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(2015
midterm assignment) Model Student Midterm answers 2015 (Index) Essay 2: Personal / professional topic |
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Cynthia Perkins
Literature of the Future Might Just Save the World
I consider myself fairly well-read, especially in my favorite genre,
science-fiction. I lean heavily toward dystopic, apocalyptic and
post-apocalyptic specifically, because I enjoy thinking about man’s fate and how
we can avoid the worst-case scenarios. Unfortunately, until I started working on
my literature degree, I did not quite have the tools to analyze texts
academically. Taking Dr. White’s
Literature of the Future has even furthered strengthen my ability to dig into a
text and discover so much more of what the author was trying to convey to the
readers.
Learning to look for symbols really opened up these narratives for me. I had
never read anything by Jorge Luis Borges before and fell in love with his
writing style. The Garden of Forking
Paths uses the symbol of the labyrinth to represent the choices we make in
life where it might lead. Interestingly, in the story Ts’ui Pen’s labyrinth is
assumed to be physical garden. It turns out, however, to be a book in which the
main character’s choices are turned into multiple stories so that all the
possibilities can be explored and experienced. At one point the characters are
in “a library of Eastern and Western books” (5). Each of these books can be seen
as a symbol representing the life or a reality of an individual or entire
groups. In each book, whether fiction or non-fiction, choices have been made
that lead to an outcome. This can be applied to our own lives in that we are
constantly making choices and those choices create the life we live and the
reality we experience.
If I hadn’t learned in the first few weeks of class how to identify the
different types of future narratives, I might have thought
Stone Lives was just another fun
cyberpunk story. The world in which Stone struggles to exist fits the Darwinian
model perfectly. He barely survives in the Bungle as everyone is pitted against
everyone else for jobs and resources. This could be correlated to some of the
political attitudes of hard line capitalists in our own time. The fact that
states no longer exist and that there are only Free Enterprise Zones could be
seen as a warning. We can’t just progress economically, but most be making equal
strides in social equality or we may be facing a bleak future. Stone is blind in
the Bungle to the way the world works. He only knows that he must eat, find
water and try to protect himself. Once he is hired by the Citrine Corporation,
he is given electronic eyes and asked to “study…this contemporary world” they
live in (187). His new eyes are a symbol becoming aware of the history that has
led to this reality and understanding how his world works.
Of course, his conclusion is that it’s
unfair, speaking of the socio-economic divide between the Haves and the Have
Nots. He learns, however, that even those with great power are subject to the
laws of nature and can be destroyed by those that are stronger.
I have read William Gibson before, but never felt like I understood him very
well due my lack of technological awareness. By reading
The Gernsback Continuum, and applying
what I have learned about symbolism and alternative future narratives, I feel
like I have a much better grasp on his style. I was able to see fairly quickly
the concept of multiple realities symbolized by mind altering drugs. The concept
of the book “The Airstream Metropolis: The Future That Never Was” he is to
photograph for reminds us that people have been imagining a better future for a
long time. Also, it made me think of how so many people today don’t really
revere the past, from world, national, and local history to their own personal
lineage. It made me wonder if this may be part of what Gibson was trying to say.
We forget about our past and therefore we are not really controlling our future.
We will repeat our mistakes because we have been careless and therefore we will
never be able to reach that perfect future in which we all have flying cars.
Working on my Bachelors of Art in Literature so far has been an interesting and
fulfilling journey. I have learned so much and I feel it has allowed me to read
so much more deeply. I haven’t quite decided if I will pursue a teaching
certificate or write full time. Either way, this class has proven to be a
valuable resource for me. If I chose to take one path or the other, or decide to
do them simultaneously, I feel I will be able to use what I have learned to not
just enrich my own understanding of the world I live in, but others as well.
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