Iberian Worlds Science Fiction Study Day : meditations , experiments, social change at IRIEC (Cultural Studies Intersites Research Institute /Institut de Recherches Intersites en Études Culturelles), Toulouse, France.
The study day will be held at the Maison de la Recherche (Université Toulouse II- Le Mirail).
The languages of the study day will be French, Spanish and Portuguese.
With this occasion the anamorphic processes (Bozzetto, Soriano) contained in the SF production of the Iberian Peninsula and the Americas, will be examined.
How the marginal status of SF in the cultural field, allows it to develop fictions of the emergence of the minority cultures and perspectives? The speculative aim of these works can be paradoxically compared to the experimental novel’s own approach (Jameson) ? What are the complex literary constructions that can generate an in depth narratological analysis of SF ? Which textual mechanisms are involved in this generic form (Suvin, Saint-Gelais, Langlet ) ? What is the position the writers concerning the literary canon ? Are they wishing to challenge it in order to renew it ?
It must be recalled that, in the Iberian worlds, SF was widely appreciated by numerous canonical writers whom works are oftently using science-fictional codes and processes. Can we, however, consider some texts (Jorge Luis Borges and Jose Saramago, for example) as belonging to SF ? To what extent can it be closer to the poetic fantastic and their many variations that have mushroomed in the Latin American continent?
Can we talk in the recent years about a turning of the SF world to the full growth South ? We observe indeed many works that imagine an alternative future challenging the Western cultural hegemony. Can you see such a phenomenon in the countries of Latin America or, conversely, can we expect a trend towards dystopia in the countries of the Iberian Peninsula ? A society in crisis it produces necessarily dystopian works ?
Finally, what relationship can be observed between genre and the social gender ? The potential of the utopian feminist SF has been beautifully used in North America by writers as Ursula Le Guin, Elizabeth Vonarburg or Joanna Russ and has also been highlighted by many critical and theoretical works such as the ones by Marleen Barr and Donna Haraway, but also by the feminine writers themselves deeply conscious of the exclusion mechanisms of the SF or by exclusion of the women in literature. Can such a phenomenon be observed in the Iberian worlds where, although less numerous, writers like Angelica Gorodischer (Argentina), Daina Chaviano (Cuba) or Elia Barceló (Spain) have left their mark on hispanophone science fiction ?
The study day will focus on literary works but also on other types of art (film, comics, illustration, etc.)
