Thinking with science fiction

Archeologies of the Future Volume 2


Fredric Jameson

24,90 €
How to fix with the naked eye the present of our human history, always intolerable to a minimally sensitive soul? By dreaming its unspoken and its false promises. For several decades, so-called “science fiction” literature has been working on this. SF is generally understood as the attempt to imagine unimaginable futures. Its subject, demonstrates Fredric Jameson, is rather the current future of our collective destiny. It is not for the authors analyzed in this collection - Philip K. Dick, Ursula Le Guin, Brian Aldiss, Vonda McIntyre, Kim Stanley Robinson or even William Gibson... - to give us "images" of the future to lull us into sleep. or liberate us from the everyday, as some literary critics still believe who persist in not taking the effort of anticipation seriously: the strength of science fiction is to defamiliarize and restructure the experience we have of our present , and this in a specific, new mode, fertile in itself and for thought. The deep motivation of SF and the science fiction novel is to make people perceive, in a local and determined way, with a plenitude of concrete details, our constitutional incapacity to imagine a different future. If the individual imagination seems rich there, it is because it reveals, on the contrary, the mimetic poverty, the systemic, cultural and ideological closure that keeps us all prisoners. This collection of articles extends the major analysis begun in Archéologies du futur. The desire called utopia (Max Milo, 2007).
The author

Fredric Jameson, born in 1934, is a professor at Duke University. He is known throughout the world for his analyzes of postmodernism and the colonization of the cultural sphere by capitalism.

288 pages | ISBN: 9782353410354

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