Difference between revisions of "Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime"
| Line 3: | Line 3: | ||
Important work of scholarship and criticism, reviewed insightfully and in some detail by Neil Easterbrook in ''SFRA Review'' #287 (Winter 2009): pp. 10-12, who offers passim his own useful observations some of which we quote.[http://sfra.org/resources/sfra-review/287.pdf] | Important work of scholarship and criticism, reviewed insightfully and in some detail by Neil Easterbrook in ''SFRA Review'' #287 (Winter 2009): pp. 10-12, who offers passim his own useful observations some of which we quote.[http://sfra.org/resources/sfra-review/287.pdf] | ||
| − | Easterbrook finds this "a terrifically useful collection of new and reprinted essays[...,] a welcome addition to the growing body of work that opens us to the traditions, genres, and nature of SF outside western Europe and North America. It indexes a cluster of concerns interesting to anyone involved with SF: the topoi and tropes are similar — disasters and monsters, lost worlds and robots, cybernetic prosthetics and space operas — as are the | + | Easterbrook finds this "a terrifically useful collection of new and reprinted essays[...,] a welcome addition to the growing body of work that opens us to the traditions, genres, and nature of SF outside western Europe and North America. It indexes a cluster of concerns interesting to anyone involved with SF: the topoi and tropes are similar — disasters and monsters, lost worlds and robots, cybernetic prosthetics and space operas — as are the thematics — progressive and reactionary responses to" in Roger Luckhurst use, ''mechanism'' as a useful 19th term for the advent of "technological machinery transforming human life" (p. 10). |
<blockquote> | <blockquote> | ||
In either the East or the West, SF is best understood as a response to the rise of modernity —initially optimistic, but after Hiroshima increasingly problematic in its accounts of technology. [...] Western “proto-SF” begins with anxieties about technoscience and mechanism (as, for example, in the instance of Mary Shelley’s ''Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus''). In Japan, there is | In either the East or the West, SF is best understood as a response to the rise of modernity —initially optimistic, but after Hiroshima increasingly problematic in its accounts of technology. [...] Western “proto-SF” begins with anxieties about technoscience and mechanism (as, for example, in the instance of Mary Shelley’s ''Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus''). In Japan, there is | ||
| − | a small body of work that corresponds to the “proto-SF” of the West, but the earliest influences came after the mid-nineteenth century, | + | a small body of work that corresponds to the “proto-SF” of the West, but the earliest influences came after the mid-nineteenth century [... in the opening of]] the Meiji period. [***] |
| + | As Miri Nakamura tells us in “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan,” “The forerunner of contemporary Japanese SF” was the “irregular detective fiction” of Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura magura (1935 — the untranslatable title might be rendered as “Trickery” or “Sorceries”) (4). Nakamura’s essay not only starts the volume’s organizational scheme around rough chronological sequence, but it also offers an acute analysis of what will be the book’s central interpretive trope — the uncanny, as drawn from Freud’s famous but infrequently read 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche.”[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uncanny#Sigmund_Freud][https://uncanny.la.utexas.edu/wp-content/uploads/2016/04/freud-uncanny_001.pdf][https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34222/34222-h/34222-h.htm] | ||
</blockquote> | </blockquote> | ||
Revision as of 23:09, 20 January 2021
Bolton, Christopher, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay Jr., and Takayuki Tatsumi, eds. Robot Ghosts and Wired Dreams: Japanese Science Fiction from Origins to Anime. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2007.
Important work of scholarship and criticism, reviewed insightfully and in some detail by Neil Easterbrook in SFRA Review #287 (Winter 2009): pp. 10-12, who offers passim his own useful observations some of which we quote.[1]
Easterbrook finds this "a terrifically useful collection of new and reprinted essays[...,] a welcome addition to the growing body of work that opens us to the traditions, genres, and nature of SF outside western Europe and North America. It indexes a cluster of concerns interesting to anyone involved with SF: the topoi and tropes are similar — disasters and monsters, lost worlds and robots, cybernetic prosthetics and space operas — as are the thematics — progressive and reactionary responses to" in Roger Luckhurst use, mechanism as a useful 19th term for the advent of "technological machinery transforming human life" (p. 10).
In either the East or the West, SF is best understood as a response to the rise of modernity —initially optimistic, but after Hiroshima increasingly problematic in its accounts of technology. [...] Western “proto-SF” begins with anxieties about technoscience and mechanism (as, for example, in the instance of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus). In Japan, there is a small body of work that corresponds to the “proto-SF” of the West, but the earliest influences came after the mid-nineteenth century [... in the opening of]] the Meiji period. [***] As Miri Nakamura tells us in “Horror and Machines in Prewar Japan,” “The forerunner of contemporary Japanese SF” was the “irregular detective fiction” of Yumeno Kyūsaku’s Dogura magura (1935 — the untranslatable title might be rendered as “Trickery” or “Sorceries”) (4). Nakamura’s essay not only starts the volume’s organizational scheme around rough chronological sequence, but it also offers an acute analysis of what will be the book’s central interpretive trope — the uncanny, as drawn from Freud’s famous but infrequently read 1919 essay “Das Unheimliche.”[2][3][4]
RDE, finishing, 19/20Jan21
