By offering a reading of Aeschylus’s Prometheus Bound, and of the post-Aeschylus tradition of the myth of Prometheus which highlights its revisions as imagined by Karl Marx and Percy Shelley, among ...others, this paper seeks to explore how to grasp, amid our danger and despair, the prominent poetic and cognitive view of a similar cataclysm from the past, as a lesson to the present. The route to do so encompasses a revisitation of the connections between theatre and democracy in ancient Greece; a consideration of the variations of the themes of knowledge, injustice and tyranny, material civilization and its control and the unbowed personal will to resist oppression, all evoked by the myth of Prometheus; and teasing out the main lineaments of a meaning for the play for an endangered Athenian democracy, as staged around 440 as well as for authors who have recycled its main theme throughout centuries, and finally for us today. It ends by giving pride of place to a Promethean hope, a long hope, arisen from suffering and wedded to cognition, which has crossed centuries and reached our times in urgency.
The work is, of course, a provisional statement: a contribution.
The first Polish translation of one of the best-known articles on the poetics of science fiction, considered nowadays a must-read reference in the field. In this classical piece, Darko Suvin famously ...argues in favour of introducing the concept of cognitive estrangement modelled after Viktor Shklovsky’s ostranenie (often questionably rendered as defamiliarisation) as well as Bertolt Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt (as defined in his Kleines Organon für das Theater). Arguing, in due course, for acknowledging the cognitive and epistemological potential of thus defined estrangement, Suvin proceeds to introduce and analyse two distinct models for studying science fiction from both historical and formalist perspective—the extrapolative model and analogic model—which altogether help at outlining features of the most prototypal science fiction. This translation is also supplemented with an addendum from 2014 wherein the author revisits his thoughts from Marxist perspective and ponders on their relevance in reference to a more politically inclined debate in science fiction studies.
Abstract
Orwell, as he himself remarked, came from a lower, professional-service fraction of the English and imperial ruling class that was 'simultaneously dominator and dominated' (Raymond ...Williams), so that a combination of state and monopoly power became his abiding nightmare. His horizon was, as of the Spanish Civil War in 1936, a revolutionary socialism committed to freedom and equality, opposed both to Labourite social democracy and to Stalinist pseudo-communism. In this article, I concentrate on Nineteen Eighty-Four, drawing on narratology (its agential system, spacetime descriptions, and composition - 'the Winston story', the 'Goldstein excerpts', and the Appendix on Newspeak) and history. I conclude that Nineteen Eighty-Four has an interesting, but limited, 'Tory anarchist' stance and horizon: in revolt against the rulers, but not believing that the revolt can succeed (in direct polemic with the Communist Manifesto). In Orwell's view there are 'three kinds of people in the world, the High, the Middle and the Low', but the mindless and passive Low reduce this to the Middle against the High, or intellect and impotence versus cynical power. 'No economics' entails here 'no class struggle', and a fair amount of misogyny. Orwell's textural skill was penetrating, but his thematics very limited. Still, he was one of the first to notice the long-duration slide of politics toward fascism, even if he drew a mistaken consequence from it, as evident in his early conflation of Stalinism and Nazism into an untenable 'totalitarianism'. Nineteen Eighty-Four remains a concerned, appealing, and in some ways useful text, albeit one that ultimately lacks wisdom.
Celotno besedilo
Dostopno za:
DOBA, IZUM, KILJ, NUK, ODKLJ, PILJ, PNG, SAZU, UILJ, UKNU, UL, UM, UPUK
The article ‘Words and Lesions’ is divided into two parts. Part 1, ‘For a rectification of “violence”’, discusses, within a ‘political epistemology of inflicted lesion’ first the denotation and ...yardsticks of violence, then systemic or ‘structural’ violence, and finally argues for counter-violence as self-defence when necessary. Part 2, ‘On the “1968 Moment”: characteristics of violence, the defeat, and the cost’, is historical – it deals with the ‘1968 Moment’: its violence, defeat, and the cost, as exemplified in the long ‘Sanrizuka struggle’ of farmers helped by students against the expropriation for a larger Tokyo airport. It then compares the Japanese characteristics to those of the French May '68. It concludes that the main historical achievement of the youth movement came about in the USA, where it contributed to ending the US intervention in Vietnam. As concerns all other major collective and radical aims and instances, the movement failed, and the causes are briefly indicated. A long note gives data about civilians killed by State vs. ‘group’ terrorism ca. 1965–2004.
Sledeći Hesiodov postupak razdvajanja dobre od loše Eride, u tri dela ovih Teza, komunizam, naučna fantastika i utopija/utopizam podeljeni su između dve krajnosti i tako ispitani. Kod naučne ...fantastike ponovo je razmotrena uloga začudnosti i novuma; oboje se sada posmatraju kao podložni nasrtljivoj obmani. Više je razrađen treći deo o dobrom i lošem utopizmu, sa raspravom o antiutopiji, definisanoj kao ciljana i otvoreno politička upotreba zatvorenog horizonta koja treba da opovrgne, izvrgne podsmehu i učini nezamislivom kako eutopiju nekog boljeg mogućeg sveta tako i distopiju. Entropijsko zatvaranje i rani Diznilend i diznifikacija ispituju se da bi se razumela antiutopija koja nas živi. Za razliku od svih ranijih verzija utopije/utopizma, ljudi su sada potpuno i trajno unutar ove lažne utopije. Teorija utopije/utopizma, koja aksiomatski postulira da utopije nisu ostvarljive, može se spasiti ako se pretpostavi da je eutopija u antiutopiji latentno prisutna kao sačinjeno odsustvo.
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