Browsing by Subject "Science fiction"

Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Aliens and Animals: Notes on Literary Lifeforms After Darwin and Freud
    (2019-12) Rowe, Michael
    This dissertation examines the work of early twentieth-century English and American writers publishing in the aftermath of war, rapid modernization, and newly urgent questions of social control and management. More specifically, it looks at writers whose work was inflected by a reading of Charles Darwin and/or Sigmund Freud. The writings of Darwin and Freud created new possibilities for reconsidering the relationship of human beings and nonhuman animals. Closely attending to the “presence” of nonhuman figures in the works of Jack London, D.H. Lawrence, H.P. Lovecraft, and Djuna Barnes, this dissertation argues that each writer, with the exception of Barnes, presumes there is a way, via the figure of the animal, to escape or see outside human culture. In the case of Jack London’s John Barleycorn, his memoir on drinking that is also an extended argument for sobriety and Prohibition, London’s image of a draft horse ultimately indicates the impossibility of any kind of sobriety. In London’s imagination, each individual subject is governed by an object—language, imagination, or legal authority—that they ingest to become what they are or could be. D.H. Lawrence’s novella, St. Mawr, likewise uses the figure of a horse, though his stallion suggests that the inexplicability of instinctual animal life—the impossibility of knowing an animal’s interior states of feeling and being—shows a way forward for human beings caught up in the melodrama of “personality.” In the end, Lawrence reaffirms masculine power and the subjugation of women. While H.P. Lovecraft’s short story, “The Whisperer in Darkness” indicates that nonhuman presence can make itself known by failing to “show up,” so to speak, in representational language, his tale recapitulates a fantasy of imperial dominion. His aliens turn out to be human after all. Djuna Barnes’s story, “A Night Among the Horses,” tells a different tale, one in which there is no getting outside human culture. The worlds depicted in London, Lawrence, and Lovecraft accept a binary of “nonhuman” nature and human culture that Barnes throws into question. If the figure of the animal provides an escape hatch, Barnes shows that the hatch leads back inside.
  • Thumbnail Image
    Item
    Octavia Butler
    (Voices from the Gaps, 1997) Becker, Jennifer; Curtright, Lauren