ABSTRACTS

PLENARY SPEAKERS:

AS IF, BUT DOUBLY DIFFERENTLY: SCIENCE FICTIONS WE DON’T (USUALLY) SEE

Paweł FRELIK

University of Warsaw

Fantastic genres in general and science fiction in particular are committed to imagining the world “differently,” to use a key word from the conference’s title. But as speculative literatures across media have deservedly taken centerstage as a cultural form best suited to engage the manifold nature of technomodernity, they have also developed their own orthodoxies and grooves. This is not to say that science fiction has become unoriginal and predictable, but there are certain privileged forms that have enjoyed special popularity: most of them can be described as intellectually ambitious, long-form, and strongly narrative-centric texts. There are, of course, good reasons why such texts should be celebrated. But cutting-edge novels, independent films, and long-form television are not the only forms that can meditate on the challenges of the world around us. Other “as ifs” are possible and, in my talk, I would like to make an argument (and, needless to say, propose some examples) in favor of texts that speculate doubly differently: against the real world and against the dominant speculative forms.

THE WEIRD EROTICISM OF ELEMENTAL AESTHETICS

Caroline EDWARDS

This lecture will consider the weird eroticism that arises from human-elemental encounters in contemporary literature and artworks. In response to the climate emergency, artists, filmmakers, and writers are increasingly exploring the perspectives of nonhuman actors and agents such as fungi, plant life, trees, rocks, and water. In my ongoing research into elemental aesthetics, I’ve been struck by the frequency with which sexuality and eroticism is invoked to convey the simultaneous disgust and fascination with nonhuman agency.

I will draw on a few exemplary examples of this weird eroticism, including queer xyloid sexuality in the arboreal collage artworks of Kenyan American artist Wangechi Mutu, lithic eroticism in the Icelandic ecohorror TV series Katla (Netflix, 2021), human-fungal procreation in British writer Aliya Whiteley’s dystopian novella The Beauty (2014), and the weird species boundary-crossing of Mother Trees in British composer Joe Acheson’s Sonic Woodland acoustic installations at the Kew Gardens botanical estate at Wakehurst, West Sussex in England.

How are we to read such artworks? Why might these artists, directors, and writers be invoking our disgust? These works, I argue, embrace the fecund, the abject, and the decomposing possibilities of mushrooms, woods, and organic matter in a rich, ambivalent imagery of inhumanism. Human protagonists are threatened with death and transmutation into forms of nutrient-rich afterlife that nourish plants (human composting) via the elemental aesthetics of symbolic redemption, and unambiguously utopian possibility. I conclude that a cultural analysis that is attuned to the utopian impulse of such artworks can help us navigate the tyranny of human exceptionalism we must overcome at a time of ecocatastrophe and mass extinction.

PARTICIPANTS:

THE NEGATIVE THEOLOGY OF ADAM WIŚNIEWSKI-SNERG

Daniel ADSETT

American University in Bulgaria

Thinkers within a variety of traditions, whether pagan, Jewish, Islamic, or Christian, have worked to find ways to speak about the most ultimate – the good beyond being, the one, or God. Plotinus, for example, argues that we cannot positively apply concepts to this One beyond being because, insofar as it transcends being, the categories that apply to beings do not apply to it. Similarly, Thomas Aquinas, though equating God with ultimate being, holds that we can only speak of God analogically, applying concepts we understand through familiar encounters with beings to the being who is the creator of these beings. In this paper, I want to raise the question of whether a negative theology might be appropriate for thinking about Adam Wiśniewski-Snerg’s ‘super beings.’ Is it possible to imagine a secular negative theology – one in which we live and act as if we are not the highest forms of life, as if there are beings above us whose actions our conceptual apparatus cannot comprehend? In his 1973 novel Robot, Wiśniewski-Snerg develops an argument for the existence of such ‘super beings’ that, though not divine in any concrete way, occupy a space above human beings in the same way human beings occupy a space above regular non-rational animals or in the way regular non-rational animals occupy a space above plants, fungi, and bacteria. Standard scientific conceptions of the universe hold that we have a relatively decent grasp of the objects and beings around us. And yet, even within this scientific paradigm, Wiśniewski-Snerg suggests that these objects and beings that surround us might have purposes and meanings beyond anything we can conceive. There very well might be beings above us whose actions cannot be understood in concepts familiar to us. We cannot prove their existence, Wiśniewski-Snerg holds, but we should still live as if they do exist. Given these considerations, I argue that Wiśniewski-Snerg advances a secular negative theology, one that enjoins us to live as if we are an intermediate, even lower, form of life.

EXPLOITATION OF THE SUBCONSCIOUS: UTILITARIANISM AND THE INDIVIDUAL IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S ‘THE LATHE OF HEAVEN’

Mihail ATANASOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

This paper aims to explore some of the ethical questions raised by Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1971 novel The Lathe of Heaven. The main focus of this analysis would be the ways in which utilitarianism as a concept and a social project is problematised within the text and beyond. Through multiple allusions to Taoism, the writings of Chuang Tzu, epitaphs from the works of H. G. Wells and Victor Hugo, and a probable reference to George Orwell, Le Guin’s novel calls for a broad spectrum of possible connections. The subject of utilitarianism additionally calls for comparison between The Lathe of Heaven and Le Guin’s short story “The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas.” Hence, the novel is suitable for a multi-layered approach of analysis, which brings together literary criticism, socio-political theory, philosophy, comparative literature studies and stylistics. However, utilitarianism within the context of The Lathe of Heaven cannot be examined in isolation. This idea is intrinsically linked to the role of the individual in a society. It is no surprise that Le Guin’s work develops and problematizes the connection between the individual and the fictional society. The idea of human autonomy and the concept of happiness itself are reanalysed in the context of social and political power. From a stylistic point of view, an interesting object of analysis would be the techniques through which the text itself works to implicitly convey otherwise complex ideas about power dynamics and vast philosophical concepts. One of the main goals of this analysis would be to trace the connections between these fundamental ideas and the ways in which they are questioned, explored, and criticised. It is important to note that SF is an especially fruitful medium for the introduction, expansion, exploration, and subversion of concepts from all theoretical and philosophical spheres. This genre makes use of style and imagination in a way that exceeds the purely rational argumentative techniques of non-fiction discourse. Such multi-dimensional connections between the imagined universes of an author’s work, the text as a medium and the portrayed socio-political and philosophical concepts are important in order for us as readers to make sense of our ever-changing reality.

‘WE DO NOT WANT TO LIVE UNDER ANYONE’S BOOT’: HUMANITY, IDENTITY, AND CAPITAL IN ‘THE EXPANSE’

Bryan BANKER

TOBB University of Economics and Technology, Turkey

Science fiction often centers on questions of identity and how different identities relate to one another in some future society. In the (future) world of the acclaimed space drama The Expanse, the social categories of identification—especially race and class—are not singular constructs but are instead inscribed into one another. The television series describes a universe hundreds of years from now, where humans have colonized much of the solar system. Earth and Mars are competing superpowers that maintain a tense alliance to continue to manage the resources and people, the displaced underclass known as “Belters,” of the Asteroid Belt. The Belters have lived and worked in deep space for many generations in hostile conditions, which has dramatically altered their anatomy. Those in power utilize the very divisions they have constructed, namely the racialized physical and cultural differences that distinguish the Belters, as a means to both substantiate the perceived inferiority of the Belters and as a rationale for perpetuating their ongoing exploitation as well. According to Ruha Benjamin, the physical distinctions observed among the Belters are not merely elements of science fiction, but rather “materializations of a dominating imagination.” In its depiction of the Belters, therefore, The Expanse makes literal what contemporary theories of identity treat abstractly; namely, that social relations of race and class cannot be divided, but are inseparable, and must be theorized as such. In analyzing the vivid portrayal of the lived experiences of Belters’ race and class relations under advanced capitalism, and the interlacing of environmental consequences with social hierarchies, The Expanse offers lucid perspectives on humanity, identity, and capital in both the present and for the future.

FINDING A PLACE OF BELONGING IN AND OUTSIDE A DYSTOPIAN COMMUNITY: OCTAVIA BUTLER’S ‘PARABLE OF THE SOWER’

Bozhidara BONEVA-KAMENOVA

Plovdiv University “Paisii Hilendarski”, Bulgaria

Octavia Butler is one of the most important African American voices of the past; she managed to break the mold and establish herself as one of the few female leading figures in the field of speculative fiction. She managed to produce a universally admired novel that deals with the trauma of slavery and time traveling through a modern re-imagining of the slave narrative genre, Kindred (1979) (an effort comparable to Toni Morrison’s Beloved (1987) and Shirley Anne Williams’s Dessa Rose (1986). The current paper aims to explore a later project of hers, the Earthseed series, more specifically the first book in that cycle, Parable of the Sower. In the 1990s, Butler embarked on a different path – she chose to examine religious, economical and ecologic issues through the Parable books. She intended the series to be a trilogy, but she never finished the third novel and left it to readers to ponder over solutions and final resolutions. Parable of the Sower presents Lauren Olamina’s story, a young girl who resides in one of the few remaining self-sufficient communities in a dystopian wasted American landscape. In time her designated home is destroyed by outside intruders and she needs to survive out in the open until she is able to find comfort in a community of her own, founded upon original understanding of existence and co-existence. The second book in the series extends the time period and uncovers the aftermath of the creation of a seemingly harmonious human settlement. Of particular interest to this examination is the transformation Lauren undergoes, struggling to establish a healthy identity in a corrupted society, when she attempts to settle down and discover a welcoming home. The reading of the text would be accomplished through the use of current publications and theories in the field of culture studies, feminism, ecology, science fiction and race theory. Butler’s vision of the future might appear grim and ambiguous at times, but it does leave some hope for a better tomorrow. As we collectively near the period she imagined (from 2024 to 2090), similarities between fiction and reality become even more evident.

(UN)IMAGINARY EUGENICS AND LATE 19TH-CENTURY UTOPIAS

Vesselin M. BUDAKOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

Scientific imagination, as exemplified in Thomas More’s Utopia (1516) and later expounded in Francis Bacon’s New Atlantis (1623), served as a precursor to nineteenth-century technophilic aspirations that were sparked by the Age of Enlightenment and its emphasis on reason and scientificity. Scientific thought envisioned dreams that went beyond the practical application of scientific discoveries but conjectured and instilled hopes in the philosophical beliefs and social dreaming of the fin-de-siècle Western world, aiming to project as well as warrant a feasible and functioning, reformed future society that could no longer be relegated to speculations in a philosophical treatise. Science and progress became for many utopias a dialectical prerequisite for a eutopian realization. While these were bridled to scientifically tackle all fields of knowledge, utopias as intrinsic political satire searched to identify a political system or ideology as well as a scientific method to validate or challenge their attainability. Utopian fiction has regularly served as a playground for fictional experiments in politics in suggesting well-wrought blueprints. Its corrective purpose and critiquing ideals of improvement relate utopia’s target at perfectibility to contemporary scientific speculations of social and individual improvement. Thus many late nineteenth-century utopias depict imaginary eutopian societies that have achieved social and political excellence based upon the successful implementation of the precepts of Social Darwinism and more particularly the quasi-scientific speculations of eugenics. In proposing eugenical solutions to contemporary social problems, utopists joined a consensus that was in favor of radical change in society. While the societies that applied eugenics were imaginary in utopian fiction, late nineteenth-century social thought was marked by real and un-imaginary advocacy for sterilization, marriage laws, and birth control. An author for the Texas Medical Journal, for instance, insists that the eradication of social “evil” may be achieved only by “[s]tate regulation of marriage, and sterilization” which is “the mission of rational medicine” (F.E. Daniel, 1896 [May], p. 613; “A Plea for Reform Criminal Jurisprudence”). I discuss exactly this ethico-scientific turn in utopian fiction that embraced Social Darwinism and eugenics as a method for social reformers to articulate arguments for individual and social improvement. This occurrence is evident in the works by Alexander Craig, Andrew Acworth, and G. Read Murphy.

THE INSIDIOUS NOTES OF REALITY: UNDERSTANDING ‘PSYCHO-PASS’ AS A SOCIO-POLITICAL IMAGINING

Payal Dahiya

University School of Humanities and Social Sciences, Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University, New Delhi, India

The Psycho-Pass anime series of 2012, is one of the social products that transform possibilities of experience into discourse, and which thus influence, reflect, and reinforce popular attitudes, assumptions and prejudice. Although the media of transmission vary in critical ways, they can be said to have in common the fact that they transmit to a potentially significant audience a redescription of reality and projected eventualities of a specific nature. Psycho-Pass, in this regard, is of significance not just for its rather graphic nature of presentation but because it forms a part of the symbolic structures we use to make sense of and ascribe meaning to our existence. The 22nd-century setup of Japan where the country is run by the regulations of the Sybil system to create a future where crime rarely occurs through a continuous analysis of the minds of the citizens makes an allegedly disturbing or depriving influence. However, the crux lies in the eerily mirrored state of insidious notes of humanism and its reality predicted decades before. Certain characters monotonously follow structures of capitalist society while others rebel and protest. Based on the expert opinion of Siegel and Beals, the world of Psycho-Pass presents the internal strain of “the generalisation of a single kind of leadership role throughout the social structure” – the Sybil System – and the external strain of “the introduction of conflicting values and behaviour patterns” which is the truth of the present human society as well. The monsters are thus rooted in present day reality and not just futuristic fictional narratives. This paper attempts to understand what the fields of discourse surrounding such fiction imply about the ways in which contemporary society sees itself and its future; decoding the audio-visual narratives which have our vulnerability and superstitions as their points of focus – the discomfort we occasionally feel about our own psyche and about what may lurk in it’s dark depths, presented within futuristic narratives that lie far beyond our reach.

GAME OF NIM

Robert A. EMMONS JR.

Rutgers University-Camden, USA

Game of Nim begins as a traditional documentary film, but takes a slight turn as it vacillates between the expository and participatory documentary modes, before finally blowing open into reflexive speculative poetics. Game of Nim is ostensibly a documentary on the history of video gaming and the first mechanical computing game: the Nimatron. Invented in 1940 for the World’s Fair in New York, the Nimatron was meant to present the theme of the fair: “The World of Tomorrow.” Game of Nim, the film, goes further and asks: Have we achieved that “World of Tomorrow?” Game of Nim, in reality, or unreality as it were, or “as if,” is a bait and switch documentary. It is a metaphor for the compounded problems in America that have led to a sickness that plagues our society. Game of Nim is a mediation on the only thing this author can think or speculate about. The promise of the future has been a science fiction all along, as America has traded humanity for greed.

TACKLING THE APOCALYPSE IN THE CLI-FI NOVELS ‘THE WATER KNIFE’ (PAOLO BACIGALUPI) AND ‘NEW YORK 2140’ (KIM STANLEY ROBINSON)

Emilia GANEVA

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

In recent decades climate fiction, as a subgenre of science fiction, has served as a metaphorical site where speculative visions of the impact of climate change and global warming are projected and subsequently reflect contemporary concerns about the future of the environment, Earth, and humankind as such. In light of present-day tendencies towards ignorance of potential ecological disasters in favor of establishing political and economic dominance, dystopian narratives within the boundaries of climate fiction take already evident exploitative practices of real-world society to the extreme, providing a peek into a hypothetical apocalyptic future where humans struggle to survive the consequences of their past negligence. Using Bruno Latour’s actor-network theory, as well as Kim Stanley Robinson’s idea of the two fold-function of science fiction, this paper will analyze the two contrasting ways of tackling the apocalypse as represented in Paolo Bacigalupi’s The Water Knife and Kim Stanley Robinson’s New York 2140. Both being labeled as climate fiction novels, the aforementioned works depict a post-apocalyptic scenario of extreme drought and mass-scale flood respectively, but ultimately represent two different outcomes of an ecological catastrophe. Bacigalupi’s dystopian narrative closely follows the race for control over scarce water resources that create a division between wealthy and impoverished, dominant and subservient cities and communities, which further accounts for violent conflicts over the supreme right to deploy them. By contrast, Kim Stanley Robinson’s novel envisions a more optimistic anti-anti-utopian scenario where the citizens of the almost entirely submerged in water New York not only cooperate and maintain peace but also open the possibility for the nationalization of capital and its redistribution to the hands of common people. Thus, the aim of this paper is to explore the practices through which an apocalyptic scenario can be aggravated or alleviated through established economic and legal policies, technological innovations, and social organization and deviation in the context of a mass-scale ecological disaster. Additionally, the focus will be put on the juxtaposition between the relation “humankind-natural world” in the current time frame of the Capitalocene and the one outlined in Bacigalupi and Robinson’s speculative sites of apocalyptic climate change in order to exemplify the impact of anthropocentric factors over the potential of humanity to survive or collapse.

“WHAT WILL THEY NOT IN THE END BECOME?”: TOWARDS A TYPOLOGY OF MACHINE REBELLION IN SPECULATIVE FICTION

Nikolay GENOV

Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

The current paper attempts to examine the popular motif of machine rebellion in terms of its typological possibilities. Drawing on the history of the robot as a semantically loaded entity doomed to fail in its physical march against its master, the text intends to focus on the “discrete influence” that technology could utilize in relation to its survival.

ANTHROPOLOGICAL AGENCY IN THE ECOLOGICAL FUTURES DEPICTED IN PHILIP K. DICK AND FRANK HERBERT’S DYSTOPIAS

Bogdan GROZA

Siena University, Italy

Philip K. Dick’s interpretation of the future recurrently lead to the motifs of humankind provoking dire alterations or compromises within other life forms or for humanity itself. Although the worlds he created would seem rather diverse at a first glance, covering different areas and themes, portraying aliens, androids and time travel, most of them have the same baseline. Within Dick’s envisioning the the future, the leitmotif of human agency leading to a drastic change in the ecological and social equilibrium of the planet is persistent; it may be more explicit or more concealed, but it is always present. It is the case for instance with Do androids dream of electric sheep?, where Earth’s fauna has almost entirely withered and real life animals (as opposed to their android counterparts) represent a symbol of wealth; it is the depiction of a society that venerates what it has been almost entirely lost. Another example may be found in Ubik, where there is an authentic sensation of awe when the main character touches real leather given that cattle had gone extinct. In the case of Philip K. Dick’s novels, nature has no agency and it intrinsically adapts to the direct agency of the force of the Anthropocene. The examples provided by these novels will also be connected and confronted with the one provided by the planet of Arrakis. Within the very first two books of the Dune saga, Frank Herbert invision the desertic ecosystem of a planet that is however radically changed by the involvement of the Fremen; Arrakis, within a short timespan, becomes almost an oasis. This paper will hence consider the writings of these two authors to analyse and emphasize the close relationship between the depicted futures with our own. Although these are dystopic realities and consequentially would not reflect our own future, these examples provide a cautionary message that is not to be taken lightly. The excessive anthroprocentrism of our society could lead to dire consequences, some of which are already visible, consequences that the two authors pondered and denoted meticulously in their ‘what if’ science-fiction scenarios.

READING USTOPIAS

Alexandra GLAVANAKOVA

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

This paper aims to explore the currently prevalent and widely diverse conceptualizations and representations of reading as an essential (also acquired) human ability and a fundamental humanist project. The title suggests the intended lens: it builds on Margaret Atwood’s notion of „ustopia“, defined as „these not-exactly places, which are anywhere but nowhere, and which are both mappable locations and states of mind.“¹ Ideologically the discussion is positioned within the techno–utopian and techno–dystopian discourse, not forgetting the „protopian“ view suggested by Kevin Kelly,² while aiming to avoid the limitations of each. The analysis builds on diverse material as well: from manifestos in defense of deep reading, also referred to as „higher-level reading“³; special events and publications dedicated to the praise of reading; practices of digital social reading in literary contexts; to imaginary futuristic visions on reading literature as portrayed in fictional texts by Ian McEwan and Ted Chiang.

ALL FICTION IS SPECULATIVE

Angel IGOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

In a famous award acceptance speech in 2014, Ursula Le Guin reiterated the established divide between ‘authors of Fantasy and Science Fiction… and the so-called Realists’. What showed through behind her bitterness was a strategy to appropriate a dismissive label and take pride in it. This paper, in a provocative manner, questions the validity of the long-standing distinction between ‘speculative’ and ‘realist’ fiction on at least four accounts:

1. Whereas speculative fiction is a widely accepted term, there seems to be no consensus on naming the other member of this binary opposition. Realist, literary or mainstream fiction all seem too narrow and unsatisfying for a number of reasons.

2. The notion of speculative fiction purports to incorporate the fantastic mode, which,

according to Todorov’s now classic definition, is unstable, elusive, and capable of

permeating various genres. The paper argues that attempts to bind the fantastic mode to a limited selection of genres is misleading.

3. Postmodern fiction (especially but not exclusively) demonstrates fluid generic

characteristics: it often mixes, disrupts, and transcends genres in manners which question all attempts at classification as the divide in question is often bridged.

4. Finally, a serious discussion of fictionality should demonstrate that all fiction, possibly

with very few exceptions, is speculative, as it necessarily speculates about the inner life of characters and disrupts the established order of things by constructing fictional worlds.
At the end of the day, whereas it is not impossible to draw the line between a ‘realist’ and ‘speculative’ fictional world, this seems a reductionist gesture of limited value.

SIGNIFYING AND COGNITIVE LIMITATIONS IN THE NOVELS ‘THE CITY & THE CITY’ AND ‘EMBASSYTOWN’ BY CHINA MIÉVILLE

Georgi ILIEV

Institute for Literature, Bulgarian Academy of Sciences

This text is going to expound on the topic of the necessary limitations in the fictional worlds of two works of the British writer China Melville. It concentrates on the linguistic and pragmatic limitations – what could be said, what could be designated and what could be cognized in the novel. One of the novels is “The City and the City”, a work in the genres of dystopia and alternate history; the other is “Embassytown”, which belongs to the tradition of hard science fiction albeit these concepts are quite loose. In “The City and the City” two ethnically different populations live in the same city and in order for violence not to erupt, they adopted the practice of “unseeing” the streets and people from the “other city” although it is the same city and the streets are densely interweaved. Yet the code of signification is strict and so is the epistemological framework. The historical association is probably something like the co-existence of Jews and Palestinians. And yet breeches occur and they are constitutive both for the limited semiosis and for the successful cognitive activity.

The novel “Embassytown” is a paramount semiotic hard fiction. It features a race of aliens who speak a specific Language. The Language completely represents every object it speaks. Hence the constant double speech, characteristic of the language of humans, is seriously impaired. The Arieki (the aliens) almost never lie and they use their two mouths simultaneously in order to convey two meanings at the same time. Humans developed genetically modified twin ambassadors who could be able to speak the Language. But the strict code of the Language suddenly gets exposed as intrinsically broken – the aliens start lying at certain occasions…

Using the concepts of Peirce, Wittgenstein and Dimitar Vatsov, I am going to argue that every semiotic code, in order to function at all, has to be breeched and broken. By “breeched” I mean subverted from the outside, and by “broken” I mean intrinsically damaged. Hence the signifying and epistemological limitations presented in the different genres of science fiction acquire their true importance.

TECHNOLOGY AND NOSTALGIA IN POST-SOVIET EASTERN BLOC LITERATURE

Dusty KEIM

University of Vienna

The 1990s saw not only the collapse of the Soviet Union and thus the entire Eastern Bloc, but also the creation of the internet and an unprecedented boom in technology and access to information. Throughout this simultaneous collapse and reconfiguration of society along both political and technological lines, former Eastern Bloc countries seek to fashion new identities. In socially and politically unstable times, the tech boom of the 1990s becomes a site of tension through which post-Soviet authors seek to return to a glorified past and refresh the consciousness. “Some cold-eyed cyberneticians see nothing miraculous in the creative act. They hold that everything is programmed by the social machine, all of society and human consciousness. This machine is, in turn, the result of many generations and destinies, and we call the result “consciousness”” (135) writes Romanian poet Nichita Danilov in his essay “In the Author’s Cell,” which appears in the collection Second-Hand Souls. Bulgarian author, Georgi Gospodinov, tackles similar issues in his novel, The Physics of Sorrow, by juxtaposing the physicality of cultural, specifically technological, artifacts with the realities of a crumbling and uncertain political infrastructure. In both works, the authors aim to create a nostalgic past and present, an imagined ideal point where everything in the past where everything was good, or at least better than it is now, and things would be good, or at least better, if only we could return to this imagined historical moment. In this paper, I will explore how both Gospodinov and Danilov employ technological artifacts as well as harness classical symbolism intertwined with redefinition of Orthodox imagery in order to create their nostalgic pasts in an effort to find meaning and rewrite the past in a moment of complete physical and metaphysical upheaval.

POSSIBLE FUTURE: LOOKING BACKWARDS?

Alexander KIOSSEV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

Today, there is often talk of a lack of alternatives, a crisis of imagination, and “defuturing”. Many believe that in order to escape the claustrophobic lack of alternatives of neoliberalism, one needs a new perspective that opens up possibilities for a better world. However, this appeal itself is not quite new one. Humanity has been dreaming for centuries, longing for happiness, opening up possible worlds, building projects, scenarios, and utopias for the future. Throughout its long history, some of these world-building dreams have been realized and unexpectedly turned into terrifying dystopias. Isn’t this a good reason to look analytically back at the risky history of dreams themselves?

In this lecture, we will explore the demiurgic avant-garde art that emerged after the First World War. This was a time when artists indulged in grandiose fantastic projects and expansive horizons. Using examples from the Soviet avant-garde of the 1920s, we will examine both the visionary and self-exploring, reflexive aspects of utopianism. Soviet poets, writers, and artists of that time sought out possibilities even in the most peculiar and seemingly insane projects, that violated the principle of common sense reality; simultaneously they explored the dangerous limits of their dreams, too.

In the first part of the lecture, the context of the time will be recreated, and some of the strangest projects of Soviet art of that time will be described – the search for God (богоискательство) and the construction of God (богостроительство), the search for an ideal cosmic language, the “aesthetic revolution” when art should penetrate into the everyday practice of millions, the liberation of animals and social engineering experiments with biological species, overcoming old age, uniting the proletariat through “blood brotherhood”, and more. The second part will focus on Russian religious criticism of utopianism (Fyodorov) and its traditions in the 1920s: the cosmism of Tsiolkovsky, the biocosmic project of immortality of Al. Svyatogor, and finally, the genius work of Andrey Platonov, which will be considered a laboratory for the ultimate test of all utopias.

IRREALISM AND UNCANNINESS IN ‘IS STACEY PREGNANT? NOTES FROM AN IRISH DYSTOPIA’ BY TOMÁS MAC SÍOMÓIN

Beatrice MASI

Bologna University, Italy

Is Stacey Pregnant? Notes from an Irish Dystopia by the Irish language author Tomás Mac Síomóin, is a satirical rewriting of Orwell’s Animals Farm which tells the story of the Clooneen bog jam, when thousands of cars got stuck in the middle of the empty countryside on their way from the West of Ireland to Dublin. The characters don’t have names, instead they are called by their vehicles’ names: Citroen, Ford, Opel, Cortina. The characters try to speculate about what has caused the jam, while despairing for both their lack of solutions and the gradual shrinking of primary resources like water and food; and although “human” time – hours, minutes – seems to have stopped, “planetary” time – night, day, and changing seasons – is still in place. The novel hybridises various narrative genres such as realism, sci fi and satire, as well as several formal structures and devices namely: the found manuscript, unreliable narration, mimesis, and estrangement. Both in its form and content, Tomás Mac Síomóin’s novel addresses the conjunction of the global and the planetary, that Depesh Chakrabarty identifies as the key to understand our present (2021). The novel in fact, shows concerns with both capitalist globalization, consumer society, fuel regimes and the planetary climate crises. Therefore, in my paper I will read the novel from the perspective of this conjunction, by analysing various levels of “irreality” that emerge at the global and planetary scale. The former will be addressed through the analytical framework of “irrealism” as theorized by the Warwick Collective (2015), while the second will be looked at through the lenses of the “uncanny” borrowed from Timothy Morton’s hyperobjects (2013) and Depesh Chakrabarty’s understanding of the planetary (2021). Moreover, to facilitate the reading of various spatial and time scales, I will employ the idea of scalar reading theorized by Timothy Clark (2012).

“ORDINARY IS WHAT YOU ARE USED TO”: RE-DISCOVERING HISTORY IN THE DYSTOPIAN FUTURE OF MARGARET ATWOOD’S THE HANDMAID’S TALE

Adela A. MIROLEVSKA

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

 

Margaret Atwood has always insisted on the distinction between literary genres, arguing that The Handmaid’s Tale is not science fiction, but speculative fiction because it “could really happen” (2003). By this, she is stressing on the novel’s function as a cautionary tale that uses the realisms of our time to build a dystopian future, that is also deeply rooted in history. “Nothing went into it that had not happened in real life somewhere at some time”, Atwood explained (2018). In this sense, the world of Gilead is not fiction – she did not create it, it was re-discovered as a possible future, and it challenges us to think about the current state of our changing reality.

When The Handmaid’s Tale was published in 1985, it was a reaction to the rise of Christian fundamentalisms and the Reagan administration in the United States, and an increasingly destabilized world. In 2016, when Hulu’s TV adaptation first aired, the political context had changed, and the narrative felt more urgent than ever.

In my paper I will trace the story’s transformations across media – from the novel, to Hulu’s 2016 television adaptation and the consequent viral presence on social and mainstream media. I will look at the emergence and spread of the handmaid as an internationally recognized symbol of protest for women’s rights activism, and the rise of female rage as a feminist instrument of resistance, especially as implemented in social media activism. My analysis will place the novel alongside the context of changing body politics, abortion rights, and social justice movements in contemporary American culture, examining the intersection between popular culture and politics. I will also attempt to explore the function of self-identification and its relation to memory as portrayed in the totalitarian society of Gilead, as well as in the context of current political movements.

THE HERO’S JOURNEY IN THE 21^ST CENTURY: THE RADICAL CHALLENGE OF A CULTURAL LEAP INTO GLOBAL UNITIVE HEALING

Elena MUSTAKOVA

Independent Social Scientist

This paper offers a new perspective on how we can think realistically about our relationship to a world in crisis, following the trajectory of the author’s evolving relationship to literature, philosophy, psychology, and culture in the transition from the 20^th and to the 21^st century, and drawing on Joseph Campbell’s classic mythological account of the hero’s journey. Starting with Faulkner’s American South, which held onto a long-gone imagined stable past, and passing through my Sofia University English Department 1983 thesis on “The Growth and Fall of Selfhood in the Literature of the English Renaissance and Romanticism”, the paper traverses the vast territory, from the individual leaving home and growing into new and more expansive ways of being, to collective awakening and the perilous journey ahead to common ground. I draw on my recent book “Global Unitive Healing: Integral Skills for Personal and Collective Transformation”, which received the 2022 Nautilus Silver Award for best nonfiction responding to the needs of the times, to describe the several different types of wholeness into which we are collectively emerging – which Ken Wilber calls Waking Up, Growing Up, Opening Up, Cleaning Up, and Showing Up, as well as Linking Up and Lifting Up.

This examination is a response to the massive search for ways to imagine and understand the conditions of deepening crises and uncertain global transformations under which we are living. It explores an integral path to wholeness, and the evolving of the psychological, social, and spiritual skills needed in a rapidly globalizing world under mounting threat. How do life meaning, worldview, and ideology play into this process? What may resolution and finding new ground through constructive collective action look like? A real-life vignette will illustrate these processes of the evolution of individual consciousness to meet the challenge of our time and will be considered as a possible prototype for the collective leap of consciousness ahead – toward greater coherence of minds and hearts, and social structures, and new forms of global governance. The structuring role of language and discourse expressing an emergent unitive epistemology will be explored and illustrated through vast processes of social change in the United States.

FAMILY REPRESENTATION IN THE UTOPIAN COMMUNITY

Lilia NIKOLOVA

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

From the 1960s and throughout the 1980s a significant social and political movement gave rise to a substantial number of science fiction and utopian novels in which individuals felt empowered to completely reject the notion of family and thus, to explore alternative lifestyles. Ursula Le Guin’s novel The Dispossessed (1974) and Samuel Delany’s Trouble on Triton (1976) portray two worlds in which gender is no longer an essential social category and where people are represented as equals, regardless of their biological sex. Le Guin’s utopia gives a picture of two planets: one envisioning an anarchist society, where labour is distributed equally and one’s social status is not determined by their assigned sex and another one that is marked by a capitalist economic system and a social order where male authority holds predominant power. Her novel symbolizes a journey that seeks to explore the boundaries of freedom within both societies, going beyond theoretical ideas and instead showcasing the transformation at the end.

In contrast, Delany’s heterotopia can be seen as a response to Le Guin’s utopia – a critique of the notion of it. The novel presents a society in which physical body and sexual orientation are not fixed and one can change them at any time. The lack of social expectations towards each gender provides a degree of liberty to what a family could be and what form it could take. And indeed, the novel demonstrates a variety of different family units.

Both novels envision structures where the nuclear family is not the only one building block for the formation of community bonds: instead, the authors explore the heterogeneous nature of kinship. The paper aims at examining how both novels, although utopian experimentations with alternative forms of living, are unable to portray a positive image of a family. The analysis will trace the bidirectional relationships between family, social structures, and individual experiences. The aim is to explore how the lack of a fixed family structure contributes to the overall harmony and well-being of both societies.

“THERE WEREN’T MANY GOOGLE HITS FOR ‘TELEPATHIC OCTOPUS’”: THE ‘REALISM’ OF THE NON-HUMAN IN TED CHIANG’S “THE STORY OF YOUR LIFE”, NNEDI OKORAFOR’S LAGOON AND DOUG JOHNSTONE’S THE SPACE BETWEEN US

Robert O’CONNOR

York St John University, UK

In her 2016 work Staying with the Trouble, Donna Haraway posits a new epoch; the Chthulucene. For Haraway, the focus must shift away from an anthropocentric centre towards a more nonhuman and multispecies narrative as a counterbalance to the inevitable climatic and environmental collapse which faces us: “Specifically, unlike either the Anthropocene or the Capitalocene, the Chthulucene is made up of ongoing multispecies stories and practices of becoming-with in times that remain at stake, in precarious times, in which the world is not finished and the sky has not fallen – yet. We are at stake to each other” (55). In times of existential, environmental crisis, it becomes more important to interact with narratives of the nonhuman to form new methods of connectivity with the natural world and understand our own place within the biosphere.

Speculative fiction is uniquely positioned to present these core values of the Chthulucene. For instance, we are recently seeing a new interpretation of alien visitation – moving away from marauding colonisation and destruction of key landmarks – which imagines them as, arguably, more “realistic” biological entities. Speculative fiction writers are beginning to realise that the mysterious creatures of the deepest oceans could hold inspiration for how extraterrestrial life could realistically look and interact with us.

Ted Chiang’s “The Story of Your Life” (2002), Nnedi Okorafor’s Lagoon (2015), and Doug Johnstone’s The Space Between Us (2023) all present a more realistic interpretation of alien visitation, one which is not only engaged with aspects of interspecies communication but also environmental commentary. This paper will demonstrate how these works, by moving away from the westernised anthropocentric imagining of extra-terrestrial bodies, are exemplars for a new generation of speculative fiction writers who are choosing to reframe the alien contact story. The results are not fables for capitalism and colonialism, but instead are narratives that depict interspecies existence whilst, in turn, presenting us with speculative scenarios and solutions regarding environmental concerns.

PRE-COLONIAL ROOTS, NOMADISM, AND COMMUNITY AS POST-APOCALYPTIC RESISTANCE IN ‘TEJER LA OSCURIDAD’ BY EMILIANO MONGE

Federica MOSCATELLI

Bologna University, Italy

In current events, it has become increasingly urgent to focus on the dire situation of our planet, now on the brink of collapse. This pressing concern is reflected in some contemporary dystopian narratives that have as their central node a catastrophe, be it environmental or human. As Francesco Muzzioli (2007) argues, dystopia is the genre that best reflects our current world, and the 20th century has, because of the traumatic historical events that marked it, provided the words to describe what was previously unimaginable (Berger, 1999). Our talk focuses on the Hispano-American historical context, and as Giulia Massini (2018) points out, it is precisely from the past that this society intends to restart. In particular, we will focus on the analysis of the dystopian/post-apocalyptic novel by the Mexican Emiliano Monge (2020): Tejer la Oscuridad. The book is a plural and choral text constructed by many narrators (around 80). Structurally, it is divided into three parts (Urdidumbre, Trama and Maya) that weave a narrative of a journey undertaken by a group of orphans who escape from the orphanage where they were confined and where they lived in an extremely hostile situation, both humanly and environmentally, in search of a place to found a new world. Monge constructs this story inspired by the Mexican reality of the 21st century and through his narration stages an intergenerational dialogue that questions the interconnection between past, present and the possibility of future reconstruction through the creation of a new language. The heart of the creation is a communitarian thought, a utopian drive (Jameson, 2005), which does not go towards the light, but seeks obscurity, nomadism as modus vivendi. In other words, the choral voice that develops during the narrative does not aim at capitalist progress but tends towards an original historical ‘regression’ viscerally linked to pre-colonial indigenous traditions. In conclusion, the aim of our intervention is to highlight new narrative possibilities that absorb the violence of the present and the past and transform it to imagine and thus create (Suvin, 2010) a new language for a future of resistance to the apocalypse that we no longer see at the end of time, but which constantly informs our present (Kermode, 1967).

THE NOVEL AS NOVUM: THOMAS PYNCHON’S ‘MASON & DIXON’

Alexander POPOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

This paper speculates about the novel as a technology for interpreting the world. In science fiction and utopian studies, the novum is a “new thing” which necessitates a wholescale resignification of reality – in obvious, or more subtle ways. The novel potentially functions doubly as a novum: once, by reshaping historical consciousness in complicated ways, and a second time, by appearing as a conceptual horizon within its own fictional world. The paper examines the case of Thomas Pynchon’s 1997 novel Mason & Dixon, arguing that the latter explicitly and self-referentially thinks about itself as a kind of technology capable of a truer interpretation of history compared to non-fictional accounts. Pynchon’s text is a hybrid: a painstakingly researched emulation of an 18th-century novel, and a 20th-century postmodern novel attempting to break beyond the conceptual limits of postmodernism. It persistently argues against theories and technologies of time and space which originate in the Enlightenment and to a great extent form the basis of contemporary life, problematizing modern conceptions of history and exposing the complicated, non-linear ways in which past, present and future are bound together. To do so, Mason & Dixon draws widely and deeply from the genre memory of the novel and ultimately reinvigorates the form by returning to it a capacity that it too often abjures – that of rendering reality uncertain and pluripotential.

GEORG LUKÁCS: FROM UTOPIAN REALISM TO REALIST UTOPIAS?

Anna SCHUBERTOVA

Charles University, Czech Republic

In the work of Georg Lukács, the theme of utopia recurs ambivalently. Lukács’ theory of realism is often associated with an anti-utopian perspective that prioritizes reconciliation with reality over utopian daydreams. While Lukács sometimes uses the term pejoratively, connecting utopian tendencies in literature and politics to subjective and idealist outlook, the utopian dimension is a crucial element of his theory of art and realism. This paper aims to achieve two interconnected objectives: (1) examine the changing relationship between realist literature and utopia in Lukács’ work, (2) assess whether Lukács’ theory of realism could be fruitful in understanding the realism of literary utopias.

In The Theory of the Novel (1916), Lukács distinguishes literary utopias from classical novels and emphasizes the subjective nature of their relationship to the world. The separation between utopia and reality is a symptom of the divide between individuals, their values, and the modern world. While in the era of fairy tales, transcendence intertwined with the everyday lives of entire communities, in modernity, we encounter it solely in subjective fantasies. However, in The Meaning of Contemporary Realism (1956), Lukács’ approach takes a different turn. Contrasting his normative model of realism with its decadent version, he praises the utopian aspects present in the works of Balzac and Tolstoy and criticizes the “ascetic defiance” of the utopian features of reality in Flaubert.

We can attribute this shift to Lukács’ adoption of Marxism and the strong emphasis on the historical dimension of realism in his theory after the 1930s. In The Historical Novel (1936-1937), he famously argues against differentiating classical historical novels and realist novels as two distinct genres. The convergence of these two forms is made possible by his understanding of “reality” as inherently dynamic. To capture social reality, the novel must establish a living connection between the past and present, thereby depicting it as open to future change. Lukács sadly did not write a parallel study of “the futuristic novel”. Building on Fredric Jameson’s creative dialogue with Lukács’ theory in Archaeologies of the Future, I will outline the possibilities of Lukácsian theory of realist utopias.

SERIOUSLY FUNNY: ‘DISCO ELYSIUM’ AND THE METAMODERN CONDITION

Severina STANKEVA

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

Following Lyotard’s definition, the paper aims to analyze the metamodern as an emergent contemporary condition (a specific set of circumstances that shape the production and dissemination of knowledge) via Estonian studio ZA/UM’s debut videogame Disco Elysium. Since Vermeulen and van den Akker describe metamodernism primarily as a form of sensibility, Disco Elysium is analyzed as it refers to and thematizes affect. Specifically, the paper examines four interrelated metamodern characteristics: oscillation between opposites, post-irony, historicism, and performatism. By subverting videogame clichés such as amnesia, decision trees, character building, gaining experience, and leveling up and thus pairing the archaic and naïve with the avant-garde and high art with pop culture, the game demonstrates a renewal of a particular neo-romantic responsibility “for the heat death of the universe.” This analysis indicates that video games, although a young art, can integrate the achievements and self-reflexivity of older art forms while simultaneously transforming and shaping them into a novel, disillusioned quest for purpose.

STATES OF POSSIBILITY: THE SPECULATIVE REALISM OF COLSON WHITEHEAD’S ‘THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD’

Ana Kocić STANKOVIĆ

University of Niš, Serbia

The paper explores links between a contemporary novel The Underground Railroad (2016) by Colson Whitehead and the literary genre of slave narratives and argues that this popular and critically acclaimed novel bases its narrative structure on the adaptation of slave narrative tropes and the use of speculative realism. A part of Whitehead’s innovation, we argue, comes from his adaptation, not only of slave narratives, but of slave stories and experiences, to which he adds his artistic touch and elements of fantasy. This is in line with what Stanford professor Ramón Saldivar (2011: 585) terms “speculative fiction” or “historical fantasy”, a combination of genres, the “connection between fantasy and history, bewildering in the continual oscillation of the narrative’s multiple referentiality to both the real and the imaginary (…), a hybrid amalgam of realism, magical realism, metafiction, and genre fictions such as science fiction, graphic narrative, and fantasy proper.” The theoretical framework first considers some of the basic tenets of slave narratives as a genre (Ernest 2014; Fisch 2007; Connor 1996) and then places Whitehead’s work within a broader context of African American writing focusing on its political engagement potential (Davis and Gates 1985; Neal 1968) and the importance of finding one’s voice in the process of self-actualization (hooks 1989; Hill Collins 2002). The central part of the paper offers a reading of Whitehead’s novel based on the argument that it represents a creative contemporary adaptation of the slave narrative literary genre in line with a broader tradition of American literature which considers slavery to be a central and integral part of the American experience (Warren 2014: 187). Whitehead’s work is also considered in light of the fact that a contemporary way of representing truth in literature and culture is multifaceted, fluid, and sometimes even contradictory, including various perspectives. Whitehead incorporates slave’s perspective, but makes his slave protagonist almost super-hero like and turns her story of suffering into a story of complete empowerment. Furthermore, he gives interpretation on past and contemporary phenomena by working them into a fantastic setting for his novel, unreal, but grounded in reality.

 

“SWEAT, MIND, MACHINE”: ANDREI PLATONOV’S COSMOLOGICAL UTOPIA

Philip STOILOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

Andrei Platonov is one of the leading figures of modern Russian literature in the beginning of the 20th century. His entire work revolves around the possibility of a radicaltransformation of human existence along the lines of labor, technological advancement and a fundamental reassessment of the relationship between “man” and “nature”. His conception of the revolutionary utopia is highly controversial – its essentially materialistic premise requires brute force, but its ultimate goal envisions a mode of existence encompassing the entirety of being and commensurable with the transcendent dimension of the cosmos itself. Platonov’s oeuvre is a challenge to the very idea of utopia – not simply imagining the present as different, but placing a demand on the present not to be what it is. Rather than devising alternative versions of the world within the framework of “as if” he affirms the dynamic mode of “as it should be” in relation to immediate reality. The utopia must achieve the impossible, th e unimaginable (unification of heaven and earth), and ultimately bring about a reconciliation between the primal contradictions of human existence.

THE USES OF RETROFUTURE

Enyo STOYANOV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

The paper will attempt to trace the different uses of retrofuturist aesthetics from its inception as an avant-garde art project during the 1970s and through its proliferation in science fiction, architecture design, and ultimately – pop culture. Retrofuturism emerged as a style of citing past imaginings of the future, in order to emphasize their failure to attain presence at the time of the citation, thus producing an effect critical distance from the past and present for satirical purposes. Gradually, the retrofuturistic gesture helped establish a series of fictional “settings” in various media: cyberpunk, steampunk, dieselpunk, atompunk, etc., often extending its sway over other popular forms of speculative fiction, such as dystopia, post-apocalyptic fiction, and alternative history. The paper aims to show that within this dissemination and saturation of retrofuturism, it attains a very peculiar twist on nostalgia: by engaging with a past sense of openness of the future, it confronts us with the conditions of its present closure.

THE FANTASY OF MATTER IN THE WORK OF CHINA MIÉVILLE

Darin TENEV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

The paper will investigate the singular way in which the British SF writer China Miéville has developed an implicit concept of matter throughout his novels. Already in his early work – for example in King Rat or Perdido Street Station – one can glimpse at this concept in statu nascendi. The paper however will focus more on fictions such as Un Lun Dun, Railsea, and The Last Days of New Paris, as well as the short-story collection Three Moments of an Explosion, where the concept comes fully to fruition. The material moment in his writings is always associated with a certain understanding of the oppressed, of the condition of those with no rights, of those deemed no longer worthy or useful. This is easily discernible in the world of UnLondon, a sort of negative of London where all things considered out of use, like broken umbrellas, or sandwich papers, etc., end up. Even more telling is the short-story “The Dusty Hat” in which dust itself, “the most radical wing of matter”, speaks to tell the story of its millenia long fight for justice. All these works can and should be read allegorically. In the way matter is treated in Miéville’s writing however there remains something that resists the naïve allegorical reading and points to the necessity to rethink matter. The paper will suggest that the new concept of matter should be dealt with in a radically empirical way, that paradoxically reveals matter as something that fantasizes. Fantasy here, as the fantasy of matter, should be construed not as a subjective activity or product but as something that makes the subject possible, and eo ipso the very distinction between empirical and transcendental. At the end the paper will explain why the genre of Miéville’s works has to be fantastic.

TRAUMA, TABOO, AND TRADITION IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S ‘SOLITUDE’

Ognyan TENEV

Sofia University “St. Kliment Ohridski”, Bulgaria

The paper constitutes an analysis of Ursula Le Guin’s short story “Solitude,” originally posted in the December 1994 edition of The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction. The story depicts a highly atomized society, where communication among adults is considered taboo, and men and women assume very specific roles with minimal interaction between them. The reading approaches the story from a psychoanalytic perspective based on the works of Freud. More specifically, the analysis considers how Freud’s theory of repression can be seen in the language, taboo, and traditions depicted in the story’s culture. Psychoanalysis can here be helpful in formulating the problems faced by the society depicted in Le Guin’s story. The aim of this interpretation is to demonstrate how one may use psychoanalysis to gain a better understanding and different perspective on social processes.

AI RELIGION AND ETHOS IN KAZUO ISHIGURO’S ‘KLARA AND THE SUN’: CROSS-CULTURAL NEGOTIATIONS

Natalia VYSOTSKA

Kyiv National Linguistics University, Ukraine

Sir Kazuo Ishiguro, the celebrated British writer of Japanese descent and the 2017 Nobel Prize for Literature winner, finds a new way of synthesizing Western and Eastern cultural codes in each of his eight novels informing them with unique artistic aura.

Klara and the Sun (2021), Ishiguro’s latest novel as to date, makes readers reconsider the substance and limits of the (non)human in line with the belief that technical fictions “can, and should, alert students, academics and critics – and indeed all consumers, citizens, industrialists and regulators – to the wider social and legal implications of new technologies, and sensitise them to the less or more foreseeable consequences” (Edwards, Schafer, Harbinja).

Ishiguro’s literary raids to S–and–T terrains fit in with the Posthuman Studies’ field of inquiry cultivated, among others, by Robert Pepperell, Neil Badminton, Katherine Hayles, Cary Wolfe, and Donna Haraway The future is envisioned in this paradigm as transcending “a human operating mode” (Nichols) and marked by the absence of basic differences between biological organisms and cyber mechanisms, robots’ teleology and human goals (Hayles). The paper seeks to highlight transcultural spiritual and ethical implications of Klara the android’s short life story related by herself and unfolding in the plausible, though less than agreeable, future.

Following in Bruno Latour’s steps, both scientists and scholars recognize that the world driven by state-of-the-art technologies is much more akin to the world driven by myth and faith, than the 18^th c. Enlighteners would make us believe. As D.F.Noble puts it, modern technology and modern faith “are merged, and always have been, the technological enterprise being, at the same time, an essentially religious endeavor”. In a paradoxical twist of this increasingly popular idea, in Ishiguro’s version it is the anthropomorphic robot herself who embraces the age-old Sun worship as a universal life-giving force practiced in vast array of both Western and Eastern religions.

As to the android’s ethics, far from breaking any of Azimov’s three laws of robotics (or more recent attempts at bringing them in line with the 21^st c. reality), it has at its center a sacrificial impulse combining Christocentric atonement/redemption motif and Japanese warrior code Bushido’s duty of loyalty for which “no life was too dear to sacrifice” (Nitobe Inazo).

THE POST-ZANY NOVEL: DYSTOPIA AND WORK IN CONTEMPORARY FICTION

Bryan YAZELL

University of Southern Denmark and a fellow at the Danish Institute for Advanced Study, Denmark

This paper examines the comedic narrative structures in recent novels about insecure work, Hilary Leichter’s Temporary (2020) and Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This (2021). These texts are exemplary of texts that, representing precarious and repetitive labor, embrace surreal humor and largely reject the novelistic conventions of realism. Of course, the concept of the workplace comedy is far from new. But as Annie McClanahan has shown in relation to television, the expansion of the freelance labor market in the last decade has changed the very structure of these comedies: episodic and fragmented storytelling reflects the insecure nature of gig work, replacing the repetitive-yet-stable nature of the sitcom, which were typically populated with characters engaged in waged work. The genre fluidity in recent fiction reflects not an escape from the grim reality of work but a critical aspect of how this literature manages the crisis posed by the gig economy, which erases the division between work and leisure and upends traditional class distinctions. To explore the relation of work to genre more fully, this paper emphasizes Leichter and Lockwood’s mutual contributions to reworking what Sianne Ngai terms ‘the zany’ figure in comedy, a character defined by frenetic routines and hyper-performative commitment to work-day tasks. By remarking on a labor regime that asks everyone to be ‘zany’, Leichter and Lockwood at once mark the dystopian nature of work today and locate a more hopeful pretext for the collective rejection of insecure work in the future. By not taking gig work seriously, these texts contest its claim on reality.