[csaa-forum] CCLCS SEMINAR SERIES: Utopia and Science Fiction - 3 September

[Andrew Milner]

CENTRE FOR COMPARATIVE LITERATURE AND  CULTURAL STUDIES
Monash University

RESEARCH SEMINAR SERIES
Second Semester 2008

All seminars are held on Wednesdays from 3.00 to 5.00 pm, in SG02, 
Building 11 (Menzies Building), Clayton Campus.

September 3

TALES OF RESONANCE AND WONDER: LOCATING SCIENCE FICTION

Andrew Milner (Professor of Cultural Studies, Centre for CL&CS)

ABSTRACT: Raymond Williams's 1978 essay on 'Utopia and Science Fiction', 
first published by the journal Science Fiction Studies, is one of the 
classic theoretical statements on science fiction in utopian studies. 
Like Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979), Tom Moylan's 
Demand the Impossible (1986) and Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the 
Future (2005), it stresses the close kinship between the two genres but, 
unlike them, it nonetheless insists on their conceptual separateness. 
For Williams, these are different but cognate genres. This paper uses 
the categories of Williams's cultural materialism - especially 
'selective tradition', 'structure of feeling' and 'emergent, residual 
and dominant' - and of post-Williamsite 'new historicism' - especially 
'resonace' and 'wonder' - to interrogate, not only Suvin's and Jameson's 
understandings of the relationship between utopia and science fiction, 
but also Williams's own.

DRINKS AND NIBBLES PROVIDED.
All welcome