Panel 11: ‘The Undiscovered Country – the Future’: Shakespeare in Science Fiction

Schedule / Horaire

Wednesday 23 April 2014, 16h-17h30.

Room: Vendôme.

Leader / Organisatrice

Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)

Participants

  1. Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
    “TaH pagh, taHbe'” – Shakespearean Heritage in the Postmodern Space Opera
  2. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College, Trondheim (Norway)
    The Extraordinary Presence of Shakespeare and his Characters in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen
  3. Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia (USA)
    ‘Desdemona’s Voice’: The Shakespearean Past in Jeff Noon’s Vurt
  4. Jennifer Drouin, University of Alabama (USA)
    Doctor Who‘s “The Shakespeare Code”, or Science Fiction as a new New Historicism

Abstracts / Résumés

1. Simone Broders, Friedrich-Alexander-Universität Erlangen-Nürnberg (Germany)
“TaH pagh, taHbe'” – Shakespearean Heritage in the Postmodern Space Opera

Shakespearean references in science fiction have been read as speculations on future literary traditions, as a means of establishing ‘hero’ and ‘villain’, or as pop culture’s claim to the bard. Yet it remains to be analyzed how Shakespeare’s plays function within the concept of postmodern space operas, toying with echo chambers and universal simulation. Holodeck performances and Hamlet quotes in Klingon on Star Trek, a Macbeth plot in Battlestar Galactica, William Shakespeare’s Star Wars – in many different forms, Shakespeare in space continues to raise questions about the self-fashioning of humanity as a whole in a future of steadily increasing challenges.

2. Delilah Bermudez Brataas, Sør-Trøndelag University College, Trondheim (Norway)
The Extraordinary Presence of Shakespeare and his Characters in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen

Shakespeare and his characters appear in Alan Moore’s League of Extraordinary Gentlemen (1999-2012) to offer readers recognizable figures to which Moore can connect a variety of fluidly recreated historical and fictional characters. The result is a multimodal virtual space where all literary figures coexist to confound time and space (science fiction’s primary realms of utopic possibility). In this paper, I demonstrate how Shakespeare, as the icon of “original” literature, anchors the infinite fluidity of the League’s many worlds thus allowing the fictionality of familiar literature to fade as readers enter the particularly creative simulacrum of Moore’s concluding Black Dossier (2005).

3. Sujata Iyengar, University of Georgia (USA)
‘Desdemona’s Voice’: The Shakespearean Past in Jeff Noon’s Vurt

This paper argues that Jeff Noon’s 1993 British cyberpunk novel Vurt rewrites Shakespeare’s tragedy of exogamy or racial crossing, Othello, as a triumphant fable in favor of interspecies mixing. The novel moves among 1990s Manchester, the drug-fuelled, multi-species virtual game-world or Vurt, and the deadly cultural crossings of Shakespeare’s Othello. The gang whose exploits the narrator, Scribble, documents prides itself on its racial purity, to such an extent that Scribble is in love with his own sister, Desdemona. By the end of the novel, however, Scribble discovers that the Vurt favors endogamy over endogamy and cross-cultural myth-making over antique Englishness.

4. Jennifer Drouin, University of Alabama (USA)
Doctor Who‘s “The Shakespeare Code”, or Science Fiction as a new New Historicism
Like John Madden’s 1998 film Shakespeare in Love, “The Shakespeare Code” episode of Doctor Who recreates the material conditions of Shakespeare’s London; however, the television series obsessed with time and history does so more accurately than the film constrained by the conventions of romantic comedy. Whereas Madden’s film distorts the timeline of Shakespeare’s plays, Doctor Who endeavours to fill in the gaps, notably by imagining the lost Love’s Labour’s Won. Doctor Who demonstrates that science fiction, because it is concerned primarily with humanity’s legacy to the universe, is more apt to do New Historicism than other genres.