Scoring Incredible Futures: Science-Fiction Screen Music, and "Postmodernism" as Romantic Epiphany
2008; Oxford University Press; Volume: 91; Issue: 3-4 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1093/musqtl/gdp001
ISSN1741-8399
Autores Tópico(s)Contemporary Literature and Criticism
Resumo“One of the crucial antinomies of art today is that it wants to be and must be squarely utopian, as social reality increasingly impedes utopia, while at the same time it should not be utopian, so as not to be found guilty of administering comfort and illusion. If the utopia of art were actualized, art would come to an end.”1 The years surrounding the turn of the twentieth century saw not only the birth of the cinema but also a great flowering of socialist and scientific utopian literature, led by works such as Edward Bellamy's prediction of life in the year 2000, Looking Backward (1888), William Morris's News from Nowhere (1890), whose Arcadian nostalgia was rooted in a nineteenth-century medievalism at odds with scientific progress, and H. G. Wells's pro-science A Modern Utopia (1905). The complex history of utopian thought nevertheless reminds us that most of these works existed in a period framed by Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) and Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897), with Darwin's Origin of Species (1859) offering a radical reappraisal of the human condition at a midpoint between the two; and that these works were also contemporaneous with social, scientific, and futuristic dystopias such as Dostoyevsky's The Brothers Karamazov (1880), Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891), and Wells's The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896), The Time Machine (1895), and The War of the Worlds (1898), all of which dated from the last twenty years of the nineteenth century. Utopian and dystopian modes of thought became yet more closely linked at this time, interdependently feeding into a variety of related fields, from science fiction and gothic horror—with which they share the practice of presenting otherness as symbol of desire or warning, as a discontinuity from a presumed “ordinary”—to political satire and social realism, energized by conflicting responses to modernity and continually examining and re-examining the bases of similarity and difference, of the known and the unknown. Furthermore, within the utopian category, Morris's News from Nowhere, for example, was intended as a rebuttal of the “soulless mechanical socialism” of Bellamy's Looking Backward,2 and this crucial dichotomy within the modern literary repertoire, clearly a legacy of the similar, much earlier, divided concerns of classic works such as Thomas More's humanist social Utopia (1516) and Francis Bacon's scientific-industrial projections in New Atlantis (1627), is fundamental to this study's claims.
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