The concept of empathy has long been studied by literary scholars. Empathy can refer to several different affective, political, and aesthetic phenomena, however, and its often assumed connection to reading is far from proven. This dissertation explores three specific aspects of empathy as they appear in postwar North American fiction, with special emphasis on what they suggest about empathy’s relationship to gendered embodiment. Reading Ruptures examines readerly empathy (an aesthetic encounter with literature) in representations of dubious sexual consent; affective empathy (a political sentiment) in representations of pregnancy; and communicative empathy (a linguistic trope of science fiction) in representations of language viruses. While these distinct types of empathy can be conceptualized and experienced separately, they illuminate each other’s political opportunities and challenges when placed in conversation. Ultimately, this dissertation argues that although science fiction’s contributions to this conversation have historically been undervalued, SF offers fresh insights into empathy’s continuing and evolving relevance for posthuman embodiment and postmodern literature.

“The Freedom of Information Hacked: Console Cowboys, Computer Wizards, and Personal Freedom in the Digital Age” examines depictions of computer hackers in fiction, the media, and popular culture, assessing how such depictions both influence and reflect popular conceptions of hackers and what they do. In doing so, the dissertation demonstrates the central concerns of hacker stories—concerns about digital security, privacy, and the value of information—have become the concerns of digital culture as a whole, hackers laying bare collective hopes and fears regarding digital networks.

This thesis is a study of the gender politics through musical discourse in the Mad Max series. Dystopian narratives are particularly interesting texts for study of gender because they allow for extreme hypothetical situations in worlds that are at once familiar and unfamiliar. Musical discourse in the Mad Max films both supports and complicates dominant readings of gender constructions. I consider the gender politics of the franchise, using Mad Max (1979) and Mad Max: Fury Road (2015) as case studies, and drawing on scholarship on gender in film music, feminist film theory, and Australian car culture. In analyzing this music, I consider its broader cultural connotations, including film music tropes and operatic character types. After considering these genre associations, I analyze the musical gestures for narrative content and consider how the placement of themes with images and dialogue influences that content, with attention to how these factors contribute to a gendered understanding of the character. As the first deep thematic analysis of music in the Mad Max films, my project extends existing scholarship on both onscreen performance and gender categorizations that include musical forces resistant to strict binary categorization. My analysis of gendered musical discourse emphasizes the power of inquiry about gender in film music to clarify, enrich, and complicate texts.

This dissertation is an analysis of the role of the automaton in late-nineteenth century French novels by Émile Zola, Jules Verne, Villiers de l’Isle-Adam, and Rachilde. Designed to resemble naturally produced people and animals, these living machines were animated by steam or electricity and used to explore the changing relationships between humans, animals, and machines. My analysis focuses on a specific type of automaton, the bachelor machine—feminized and sexualized machines that often resemble women and replace them in romantic and sexual relationships. My research is informed by the nineteenth century clinical approach to medicine that assumed that the body, particularly the female body, was a penetrable space to be dissected and diagnosed. By focusing on female sexuality and reproduction, women in the nineteenth century were considered biological machines, valued only for their reproductive capabilities. Under the male scientific gaze, the hysterical female body was a site of diseased sexuality that was replaced by bachelor machines and other mechanized women. I label these fictional bachelor machines “reproductive futurisms” and consider their role in evolutionary debates which increasingly link anthrogenesis and technogenesis. The female automata presented in these novels are examples of a new type of representational text in which artificial femininity is a hybrid of technical mastery and artistry. Female automata are fabricated using technologies of re-production including: sculpture, wax casts, photography, the hologram, the phonograph, and early films. These technologies of re-production change the ways in which the human body and voice are captured and reproduced. Furthermore, many of these technologies of re-production mimic dissection techniques and result in the fragmentation of the female form. This study makes a contribution to the fields of nineteenth century French studies and gender and sexuality studies.

Science fiction film has been telling stories about artificial anthropomorphic robots and androids for almost a hundred years, spawning films, such as Metropolis (1927), Ghost in the Shell (1951), and Blade Runner (1982). Each of these science-fiction films was complemented by a musical score that helped to create an onscreen world dominated by a dystopian view of the future. Influenced by the generations of prior science-fiction films, Automata (2014), The Machine (2013), and Ex Machina (2015) are all concerned with the same narrative in which humanity is in decline while artificial robots are rising up and experiencing life in a way that humans are no longer capable of doing. These three films were all chosen as exemplars of recent science- fiction films with stories about robots versus humans. Further, this difference between robots and humans is paralleled in the film's musical scores. Humans are represented by depressive musical themes with dull and cold timbres that symbolize how empty they have become. Robots, on the other hand, are represented by bright and lively timbres that symbolize how the robots are living more vibrant lives than humans. This thesis traces themes for humans and robots through several important moments and tropes in each film: the state of humanity, the first encounter with the robot, the quality of life for robots and humans, and the eventual conflict that erupts between artificial and organic life. This conflict ends with the arrival of a robotic Eve figure, a sole female robot that is set apart by the film score as a special being, the start of a new age that is dominated by robotic life. These films choose to portray female robots and promote the idea of Eve because the female is seen as a mysterious Other to be feared; in the same way, humans fear these female robots because of their Otherness. Analysis and conclusions were achieved through transcription of the film scores, interviews with the film composers, analysis connecting the score to the visual scene, and constructing a historical context that connects the three films to their predecessors. Future research can expand on these findings by adding more science fiction films to the film pool, examining just how far the musical difference between humans and robots can be traced in film. Unlocking the musical themes assigned to humans and examining how they change over time can reveal how humans perceive themselves, for better or worse. This study is also meant to serve as a gateway for more science fiction films to be studied through their music, as some film's have hidden meanings that can only be understood by examining the music and how it interacts with the visual scene. A study of Automata, The Machine, and Ex Machina manifests how humanity is making way for the robotic Eve and the next stage of evolution for the world.

This project examines how a subset of contemporary American literary cross-genre authors use popular forms within their fiction to comment on, interact with, and critique the possibilities of formula fiction and modern fan communities. I argue that the historic feminization of the popular (set against the stoicism of realism), combined with the startlingly masculine histories of popular genres like science fiction and fantasy, has resulted in distinct differences in the style and aims of male and female authors utilizing hybrid forms. The writers comprising the focus of this study, Junot Díaz, Michael Chabon, Margaret Atwood, and Kelly Link, create a range of competing modes of genre mixing that clarify the lingering effects of popular genre’s marginalization by the literary elite and the academy. The chapters of this project move through these modes by examining, respectively, toxic nerd fantasies and fandoms, the impact of fan fiction and its universalizing impulse, the rise of “speculative fiction,” and the role of domestic fabulism in reimagining the limited frameworks of realism and celebrating the possibilities of mass tropes and forms. Each of these chapters interrogates the author’s impact on the developing field of the new American literary genre fiction, linking their public personas as fans and scholars of genre to the attitudes and ideologies advanced by their fiction. These projects, anti-imperialist or feminist in nature, make self-conscious arguments about the value of the popular genres with which they interact. By focusing on the links between the author’s persona, public reception, and cultural fandoms, and the impact of these elements on contemporary cross-genre fiction, I attempt to revitalize genre theory in a manner that challenges its historically hierarchal configurations, particularly for women authors and consumers of the popular.

A spectre is haunting contemporary technoculture: the spectre of Singularity. Ten years into a century thus far characterized chiefly by the catastrophic failure of global economic and political systems, deepening ecological anxieties, and slow-motion social crisis, the only sector of our collective cultural myth of Progress still vibrantly intact is the technological - a project which, in vivid contrast to the systemic failure that seemingly prevails at nearly every other level, continues to charge forward at breakneck speed. Since the late twentieth century, prompted by the all-but-exponential growth of machine intelligence and global information networks, and by the still largely obscure but increasingly profound-seeming implications of emerging nanotechnology, futurists and fabulists alike have postulated an imminent historical threshold whereupon the nature of human existence will be radically and irrevocably transformed in a sudden explosion of technological development. This moment of transcendence, it is supposed, is at most only a few years off; indeed, some say, it may have already begun. The "Singularity" - a term coined in 1986 by the mathematician and science fiction writer Vernor Vinge, and subsequently adopted throughout technocultural discourse - is at present the primary site of interpenetration between technoscientific and science-fictional figurations of the future, an area in which the longstanding binary distinctions between science and SF, and between present and future, are rapidly dissolving. As much as the Singularity thesis implies a total reorganization of society and of the self - which posthumanist cultural studies and cyborg theory have already begun mapping - it also poses a daunting existential challenge to the enterprise of SF itself, to the extent that the Singularity imposes what Vinge has described as "an opaque wall across the future," an impenetrable cognitive obstacle beyond which the extrapolative imagination cannot glimpse. For a genre long defined by its efforts to assert, through the narrative technique of extrapolation, a meaningful continuity between present and future, the Singularity presents a thorny problem indeed, demanding both a reevaluation of SF's conception of and orientation toward the future, and a new narrative model capable of grappling with the alien and often paradoxical complexity of the postsingular. This study is an inquiry into the properties and problematics of Singularity across fictional and nonfictional discourses, and as such it operates on two levels. Reading Singularitarian literature against a broadly articulated context of fringe-science and transhumanist movements, consumer culture, political and economic theory, and related areas of contemporary cyber- and technoculture, I examine how the metaphor of Singularity structures and signifies the aspirations and anxieties of late-twentieth and early twenty-first century technocivilization. As a project of literary criticism specifically, the study works to identify and theorize a grouping of texts that is emerging from cyberpunk and postcyberpunk tendencies in contemporary SF, organized around the premises of Singularity and the posthuman, and classifiable primarily in terms of an attempt to mount a response to the formal and conceptual problems Vinge has identified. Primary readings are drawn from a wide-ranging selection of twentieth- and twenty-first-century technocultural fiction, with emphasis on SF works by Charles Stross, Cory Doctorow, Neal Stephenson, Bruce Sterling, Rudy Rucker, and William Gibson.

A literatura de Ficção Científica (FC), conhecida por desafiar os limites entre a ficção e a realidade, enfrentou grandes obstáculos para se estabelecer no polissistema literário brasileiro e ser reconhecida como gênero relevante. Buscando entender melhor as circunstâncias que levaram a esse cenário e o impacto de sua classificação como literatura traduzida, este trabalho analisa, sob a ótica das refrações, algumas publicações que podem ter representado o primeiro contato do público brasileiro com esse gênero. Foram determinadas duas frentes investigação: a primeira se dedicou aos elementos paratextuais presentes nas primeiras coletâneas do gênero publicadas no país, Maravilhas da Ficção Cientifica (1958) e Antologia Brasileira de Ficção Científica (1961); e a segunda se concentrou em identificar, coletar e examinar notas jornalísticas que mencionassem os termos ficção científica e science fiction publicadas nas décadas de 1950 e 1960 período no qual o gênero começava a ser registrado pela grande mídia e explorado como proposta comercial. Os resultados encontrados revelam uma relação direta entre a influência estrangeira na formação do polissistema literário brasileiro e a postura das editoras e jornais do país, incentivadas pela ação marcante dos grupos de autores, editores e entusiastas do gênero. / Science Fiction (SF) literature, known for challenging the boundaries between fiction and reality, faced great obstacles in establishing itself in the Brazilian literary polysystem and earning recognition as a relevant genre. To understand the circumstances that led to this scenario and the impact of its being classified as translated literature, this paper analyzes, from the perspective of refractions, some publications that may have been the first contact of the Brazilian public with SF literature. Two research approaches were defined: the first addressed the paratextual elements present in the first collections of the genre published in Brazil, Maravilhas da Ficção Cientifica (1958) and Antologia Brasileira de Ficção Científica (1961); and the second focused on identifying, collecting, and examining journalistic notes quoting the terms \"ficção científica\" and \"science fiction\" published in the 1950s and 1960s a period in which the genre began to be registered by the mainstream media and explored as a commercial possibility. The results show a direct association between the foreign influence in the formation of the Brazilian literary polysystem and the conduct of the country\'s publishers and newspapers, stimulated by the striking action of the groups formed by authors, editors and enthusiasts of the genre.

No description available.

Doctor of Philosophy / In this thesis I discuss feminist science fiction as a literature that explores a variety of alternative social realities. This provides the site to explore alternative notions of the heroic inspired by feminist critiques of the traditional heroic, which come from feminist philosophical, as well as literary critical sources. Alternative notions of the heroic offer a shift in perspective from a specific heroic identity to the events the characters are involved in. The shift to events is made precisely because that is where the temporal is located and dynamic change occurs. Events are where 'becoming' alternatively heroic occurs: in the interaction between a character and the environment.