CFP: Early Modern Science Fiction (3/15/05; MLA '05)

Early Modern Science Fiction (3/15/05; MLA '05)

The “official history” of science fiction increasingly posits that the genre began in 1818, when Mary Shelley used science instead of magic to fashion a man-made creature.  This tale of science fiction’s  ‘spontaneous generation,’ however, only succeeds in creating a genre on the model of Frankenstein’s monster, a genre without an infancy and without any traceable ties to the past.
        
Papers are welcome for a proposed special session at MLA 2005 which advance an “alternate history” or “future history” of the science fiction genre, one which emerges from the scientific revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries rather than the industrial revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth. 

Possible topics include:

➢ Early modern texts using the tropes of SF (aliens, automata, Atlantis, computers, clones, drugs, end-of-the-world scenarios, futurity, hyperspace, ice-ages, last men or women on earth, magical machines, outer space, space-travel, time-travel, utopias, etc.)

➢ Early modern science and its speculative fictions (thought-experiments, dialogues, hypotheses, and mountebanks from DaVinci to Descartes)

➢ Postmodern SF set in the early modern period (Marge Piercy’s He, She, and It, Neal Stephenson's Baroque Trilogy, Neil Gaiman’s Sandman or 1603 series, or even John Banville’s The Revolution Trilogy) or SF as it responds to or rewrites the early modern literary canon (e.g. C.S. Lewis’s space trilogy and Pullman’s His Dark Materials in response to Paradise Lost or Forbidden Planet in response to The Tempest)

➢ Theories of modernity posited in some way on the science/fiction divide (Foucault, Fukuyama, Horkheimer and Adorno, Haraway, Latour, Shapin, and Toulmin, among others.) 
 
Please send 1-2 page abstracts by March 15 to Lara Dodds (ldodds_at_english.msstate.edu) and Scott Maisano (Scott.Maisano_at_umb.edu)

Dr. Scott C. Maisano
Assistant Professor
English Department
University of Massachusetts-Boston
Boston, MA 02125-3393
Office Tel: 617-287-6738
Dept. Fax: 617-287-6766
 

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Received on Wed Mar 02 2005 - 10:18:29 EST