As Prof. Dale Townsend has observed, the concept of the Gothic has had an association with fairies from its inception; even before Walpole’s 1764 Castle of Otranto (considered the first Gothic novel), eighteenth-century poetics talked of ‘the fairy kind of writing’ which, for Addison, ‘raise a pleasing kind of Horrour in the Mind of the Reader’…[Read more]

While there has been a growing acknowledgement of the existence of earlier examples of television science fiction, the typical history of the genre still privileges Nigel Kneale’s The Quatermass Experiment (1953) as foundational. This was a significant production, and an effective piece of television drama, but it was not the first piece of B…[Read more]

Tras el análisis de las tres novelas que Carlos Gardini publica en este siglo, se observa que la característica formal más notable es una trama concebida para conducir a un instante de revelación plena sobre el mundo, re-conocido ahora en un momento de luminosa anagnórisis. Esta anagnórisis consiste en la comprensión por parte de un protag…[Read more]

En el caso de cierta CF escrita en México, hay una doble invasión: espacial y temporal. Ocurre así, por ejemplo, en La destrucción de todas las cosas (1992), de Hugo Hiriart, y en “La catástrofe” (1984), recogido en La sangre de Medusa de José Emilio Pacheco.211 En estos textos, se emplea un género que se percibe como ajeno para abordar la disloca…[Read more]

No sólo la calidad une Trafalgar y Kalpa Imperial, o el hecho de que cierren un primer periodo de la obra de Gorodischer. En ambos libros la fi gura central es un narrador que relata aventuras y acontecimientos en lo que es, explícita o implícitamente, otro planeta, muchos en Trafalgar, uno solo en Kalpa Imperial. Estos planetas y estos ac…[Read more]

En el capítulo 1 se ofrece un modelo del funcionamiento del género de la ciencia ficción construido desde una cierta mirada del latinoamericanista. El capítulo 2 examina la práctica de la ciencia ficción en América Latina.

La ciencia ficción latinoamericana es, ante todo, ficción latinoamericana. Participa íntegramente de las corrientes culturales y artísticas que nutren la literatura de América Latina, al tiempo que constituye un específi co punto de articulación de éstas. Englobable en la literatura de lo insólito, la ciencia ficción (CF a partir de ahora) es…[Read more]

My purpose in this article is to analyze Bioy’s novel in terms of two concepts from two well-known studies on specters and haunting, and to connect this spectral dimension of the novel to current discussions of the concept of cosmopolitanism. The first idea I will use is Derrida’s njunction that one needs “to learn to live with ghosts” (Specte…[Read more]

You are cordially invited to a special event to celebrate ten years of the Open Graves, Open Minds project and to launch our new book In the Company of Wolves: Werewolves, Wolves and Wild Children.
In the Company of Wolves presents further research from the Open Graves, Open Minds Project. It connects together innovative research from a variety…[Read more]

This essay explores the ecoGothic resonances of Tales of the Black Freighter, a dark
pirate tale embedded within Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ 1986-87
postmodern DC graphic novel. By providing a grim prism for themes such as nuclear
paranoia, the monstrous transformation of the self, and the horrifying possibilities of
scientific…[Read more]

Because it is all too easy to (accidentally) make assumptions about what first-year students know about language, in 2019-2020 my lit and comp type courses will begin with a segment on language, before moving on to sentences, paragraphs, and essays.

Our exploration of language will start by jumping into a story, to help us identify the 8 parts…[Read more]

The recent popularity of the film version of Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings has renewed interest in this widely read work set in the realm of Middle-earth. A careful study of Tolkien’s work can be used to raise several philosophical questions, particularly in the area of ethics. This course will examine such questions, also considering topics fro…[Read more]

Within the context of an increasingly dystopian sense of global crisis, how can the idea of Utopia help us galvanise political literary readings? This special session will present a roundtable discussion in which panelists consider how we can use utopian methods to understand different kinds of literary texts, reflecting upon the importance of the…[Read more]

Discussing the concept of cultural trauma and its role in popular television dramas such as 24 (FOX 2001-10, 2014-), Battlestar Galactica (Syfy 2004-9), Rubicon (AMC 2010) and Person of Interest (CBS 2011-16), this paper sets out to identify three distinct clusters that are part of what Newcomb and Hirsch once termed a “cultural forum”—a discu…[Read more]

In response to the four commentaries on ‘Cyborg uterine geography’, in which I argued normatively for reorganizing gestation on the basis of comradeliness, I grapple with three overlapping conceptual areas highlighted: the ethical and political affordances of the term ‘generosity’ in relation to care and pregnancy; the methodological questio…[Read more]

This essay reads Ivan Efremov’s “Andromeda Nebula” (1957), Stanisław Lem’s “Solaris” (1961), and Angela and Karlheinz Steinmüller’s “Andymon” (1982) in order to explore the relationship between biological evolution and dialectical materialism, as it was negotiated through the trope of the alien in the context of the cultural politics of Eastern E…[Read more]

Actuality is a border between the world that is and the future worlds that could be. Science- fiction stories look across the border, into the frontiers of ‘the future’. William Gibson did his part in the 1980s to invent cyberpunk fiction as a slick, stylish view into a bleak dystopian future, but by the turn of the century, much of what he’d…[Read more]

The link between asimovian universe and Sherlock Holmes