Journal article
Slipstream Then, Slipstream Now: The Curious Connections between William Douglas O'Connor's "The Brazen Android" and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days
Science-fiction studies, Vol.38(1), pp.67-91
03/01/2011
DOI: 10.5621/sciefictstud.38.1.0067
Abstract
Slipstream is a transitional literature that arises either from a shift from one historical narrative paradigm to another or from a move beyond a given set of narrative protocols when they come to seem inadequate to the writer's purpose. Slipstream may invoke narrative protocols associated with sf, thus making the literature "strangely familiar" to those who know the genre; but it does so without pursuing sf's codified agendas. William Douglas O'Connor's "The Brazen Android" (1891) offers an example of a slipstream work avant la lettre that transitions from the gothic/supernatural mode associated with the fictions of Hawthorne and Poe toward a new emphasis on scientific explanation and method soon to be associated with sf. Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days (2005) offers an example of a contemporary slipstream text, literally giving fresh voice to Walt Whitman's views through three distinct historical periods, for which sf narrative protocols and topoi provided a formal vehicle not otherwise available in mainstream writing. Both O'Connor and Cunningham use a patently science-fictional metaphor--the talking head--to advance agendas not limited to those of sf, in the process giving their fictions the "strangely familiar" feel of science fiction. [PUBLICATION ABSTRACT]
Details
- Title: Subtitle
- Slipstream Then, Slipstream Now: The Curious Connections between William Douglas O'Connor's "The Brazen Android" and Michael Cunningham's Specimen Days
- Creators
- Brooks Landon
- Resource Type
- Journal article
- Publication Details
- Science-fiction studies, Vol.38(1), pp.67-91
- Publisher
- SF-TH, Inc
- DOI
- 10.5621/sciefictstud.38.1.0067
- ISSN
- 0091-7729
- eISSN
- 2327-6207
- Language
- English
- Date published
- 03/01/2011
- Academic Unit
- English
- Record Identifier
- 9984397932202771
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