Tag Archives: Drama

John Updike, Terrorist

By Steen | November 15, 2006

Updike’s new novel comes five years after 9/11 and takes those events as the starting points for a discussion of what fanaticism and terrorism mean. Rather than looking at terrorists as coming from outside the US, he investigates how domestic terrorists might think and why they would hate US culture and society. It is an [...]

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Kathryn Kramer, A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space

By Steen | June 21, 2006

A piece from my dissertation, I’m briefly discussing representational issues in Kathryn Kramer’s A Handbook for Visitors from Outer Space. I’m trying to establish its connection the the slipstream “movement” as Bruce Sterling began defining.

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Michael Winterbottom, Code 46

By Steen | November 30, 2005

A form of hybrid between science fiction and a love story, it is also a new take on the Oedipus myth. The future of the film, not very different from our present and not dependent on special effects, is one where genetic screening is the main way of controlling people and populations; whether done by [...]

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Gus Van Sant, Elephant

By Steen | August 8, 2005

A film which takes its cue from the various high school shootings in the US, but unlike documentaries like Michael Moore’s Bowling for Columbine there is no direct indictment of anyone or anything other than the culture in general. The film has no intentions of answering any questions or investigating what went wrong in the [...]

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Kazuo Ishiguro, Never Let Me Go

By Steen | May 31, 2005

I’ve just finished Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go and it’s a wonderful book. It has a very unusual premise for Ishiguro, who has so far mostly written family/ethnic dramas (such as The Remains of the Day) but here he does something unusual. He writes a novel with a science fiction premise. Of course, the [...]

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