive sense of collective, complex experience. The critical element, entitled “Broken Wor(l)ds: Edwin Morgan’s Science Fiction Poems”, explores processes of estrangement and uncertainty as vehicles for promoting change throughout Edwin Morgan’s science fiction poems. Chapter one focuses on Morgan’s computer poems, chapter two looks at his space poems, chapter three examines the poem “In Sobieski’s Shield” and chapter four considers Morgan’s dystopian poems. It demonstrates that Morgan deconstructed and rebuilt poetic structure, language and genre as a way of rejecting parochialism and insisting on a progressive poetry which engaged with the modern world.

published_or_final_version / English Studies / Master / Master of Arts

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Mémoire numérisé par la Division de la gestion de documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal. / Pour respecter les droits d'auteur, la version électronique de cette thèse ou ce mémoire a été dépouillée, le cas échéant, de ses documents visuels et audio-visuels. La version intégrale de la thèse ou du mémoire a été déposée au Service de la gestion des documents et des archives de l'Université de Montréal.

This is a collection of essays that reflects on ideas pertaining to family, politics, the environment, and identity.

In my thesis I argue that the return of the religious in contemporary culture has been in two forms the rise of so-called fundamentalisms in the established faiths-Christian, Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, even Buddhist-and the rise of a New Age style spirituality that draws from aspects of those faiths even as it produces something distinctively different. I argue that this shift both produces post-modern media culture, and is itself always-already mediated through the realm of the fictional. Secular and profane are always entangled within one another, a constant and pervasive media presence that modulates the way that contemporary subjects experience themselves and their relationship to the spiritual. I use popular culture as an entry point, an entry point that can presume neither belief nor unbelief in its audiences, showing that it is “unreal” texts such as Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Matrix and so on that we find religious symbols and ideas refracted through a postmodernist sensibility, with little regard for the demands of “real world” epistemology. I argue that it is in this interplay between traditional religions and New Age-ised spirituality in popular culture that the sacred truly finds itself in postmodernity.

Genres are constituted, implicitly and explicitly, through their construction of the past. Genres continually reconstitute themselves, as authors, producers and, most importantly, readers situate texts in relation to one another; each text implies a reader who will locate the text on a spectrum of previously developed generic characteristics. Though science fiction appears to be a genre concerned with the future, I argue that the persistent presence of lost race stories – where the contemporary world and groups of people thought to exist only in the past intersect – in science fiction demonstrates that the past is crucial in the operation of the genre. By tracing the origins and evolution of the lost race story from late nineteenth-century novels through the early twentieth-century American pulp science fiction magazines to novel-length narratives, and narrative series, at the end of the twentieth century, this thesis shows how the consistent presence, and varied uses, of lost race stories in science fiction complicates previous critical narratives of the history and definitions of science fiction.

Thesis (M. Phil.)--University of Hong Kong, 2006. / Title proper from title frame. Also available in printed format.