IRIS

Other Worlds and the Narrative Construction of Otherness

Francesca Bellino
;Alessandro Mengozzi
;
2017-01-01
2017
Francesca Bellino; Esterino Adami; Alessandro Mengozzi
Francesca Bellino; Esterino Adami; Alessandro Mengozzi; Alessandra Consolaro; Ada Barbaro; Cristina Colet; Graziella Acquaviva; Lucia Avallone; Alessandro Monti; Tommaso Braccini
Inglese
1
207
207
978-88-6977-095-1
Mimesis
Sesto San Giovanni, Milano
no
This volume is concerned with the explorations of different dimensions of the coterminous worlds of Science Fiction and Fantasy, with a particular reference to Asia and Africa, and their relations with other. It ambitiously gathers contributions from Italian scholars working in a variety of disciplines ranging from Chinese Studies to Arabic Literature and Indian Cultures, from Translation Studies and Stylistics in English-language fiction and Postcolonial authors to Semitic and Classical Philology, and it is grounded upon different methodological perspectives and frameworks. The scope of the volume is deliberately open-ended and broad, since it aims to transverse, tackle, compare and contrast a constellation of discourses, texts, and authors in various cultures, often observed in a dialogic relationship between past and present, thus adopting in toto an interdisciplinary approach. Therefore, it is possible to identify a series of recurrent tropes, topics and features, which cumulatively design a red thread in the chapters here presented. One of the macro-areas that emerges is centred on the idea of language as a tool to build up styles, genres and texts: many of the narratives taken into account (cheap science fiction, comics books, oral myths) superficially appear to be simple, even naïf and marginal, representing a generic category of so-called ‘popular culture’, but in reality they partake of cultural complexities in transit between tradition and (post)modernity. In challenging canons and readers, and implicitly suggesting other paths of transformation and elaboration, for example with the same themes and characters across genre boundaries, from literature to cinema, from mythology to graphic novels, these narratives actually appropriate modalities and devices that undergo a process of revision to envisage thorny cultural questions. Stereotype, for example, is one of the mechanisms through which different stories of Science Fiction and Fantasy operate. Indeed the outlandish creatures, characters, and places that they feature on first sight appear to be connoted as unoriginal, frozen and even trite, but in reality they work as means for exploring a variety of discourses by speculating on other wor(l)ds, and to achieve such goal they often rely on intertextuality and hybridity, two key paradigms that reverberate through various genres. Intertextuality here concerns the capacity of texts and stories to link bridges with other references and domains. The linguistic, literary and cultural materials analysed in the various papers establish connections between traditions, shuttling between times and spaces, so that it is possible to imagine the irruption of fantasy as a way to obliterate history in 1960s Egypt, utopian or dystopian places in the Indian subcontinent, the menace of the East in terms of racialised figures at the beginning of the twentieth century in the West, or ghostly beliefs from ancient Greek to the Raj period and contemporary Indian cinema. Hybridity on the other hand triggers a strategy of transformation that affects both styles and contents. The expressive modalities and languages of Asian and African Sci-fi and Fantasy in fact stem from and blend together a wealth of traditions, imageries and stories. Thanks to them fiends of antiquity surface from Victorian ghost literature in the works of M. R. James, or the Tanzanian demon known as Popobawa that embodies the Freudian notion of the uncanny, leaves fiction and as shared belief enters the realm of propaganda, news and eventually history. Interestingly, hybridity also turns out to be a recurring token as it thematically impacts upon body discourse with monstrosity as a constant feature for the beings and creatures portrayed in this type of texts. The contributions here collected examine a critical gaze both within and across cultures: thus not only the construction of the Oriental ‘other’ as a kind of clichéd bearer of otherness, strangeness, and even threat – see the time-honoured ghoulish character of Ra’s al-Ghūl in modern Batman adventures – or bestiality – see the Indians as beasts in the Greek and Classical Syriac novel on Alexander the Great – but also the reshaping of Western symbols from the world’s peripheries, for example through the translational process of an American romance for young adults in the Somali language.
Science Fiction; Fantastic Literature; Orient; Arabic Literature, Asian Literatures, African Literatures
Esperti anonimi
3
7 Curatele::7.1 Curatela
284
info:eu-repo/semantics/other
none
Bellino, Francesca; Mengozzi, Alessandro; Adami, Esterino
7.1 Curatela
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Utilizza questo identificativo per citare o creare un link a questo documento: https://hdl.handle.net/11574/216860
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