Rövid leírás:

This collection argues that Connie Willis?s oeuvre performs science fiction?s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly?and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location

Hosszú leírás:

In spite of Connie Willis?s numerous science fiction awards and her groundbreaking history as a woman in the field, there is a surprising dearth of critical publication surrounding her work. Taking Doomsday Book as its cue, this collection argues that Connie Willis?s most famous novel, along with the rest of her oeuvre, performs science fiction?s task of cognitive estrangement by highlighting our human inability to read the times correctly?and yet also affirming the ethical imperative to attempt to truly observe and record our temporal location. Willis?s fiction emphasizes that doomsdays happen every day, and they risk being forgotten by some, even as their trauma repeats for others. However, disasters also have the potential to upend accepted knowledge and transform the social order for the better, and this collection considers the ways that Willis pairs comic and tragic modes to reflect these uncertainties.

Tartalomjegyzék:

Introduction

PART I: Contagion

Chapter One: All This Has Happened Before, and All This Will Happen Again: Doomsday Book and Recurring Pandemics

Joelle L. Renstrom

Chapter Two: Flip Passes: Interpreting Agency and Contagion in Bellwether

Jill Marie Treftz

PART II: Individual and Collective Trauma

Chapter Three: Emergency Unpreparedness: Responses to Disaster in Connie Willis?s Passage Matthew Newcomb

Chapter Four: Taking it Personally: Private Engagement with Public Trauma from World War II to J.F.K.

Janet L. Bland

PART III: Incarnation and Embodiment

Chapter Five: "You Were Here All Along": Doomsday Book and the Bodies of Christ

Chad Schrock

Chapter Six: Christmas Every Day: Incarnational Theology in Connie Willis?s "Inn" and "Epiphany"

Erin Newcomb

PART IV: Intertextuality

Chapter Seven: Bell Speech in John Donne, Richard Wilbur, and Connie Willis?s Doomsday Book

William Tate

Chapter Eight: Finding Love (and Truth?) in the Midst of Chaos: The Influence of Dorothy L. Sayers?s Detective Fiction on To Say Nothing of the Dog

Christine A. Colón

PART V: Genre, Gender, and Xenophobia

Chapter Nine: The Mote in the Jester?s Eye: Aspects of Race and Gender in Connie Willis?s Light Short Fiction

Sylvia Kelso

Chapter Ten: "Tell All the Truth but Tell it Slant": Rhetorical Humor in Connie Willis?s Short Fiction

Rosalyn Eves

PART VI: Humanist and Posthumanist Witness

Chapter Eleven: Messages in a Bottle: The Historian?s Ethic in Connie Willis?s Quantum Universe

Kathryn N. McDaniel

Chapter Twelve: Schrödinger?s Cathedrals: Humanist Memory and Posthumanist Sacramentality in Connie Willis?s Fiction

Carissa Turner Smith