special topics in popular culture studies: james tiptree, jr. & science fiction

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction


Her Smoke Rose Up

Forever: "Her Smoke

Rose Up Forever"

(1974)


Her Smoke Rose Up

Forever: "Your Faces, O My

Sisters! Your Faces Filled of

Light!" (1976)


Meet Me at Infinity:

“Afterword to ‘Her Smoke

Rose Up Forever’”


James Tiptree: The

Double Life of Alice

B. Sheldon:

Chapters 15-19


50 Key Figures in Science

Fiction: Leigh Brackett

(1915-1978)

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction Leigh Brackett


50 Key Figures in

Science Fiction: Octavia

Butler (1947-2006)


Octavia Butler


50 Key Figures in

Science Fiction: David

Cronenberg (1943- )

ENGL 2020 Themes in Literature and Culture: The Grotesque

David Cronenberg (1943- ). Canadian Filmmaker

Cronenberg Interview on the Grotesque Blog

David Cronenberg and the Cinema of the Extreme

http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/cronenberg-interview.html

http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/cronenberg-interview.html

http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2011/11/david-cronenberg.html




"[He] encouraged my body to revolt against me."a character in David Cronenberg's The Brood* ". . . the idea of a creative cancer; something that you would normally see as a disease now goes to another level of creativity and starts sculpting with your own body."Cronenberg in an interview The words quoted above are from a character named Hartog, a patient in Dr. Raglan's "Psychoplasmics Institute," where a mad scientist teaches his patients how to cure themselves by manifesting their own neuroses and psychoses physically. Bodies are always in revolt (revolting) in Cronenberg's films. It was in his films in the seventies and eighties that we were first "privileged" to witness those images of subcutaneous movement that became his trademark, of something alive and independent moving beneath our skin, of alien presences inside our own bodies.



Another mad scientist's creation (in Shivers) of a parasitic organism—supposedly intended to stand-in for and then replace failing bodily organs but actually designed to put an end to mankind's over zealous rationality—goes awry and creates a plague of sexual violence in a seemingly utopian community.

An experimental technique of plastic surgery (in Rabid) turns a young woman into a rabies-spreading vampire.

Her Psychoplasmic "cure" induces a woman to give birth to a murderous "brood" of offspring, who fulfill her every violent repressed wish, including murdering her own parents.


Exposure to a clandestine satellite TV channel called "Videodrome," invented by Professor Brian O'Blivion and intended to pave the way for mankind's next evolutionary step—the development of "The New Flesh"—induces in a Toronto cable station owner a brain tumor and subsequent hallucinations of bodily mutation and murder, etc. As one critic (William Beard) has observed, the body in Cronenberg's films is "an anarchic domain," the "untamable half of the human animal—an aspect that forever lies in wait beneath the bland assumptions of control and the airy cerebrations of the conscious mind." Sometimes a truce between mind and body is momentarily established, but it can never be maintained. For if the body's "mysterious needs and mechanisms are tinkered with or denied or ignored," catastrophe results.


As "part of trying to reverse the normal understanding of what goes on physically, psychologically and biologically to us," Cronenberg counsels in an interview, we must learn to understand a disease "from the disease's point of view." "A virus is only doing its job," he theorizes in an interview.It's trying to live its life. The fact that it's destroying you by doing so is not its fault. . . . I think most diseases would be very shocked to be considered diseases at all. It's a very negative connotation. For them, it's very positive when they take over your body and destroy you. It's a triumph.”


1975 (aka Shivers)


1977

On the Grotesque Blog

http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/rabid-clip.htmll


1979


http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/brood-trailer.html


1981


1983


1983

Satuday Night Live’s “Ed Glosser: Trivial Psychic”

http://www.hulu.com/watch/4180/saturday-night-live-ed-glosser-trivial-psychic







1986


1988


1991


http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/naked-lunch-trailer.html


1996


1999


http://thegrotesqueblog.blogspot.com/2012/04/restaurant-scene-from-existenz.html


2005


2007


2011


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg, by Dr

Martyn Steenbeck

ln 1976 I contracted an audiovisual virus. It happened in a cinema. At that time, I believed that few people had been exposed to this particular cinematic phenomenon. However, I was later to discover that large audiences in more than forty countries had also been ravaged by what I had seen. There was no known antidote, and worse, the contagion seemed to spread at an alarming rate among those very unsuspecting souls who had exposed themselves to it for the price of a movie ticket.

It is now clear that in the warm, dark recesses of movie auditoriums everywhere, the virus found little resistance among audiences whose immune systems had grown soporific and complacent on a diet of polite imagination, subtle subtext and decorative gore. We had exposed our- selves to a movie called Shivers. Eighty-seven minutes later, life was a different prospect altogether.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck The perpetrator, mad scientist, creative genius - depending on your point of view - was Canadian film-maker David Cronenberg, a man (I have since discovered) whose social camouflage resembles a recently graduated dental student with straight As for etiquette, articulation and an uncanny ability to locate painful nerves.

The Cronenberg Condition (I can describe it in no other way) has proved contagious and addictive. Although the director's own viral approach to horror is less a part of the healthy flow of the genre than a parasite or tumour on it, Cronenberg's visions have been appropriated by the main body of the horror/sci-fi genres. It's unlikely that the million- dollar mainstream shock of. Alien could have been realised without the extreme and uncompromising purity of imagination of the low-budget Shivers, made four years earlier. 'Body horror'- as convenient a phrase as any with which to satisfy the impulse to imprison and control such phenomena - is now everywhere. But it starts and ends with Cronenberg. The (un)intention is clear: to transpose a sensibility into language: 'Felliniesque', 'Kafkaesque', and now 'Cronenbergesque'.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck His practice has no other cinematic parallel that I am aware of. Its true equivalent is to be found in the nature of pure scientific endeavour. Very obviously in the early films, the director is the absentee scientist of the narratives: the man who sets in motion an experiment aimed at short-circuiting the evolutionary process, but is no longer present to witness or fully comprehend its inevitable and unpredictable course. However, this self-reflexive alignment with fictional scientific masterminds is only the beginning. Cronenberg's practice itself is truly scientific. The films are experiments, conducted in a 'pure' sense, with little or no regard for the consequences. The point is to follow the experiment or hypothesis through to the end, unrestrained by social or political considerations.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck Furthermore, each film can now be seen as an important and necessary stage in a continuing meta-experiment, which has taken years. In true scientific spirit, the director has been encouraged by each movie to progress and refine that experiment - film to film - as part of a lifetime's commitment towards an end: finding the cure to a disease common to us all. It is called mortality.

Knowing this disease to be incurable, and finding religious belief an unacceptable anaesthetic, each film explores an alternative way of exploring and defusing anxiety about death. Mutation and transformation are offered up as possible cures for a mind./body schism which results from the very incomprehensibility of bodily demise. The fact that these alternatives also lead to death and destruction is perhaps less to do with a deep-rooted pessimism or negativity than the need to seek a hard and realistic optimism. Needless to say, the experiment must continue. The cure is elusive.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck

Cronenberg sets his experiments in motion but, like his fictional counterparts, has no control over their eventual fate when released into the world. This may account for the observation - or criticism - that what the director says about his films sometimes fails to correspond to how they actually work on certain audiences and critics. However, scientific endeavour often causes unease, due to an unwillingness or inability - endemic to the process - to discuss or perceive effect or implication. It is Cronenberg's enthusiasm for the pure experiment that has distressed some critics: his determination to be unsparing and unflinching; his refusal to dilute what he creates with any considerations outside the demands of a particular narrative.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck I have attempted to comprehend the nature of my addiction to the Cronenberg condition. Like certain other viruses that are pleasurable in the getting, it continually retreats to the safety of the nervous system where it loiters * only to break surface again in another story, on another screen, in another town. It seems incurable, to my mind. The pain is in its emergent melancholia; the pleasure is in its absolute integrity - a rare commodity in commercial movie-making; the joy is in its necessary and perverse sense of humour and play. And the consolation is in its cathartic effect: hopefully personal chaos isn't any more frightening, or more close, than what David Cronenberg projects on that screen.


Foreword to Cronenberg on Cronenberg by Dr Martyn Steenbeck Note: Psychologist and cineaste Dr Martyn Steenbeck established a revolutionary media studies course in 1978 at the Schreber Institute in northern Ontario. He dedicated much of his academic life to analysing the impact of violent sexual imagery on the central nervous system. The above is taken from his unpublished journals, lodged with the Schreber Institute by his wife Flavia, shortly after his mysterious death by self- immolation in 1988.

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction David Cronenberg


50 Key Figures in Science

Fiction: Samuel R. Delany

(1942- )

Special Topics in Popular Culture Studies: James Tiptree, Jr. & Science Fiction Samuel R. Delany


The Dreams Our Stuff is

Made Of: "How Science

Fiction Diffused the Bomb”


Wesleyan Anthology of Science

Fiction: William Tenn, "The

Liberation of Earth" (1953)



Fiction: Alfred Bester, "Fondly

Fahrenheit" (1954)



Fiction: Avram Davidson, "The

Golem" (1955)



Fiction: Cordwainer Smith, "The

Game of Rat and Dragon" (1955)

special topics in popular culture studies: james tiptree, jr. & science fiction

Documents

science fiction slide

science fiction james

popular culture studies

special topics

extreme slide

grotesque david cronenberg

smoke rose

key figures