Culture's Futures

Science Fiction, Form and the Problem of Culture
Erscheinungsjahr 2025
ISBN: 978-3-031-80429-8
Verlag: Springer Nature Switzerland

Buch, Englisch, 291 Seiten, Format (B × H): 153 mm x 216 mm, Gewicht: 511 g

This book argues that science fiction has been a key participant, along with anthropology and literary theory, in the interdisciplinary debates over “culture” and narrative form from the modernist period to the present. Both science fiction and the anthropological ethnography, in their modernist forms and post-modern/postcolonial reinventions, are intertwined technologies for constructing “culture” and difference through narrative worldbuilding.  This book traces the ways SF authors -- including Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, and Octavia E. Butler, as well as Indigenous futurists  Craig Strete, Celu Amberstone, Rebecca Roanhorse and Cherie Dimaline -- have deployed, interrogated and revised these models of “culture,” representation and power to imagine new futures. 

Zielgruppe

Research

Autoren/Hrsg.

Aronoff, Eric

Fachgebiete

• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Interdisziplinäres Wissenschaften Wissenschaft und Gesellschaft | Kulturwissenschaften Kulturwissenschaften
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturgeschichte und Literaturkritik

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Chapter 1: Introduction:  Science Fiction, Anthropology and the Problem of Culture.- Chapter 2: Aliens, Anthropologists, and American Indians:  Ray Bradbury’s , Modernist Anthropology and the Idea of Culture.- Chapter 3: Well-Wrought Cultures and Carrier Bags: Forms of Culture in Ursula K. Le Guin’s and .- Chapter 4:  Captivity, Conversion, Culture:  Octavia E. Butler’s Genre-tic Engineering of Ethnography and Science Fiction in the Trilogy.- Chapter 5: Resisting Culture:  Culture and/as Sovereignty in Indigenous Futurisms.- Chapter 6: Coda: Culture’s Futures.

Über Autor(innen)

Eric Aronoff is an Associate Professor of Humanities in the Residential College of Arts and Humanities at Michigan State University, USA. His areas of  expertise are modernist American literature and criticism, anthropology and literature, and theories of culture, as well as science fiction. Eric also has strong research interests in  literature and the environment.  His work has appeared in journals such as and . Eric’s first book, was published in 2013.