![]() ![]() What distinguishes speculative Orientalism is the sf writers’ use of the imagined Asia/ns as a speculative instrument for estranging American readers’ familiar epistemology and ontology. The Oriental figure I analyze is neither understood as premodern and threatening as in Saidian Orientalism, nor as futuristic or robotic as in techno-Orientalism. I distinguish this type of Orientalism from Edward Said’s traditional Orientalism found mainly in the early twentieth-century yellow peril genre and from techno-Orientalism in the 1980s’ cyberpunk genre. I argue that American New Wave sf writers understand Asia/ns as a gateway to an alternative reality, and, in the process, simplify, alienate, exoticize, and effeminize Asia/ns and conflate them in one homogeneous group or with Indigenous people. Also, the importance of drawing upon conceptual point of view in dealing with episodes containing deliberate metaphors and/or schema refreshment was pointed out.This dissertation traces the genealogy of a type of Orientalism found in American New Wave science fiction (sf) between the 1950s and the 1970s. Besides, priming of certain kinds of sub-worlds or displacement of world-builders was sometimes under the impact of emotion. It was found that tense manipulation requires a more careful examination due to the fact that the absence of tense shifting is not always a sign of the absence of world shifting. O'Brien's techniques of tense manipulation, displacement of world-builders, and deliberate metaphors with or without schema refreshment have been examined to highlight the way textual features cue the reader's movements between various event frames. This study involves a Text World Theory perspective on Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried to explore the stylistic particularities of traumatically-loaded episodes in terms of the shifting between the matrix contextual frame and the generated sub-worlds. Text World Theory is a remarkable approach for exploration of the reader's cognitive interactions with the text. In the final part of the article I shortly broaden my research scope and also take into account Ian McDonald’s River of Gods (2004), SF novel that brings to the fore the idea of water exploitation and pollution in a futuristic Indian subcontinent, thus providing a further insight into the linguistic, stylistic and narrative construction of the waste theme. In my view, since the conceptualisation and the rendering of the theme warn and challenge the reader to respond to important ethical questions, these dystopian narratives are set to work as parables that have to be cognitively processed and decoded. Here I aim at investigating how discourse worlds of waste are triggered by the texts under consideration through the resources of the language of science fiction. In this article I focus on some literary works by Padmanabhan and Singh dealing with the theme of waste, and I adopt an interdisciplinary approach that benefits from an amalgamation of postcolonial studies, cognitive poetics and ecolinguistics. In particular, in their short fiction, both authors appropriate and reinvent the architexts of utopia and dystopia to build up a complex system of deictic temporal shifts that allow an exploration of the future and a reflection on the central role of nature. ![]() Significant examples of this type of writing are the short stories by Manjula Padmanabhan (1999 2004) and Vandana Singh (2004 2008), two Indian writers who employ the narrative format to critically address the environmental question and the possible creation of waste worlds, also bearing in mind real-life catastrophes such as the 1984 Bhopal gas tragedy. ![]() Postcolonial speculative discourse has often treated the threat of potential ecological wastelands emerging from the unwise actions of humankind. ![]()
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