1,721,022 research outputs found
Novel Dialogue 1.6: Military Sci-Fi Minus the Misogyny: Kameron Hurley with Gerry Canavan (AV)
No full textGerry Canavan talks to geek feminist author Kameron Hurley about her Hugo-nominated novel The Light Brigade. A love-hate letter to military science fiction, The Light Brigade turns the form on its head. It is built around women fighters, queerness, and defying authority while being at the bottom of the chain of command. The novel also has surprising roots in the history of anti-apartheid resistance in South Africa where Kameron lived for a time to research women's roles in armed revolt. We discuss delayed reveals of characters' race and gender in sci-fi in light of the genre's history of White supremacy and male-dominated narratives. Kameron and Gerry also revisit some of the juiciest, pulpiest fiction around the stuff we loved as kids but don't talk about or teach in the classroom (shh!)
Eric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction
Get PDFEric Carl Link and Gerry Canavan, eds. The Cambridge Companion to American Science Fiction The Cambridge Companion Series. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Pp. 254 ISBN: 978-1-107-05246-8. Christina Dokou National and Kapodistrian University of Athens This volume proclaims itself the successor of the earlier (2003) Cambridge Companion to Science Fiction, edited by Edward James and Farah Mendlesohn, and indeed adheres to the key virtues of the previous volume: it feat..
Apocalypse now: Covid-19 and the SF imaginary
Get PDFThe following conversation was conducted via Google Docs between 1st May and 23rd June 2020. The participants were Gerry Canavan (Marquette University), Jennifer Cooke (Loughborough University) and Caroline Edwards (Birkbeck College, London). Gerry is President of the SFRA; his books include Green Planets: Ecology and Science Fiction (2014), co-edited with Kim Stanley Robinson, Octavia E. Butler (2016), and most recently The Cambridge History of Science Fiction (2019), co-edited with Eric Carl Link. Jennifer is a poet and academic; her first book was on Legacies of Plague in Literature, Theory, and Film (2009) while her most recent is Contemporary Feminist Life-Writing: The New Audacity (2020). Caroline’s books include Utopia and the Contemporary British Novel (2019) and, with Tony Venezia, China Miéville: Critical Essays (2015); she is also editor of Alluvium and co-founder with Martin Eve of the Open Library of Humanities
Review of Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction
No full textYoshinaga, Ida, Sean Guynes, and Gerry Canavan, editors. Uneven Futures: Strategies for Community Survival from Speculative Fiction. The MIT Press, 2022. ISBN: 978-0262543941
Speculative Escapism in Contemporary Fantasy: Labor, Utility, Affect
No full textMy dissertation examines the concept of escapism as it has been understood in the Western tradition and in its interactions with what we would now call speculative literature. Beginning with Plato’s Republic, this project traces the concept of escapism in the trajectory of reactions to nonmimetic literary works as threats to the state, family, and individual character. In investigating these reactions, I identify a suspicion of the nonmimetic in such texts as Sir Philip Sidney’s Defense of Poesy and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “Of Fairy-Stories” that I argue is linked to Max Weber’s Protestant ethic and a drive to render the imagination productive and utilitarian. I am interested in the tension between the scholarly defenses of escapism, which largely seek to justify allegedly escapist media as secretly instructive or therapeutic, and the affective drives that appear to motivate escapist modes of reading. Using the work of Lee Edelman as a foundation, my project leverages concepts of queer negativity and nonreproductive futurity as potential hermeneutics for understanding modes of escapism facilitated by fantasy literature. For my case studies, I turn to the portal fantasy genre as a fertile site of escapist affects. I argue that the portal fantasy can be understood as increasingly in explicit conversation with discourses of reproductive futurism and capitalist productivity, against which it juxtaposes powerful affective commitments to fictive Secondary Worlds. Lev Grossman’s The Magicians trilogy and Seanan McGuire’s Wayward Children novels are my primary texts, each exemplary of a growing reflexivity in the portal fantasy genre as it grapples with the specter of utility and an intense drive of both characters and readers to abandon the empirical world in favor of fantastical Secondary World
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Get PDFThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
Beware of MOOCs
Get PDFGerry Canavan, an assistant professor in the English department at Marquette University in Milwaukee, WI, shared his concerns about this new wave of e-learning with Higher Education Brief in this exclusive Q&A article. He said MOOCs are an ineffective medium for learning and that they de-skill and de-professionalize academia
Variations on the Author
Get PDF“Variations on the Author” discusses two of Eduardo Coutinho’s recent films (Um Dia na Vida, from 2010, and Últimas Conversas, posthumously released in 2015) and their contribution to the general question of documentary authorship. The director’s filmography is characterized by a consistent yet self-effacing form of authorial self-inscription: Coutinho often features as an interviewer that rather than express opinions propels discourses; an interviewer that is good at listening. This mode of self-inscription characterizes him as an author who is not expressive but who is nonetheless markedly present on the screen. In Um Dia na Vida, however, Coutinho is completely absent form the image, while Últimas Conversas, on the contrary, includes a confessional prologue that moves the director from the margins to the center of his films. This article examines the ways in which these works stand out in the filmography of a director who offers new insights into the notion of cinematic authorship
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