The following report describes the pre-production, production, and post-production of the short film, 8.BIT.BROS, designed from its inception to fully exploit the years-developed, cumulative and varied skills of its director. The fantastical narrative focuses on the strained emotional dynamic between two adult brothers that have yet to come to terms with having witnessed their father’s death as children. Their trauma is dramatized and encapsulated in the videogame-themed psychotic hallucinations of the film’s protagonist. The director’s specialized skill-set was put to practical use in both the creation of animatronic creature effect, “Commander Gorgo,” and during the post-production phase of the film, wherein green screen compositing, animation, and motion graphics were used at length to bring the narrative life. / text

As Aristotle wrote, rhetoric is an art or faculty of finding the available means of persuasion in a given circumstance, and the late nineteenth century was a time in American history when many authors used utopian fiction as the best available means of persuasion. For a few years, the utopian novel became a widespread, versatile and common rhetorical trope. Edward Bellamy was the most popular of these writers. Bellamy’s utopian novel Looking Backward was not only the third best-selling book of nineteenth century America, it inspired over a hundred other utopian novels and helped create a mass movement of “Bellamy clubs” along with a political party (Nationalism). During the latter part of the nineteenth century, American public discourse underwent a general shift from a focus on communal values to a focus on individuals as the source of truth. Utopian fiction of the era helps illuminate why and how this shift occurred. In nineteenth century America, literature was generally not considered to be rhetorical. At most, critics treated fiction as a form of epideictic rhetoric, aiming only to delight, educate, or create discussion. When fiction was used to promote legislative agendas and thus entered into the realm of deliberative rhetoric, critics argued that its transgression of rhetorical boundaries supposedly ruined its appeal. Utopian literature came the closest to breaking down the barriers between literature and rhetoric, as hundreds of utopian novels were published, most of them in response to Edward Bellamy. A close rhetorical reading of Looking Backward details its rhetorical nature and helps account for its rhetorical success. I treat each of the novels as participants in the larger cultural conversation, and detail the ways in which they address Bellamy, each other, and issues such as the temperance movement and the decline of classical languages in higher education. In modern times, though Bellamy has faded from the public memory, he has proven useful in a variety of contexts, from a political punching bag to a way to lend an air of erudition to various types of popular fiction. / text

One of the most striking features of contemporary Scottish fiction has been its shift from the predominantly realist novels of the 1960s and 1970s to an engagement with very different modes of writing, from the mixture of realism and visionary future satire in Alasdair Gray’s Lanark (1981) to the Rabelaisian absurdity and excess of Irvine Welsh’s Filth (1998). This development has received considerable critical attention, energising debates concerning how such writing relates to or challenges familiar tropes of identity and national culture. At the same time, however, there has been a very striking and commercially successful rise in the production of popular genre literature in Scotland, in categories which have included speculative fiction and crime fiction. Although Scottish literary fiction of recent decades has been studied in great depth, Scottish popular genre literature has received considerably less critical scrutiny in comparison. Therefore, the aim of my research is to examine popular Scottish writing of the stated period in order to reflect upon whether a significant relationship can be discerned between genre fiction and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction, and to consider the characteristics of such a connection between these different modes of writing. To achieve this objective, the dissertation will investigate whether the features of any such shared literary concerns are inclined to vary between the mainstream of literary fiction in Scotland and two different, distinct forms of popular genre writing. My research will take up the challenge of engaging with the popular genres of speculative fiction and crime fiction during the years 1975 to 2006. I intend to discuss the extent to which the national political and cultural climate of the period under discussion informed the narrative form and social commentary of such works, and to investigate the manner in which, and the extent to which, a specific and identifiably Scottish response to these ideological matters can be identified in popular prose fiction during this period. This will be done by discussing and comparing eight novels in total; four for each chosen popular genre. From the field of speculative fiction, I will examine texts by the authors Iain M. Banks, Ken MacLeod, Margaret Elphinstone and Matthew Fitt. The discussion will then turn to crime fiction, with an analysis of novels by Ian Rankin, Christopher Brookmyre, Denise Mina and Louise Welsh. As well as evaluating the work of each author and its relevance to other texts in the field, consideration will be given to the significance of each novel under discussion to wider considerations of ideology, genre and national identity which were ongoing both at the time of their publication and in subsequent years. The dissertation’s conclusion will then consider the nature of the relationship between the popular genres which have been examined and the mainstream of Scottish literary fiction within the period indicated above.

Studien är en applicering av Foucaults Övervakning och straff på science fiction-romanen The Left Hand of Darkness av Le Guin. Fokus låg på hur makten drabbar huvudkaraktärerna; syftet var att notera hur de gör motstånd mot maktutövningen och att ta fasta på alternativa maktrelationer som kan influera verkligt politiskt arbete mot en bättre, mer jämlik värld. Att använda Foucaults idéer på liknande sätt är vanligt. Analysen består av sex sekvenser som utspelar sig på planeten Vinter i The Left Hand of Darkness. Landsförvisningar för att återupprätta härskarens makt, både avsaknaden och upprättandet av framstegsmyt och en etik som förespråkar jämlikhet utmärkte monarkin Karhide; kuvade kroppar i disciplinens förtecken och en makt som är sammantvinnad med vetandet kännetecknade byråkratin Orgoreyn. Slutsats: Det är nödvändigt att uppoffra sig för att få till stånd förändringar. Den politiske visionären kan dessutom ha användning för en särskild etik, en mindre aggressiv framstegsmyt och horisontellt samarbete.

This thesis identifies a trend in recent postmodern dystopian fiction for writers to metafictionally dwell on the place of literature in a future context. This trend springs from similar concerns present in the two most influential dystopian novels of the 20th century, Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Yet, unlike Huxley and Orwell, for whom the marginalization of literature is merely one symptom of the hegemonic control oppressing these future societies, the postmodern writers I identify situate the book’s future disappearance at the epicenter of culture’s demise. In Gary Shteyngart’s Super Sad True Love Story (2010), electronic technologies have virtually eradicated print literature and the novel’s protagonist, Lenny, mourns the changes in social interactions he sees this shift in technology bringing about. In Jeanette Winterson’s The Stone Gods (2007), marginalized book-lovers see the devastation humanity continuously wreaks on the environment as a product of culture’s disdain for literature.

This thesis performs a textual analysis of two for-profit science fiction texts in which the authors implanted queer content: Bryan Singer's X-Men films and James Robert's Transformers comic series, "More Than Meets the Eye". The argument incorporates queer (referring to attraction and gender variance) media representation and western identity politics lenses into its critique. By interrogating reality through the masquerade of an impossible universe, science fiction affects how subversive a text can be. When authors designate the natural and the unnatural in a strange universe, they designate what and who belongs in our society. Whatever they imagine has an effect on our reality.

<p>The dissertation brings together approaches across the fields of physics, critical theory, literary studies, philosophy of physics, sociology of science, and history of science to synthesize a hybrid approach for instigating more rigorous and intense cross-disciplinary interrogations between the sciences and the humanities. I explore the concept of speculation in particle physics and science fiction to examine emergent critical approaches for working in the two areas of literature and physics (the latter through critical science studies), but with the expectation of contributing new insights to media theory, critical code studies, and also the science studies of science fiction. </p><p>There are two levels of conversations going on in the dissertation; at the first level, the discussion is centered on a critical historiography and philosophical implications of the discovery Higgs boson in relation to its position at the intersection of old (current) and the potential for new possibilities in quantum physics; I then position my findings on the Higgs boson in connection to the double-slit experiment that represents foundational inquiries into quantum physics, to demonstrate the bridge between fundamental physics and high energy particle physics. The conceptualization of the variants of the double-slit experiment informs the aforementioned critical comparisons. At the second level of the conversation, theories are produced from a close study of the physics objects as speculative engine for new knowledge generation that are then reconceptualized and re-articulated for extrapolation into the speculative ontology of hard science fiction, particularly the hard science fiction written with the double intent of speaking to the science while producing imaginative and socially conscious science through the literary affordances of science fiction. The works of science fiction examined here demonstrate the tension between the internal values of physics in the practice of theory and experiment and questions on ethics, culture, and morality.</p><p>Nevertheless, the dissertation hopes to show the beginnings of a possibility, through the contentious but generative space provided by speculative physics, to produce more cross-collaborative thinking between physics as represented by the hard sciences, and science fiction representing the objects of literary enterprise and creative evolution.</p> / Dissertation

This thesis starts from the observation that, while it is common for commentators to divide postmodern fiction into two general fields – one experimental and anti-mimetic, the other cautiously mimetic, there remains a fairly significant field of postmodern texts that use largely mimetic approaches but represent worlds that are categorically distinct from actuality. This third group is even more pronounced if popular culture and “commercial” fiction, in particular sf and fantasy, are taken into account. Additionally, the third category has the interesting characteristic that the texts within this group very often generate unusual loyalty among its fans. Based on a renewed investigation of the main genre critics in postmodern fiction, the first chapter suggests a tripartite division of postmodern fiction, into formalist, metamimetic, and transreferetial texts. These are provisionally circumscribed by their reference worlds: formalist fiction attempts to derail its own capacity for presenting a world; metamimetic fiction presents mediated versions of worlds closely reminiscent of actuality; and transreferential fiction sets its narrative in worlds that are experienced as such, but are clearly distinct from actuality. If transreferential fiction deals with alternate worlds, it also very often relies on the reader’s immersion in the fictional world to provide unique, often subversive, fictional experiences. This process can be identified as the exploration of the fictional world, and it is very often guided so as to be experienced as a virtual reality of sorts. If transreferential texts are experienced as interactive in this sense, it is likely that they convey experiences and insights in ways different from either of the other two strands of postmodern fiction. In order to investigate the interactive experience provided by these texts, an extended conceptual and analytical set is proposed, rooted primarily in Ricoeurian hermeutics and possible-worlds theory. These two main theoretical approaches approximately correspond to the temporal and the spatial dimensions of texts, respectively. Much of the power of these texts rooted in the care they take to guide the reader through their fictional worlds and the experiences offered by the narrative, often at the hand of fictioninternal ‘guides’. These theoretical approaches are supplement by sf theoretical research and by Aleid Fokkema’s study of postmodern character. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 apply the theoretical toolset to three paradigmatic transreferential texts: sf New Wave author M John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence; Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy; and Jeff Noon’s Vurt and Pollen, texts that have much in common with cyberpunk but which make much more extensive use of formalist techniques. Each chapter has a slightly different main focus, matching the text in question, respectively: aesthetic parameters and worldcreation strategies of transreferential fiction; close “guidance” of the reader and extrapolation; and virtual reality and identity games. The final chapter presents the findings from the research conducted in the initial study. The findings stem from the central insight that transreferential texts deploy a powerful suit of mimetic strategies to maximise immersion, but simultaneously introduce a variety of interactive strategies. Transreferential fiction balances immersion against interactivity, often by selectively maximising the mimesis of some elements while allowing others to be presented through formalist strategies, which requires a reading mode that is simultaneously immersive and open to challenging propositions. A significant implication of this for critical studies – both literary and sf – is that the Barthesian formalist reading model is insufficient to deal with transreferential texts. Rather, texts like these demand a layered reading approach which facilitates immersion on a first reading and supplements it critically on a second. The final chapter further considers how widely and in what forms the themes and strategies found in the preceding chapters recur in other texts from the proposed transreferential supergenre, including sf, magic realist and limitpostmodernist texts. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

This thesis starts from the observation that, while it is common for commentators to divide postmodern fiction into two general fields – one experimental and anti-mimetic, the other cautiously mimetic, there remains a fairly significant field of postmodern texts that use largely mimetic approaches but represent worlds that are categorically distinct from actuality. This third group is even more pronounced if popular culture and “commercial” fiction, in particular sf and fantasy, are taken into account. Additionally, the third category has the interesting characteristic that the texts within this group very often generate unusual loyalty among its fans. Based on a renewed investigation of the main genre critics in postmodern fiction, the first chapter suggests a tripartite division of postmodern fiction, into formalist, metamimetic, and transreferetial texts. These are provisionally circumscribed by their reference worlds: formalist fiction attempts to derail its own capacity for presenting a world; metamimetic fiction presents mediated versions of worlds closely reminiscent of actuality; and transreferential fiction sets its narrative in worlds that are experienced as such, but are clearly distinct from actuality. If transreferential fiction deals with alternate worlds, it also very often relies on the reader’s immersion in the fictional world to provide unique, often subversive, fictional experiences. This process can be identified as the exploration of the fictional world, and it is very often guided so as to be experienced as a virtual reality of sorts. If transreferential texts are experienced as interactive in this sense, it is likely that they convey experiences and insights in ways different from either of the other two strands of postmodern fiction. In order to investigate the interactive experience provided by these texts, an extended conceptual and analytical set is proposed, rooted primarily in Ricoeurian hermeutics and possible-worlds theory. These two main theoretical approaches approximately correspond to the temporal and the spatial dimensions of texts, respectively. Much of the power of these texts rooted in the care they take to guide the reader through their fictional worlds and the experiences offered by the narrative, often at the hand of fictioninternal ‘guides’. These theoretical approaches are supplement by sf theoretical research and by Aleid Fokkema’s study of postmodern character. Chapters 3, 4, and 5 apply the theoretical toolset to three paradigmatic transreferential texts: sf New Wave author M John Harrison’s Viriconium sequence; Gibson’s Sprawl trilogy; and Jeff Noon’s Vurt and Pollen, texts that have much in common with cyberpunk but which make much more extensive use of formalist techniques. Each chapter has a slightly different main focus, matching the text in question, respectively: aesthetic parameters and worldcreation strategies of transreferential fiction; close “guidance” of the reader and extrapolation; and virtual reality and identity games. The final chapter presents the findings from the research conducted in the initial study. The findings stem from the central insight that transreferential texts deploy a powerful suit of mimetic strategies to maximise immersion, but simultaneously introduce a variety of interactive strategies. Transreferential fiction balances immersion against interactivity, often by selectively maximising the mimesis of some elements while allowing others to be presented through formalist strategies, which requires a reading mode that is simultaneously immersive and open to challenging propositions. A significant implication of this for critical studies – both literary and sf – is that the Barthesian formalist reading model is insufficient to deal with transreferential texts. Rather, texts like these demand a layered reading approach which facilitates immersion on a first reading and supplements it critically on a second. The final chapter further considers how widely and in what forms the themes and strategies found in the preceding chapters recur in other texts from the proposed transreferential supergenre, including sf, magic realist and limitpostmodernist texts. / Thesis (PhD (English))--North-West University, Potchefstroom Campus, 2013.

To be presented as the author's Thesis (doctoral)--Åbo Akademi University on Feb. 3, 1995. / Includes bibliographical references (p. [379]-396) and index.