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Darko Ronald Suvin (born July, 19, 1930) is a Yugoslav-born academic and critic, who became a Professor at McGill University in Montreal — now emeritus. He was born in Zagreb, capital of Croatia, and after teaching at the department for comparative literature at Zagreb University, moved to Canada in 1968. He is best known for several major works of criticism and literary history devoted to science fiction.
He was editor of Science-Fiction Studies (later respelled as Science Fiction Studies) from 1973 to 1980. After his retirement from McGill in 1999, he lives in Lucca, Italy.
.....
H. G. Wells and Modern Science Fiction (1977) — edited by Darko Suvin, with Robert M. Philmus
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Victorian Science Fiction in the UK: The Discourses of Knowledge and Power (1983)
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US Science Fiction and War/Militarism (Fictions, Studi sulla narrativita, Anno III, Pisa 2004, issue 3: 1-166) - guest editor, with Salvatore Proietti, special issue in English
...etc. etc.
The Encyclopedia of Science Fiction, edited by John Clute and Peter Nicholls, contains an extensive discussion of the problem of definition, under the heading "Definitions of SF". The authors regard Darko Suvin's definition as having been most useful in catalysing academic debate, though they consider disagreements to be inevitable as science fiction is not homogeneous. Suvin's cited definition, dating from 1972, is: "a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the presence and interaction of estrangement and cognition, and whose main formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author's empirical environment."[2] The authors of the Encyclopedia article - Brian Stableford, Clute, and Nicholls - explain that, by "cognition", Suvin refers to the seeking of rational understanding, while his concept of estrangement is similar to the idea of alienation developed by Bertolt Brecht, that is, a means of making the subject matter recognizable while also seeming unfamiliar.
The political relationship between 9/11 and market forces reveals the second point of departure for Dark Horizons: the corporate commodification of Utopia. The key essay exploring this commodification is Darko Suvin’s “Theses on Dystopia 2001,” wherein he argues that we are living “morally in an almost complete dystopia—dystopian because anti-utopian—and materially (economically) on the razor’s edge of collapse, distributive and collective” (187). [b]This razor’s edge is psychologically epitomized by Disneyfication, a strategy of
"infantilization of adults. Its images function as an infantile “security blanket,” producing constantly repeated demand to match the constantly recycled offer. The infantilization entails a double rejection. First, it rejects any intervention into the real world that would make the pursuit of happiness collectively attainable: it is a debilitating daydream that appeals to the same mechanism as empathizing performances and publicity. Second and obversely, it rejects any reality construction of one’s desire, however shallow or destructive.Wedded to consumer dynamics of an ever expanding market, Disneyland remains deeply inimical to knowledge." ([/b]194; italics in original)2
At school he grills teachers on the possibility of escaping God’s path through black holes in the universe, and creates IMG’s with Gretchen – Infant Memory Glasses, which you put on your child to make sure that their images and memories of the world are of beautiful rather than tragic things.
DARKO SUVIN
DISPLACED PERSONS
To be displaced from one’s country of origin and upbringing—the experience of over 175 million people in the world, on a conservative estimate—is a wrench perhaps comparable in impact to that of war, long-term hunger or imprisonment. [1] It has similar roots to these in the odium theologicum of modern power-holders, although displacement is of course a relatively milder variant. In this sense, too, it is quite unmetaphorical. Instead of a person creatively carrying over (meta phorein) meanings, across accepted borders of sense, a person is here bodily pushed over borders by forces beyond his or her control. But all our lives are shot through with ways of apprehending ourselves and others (what is a border? and a person?), so that right at the outset a secondary, metaphoric usage of displacement needs to be brought into play: the sense of feeling alien and out of place, a widespread unease sometimes deepening into despair, that seems so intrinsic to the experience of modernity. Marx, of course, found the root of alienation in the labour process. The acute critic of the first modern mass democracy, Thoreau, postulated that most people live lives of quiet desperation, but the sentiment is most often articulated by and about intellectuals, from Nietzsche to Sartre to Said.
But this depends on how we define intellectuals. Sociologically, they have been characterized as those middle-class people, largely university graduates, who ‘produce, distribute and preserve distinct forms of consciousness’—images, stories, concepts. [2] In another sense, however, anybody is a potential intellectual insofar as she or he attempts to articulate meanings and make sense of the forces shaping our lives, as Brecht and Gramsci put it, combining a lived concern for knowledge and for freedom. For the present purpose I would differentiate between two poles, one of critical intellectuals and the other what Debray has called reproductive or distributive intellectuals: the engineers of material and human resources; admen and design professionals; the new bishops and cardinals of the media clerisy; most lawyers—in other words, the ‘organic’ mercenaries, for whom postmodern cynicism dispenses with the need for alibis. Most distributive intellectuals work to reproduce, at one level or another, the means of psychophysical repression. The critical intellectuals, those who produce new forms of consciousness and subconsciousness, are most likely to be alienated from today’s regimes, to feel themselves what used to be called ‘inner émigrés’ or undeclared exiles.
Yet this is too ambiguous a category to be used at the outset of an investigation into ‘actually existing’ displacement. The metaphor, ‘all modern thinkers are exiles’, might tend rather to conceal the brute fact of bodies not only psychically but physically in exile, and the new ways of feeling, thinking, and living that this brings; to elide the experience of working and downtrodden people. The metaphor is of Christian origin, evoking the expulsion from Eden; and the quasi-Christian insistence on the alienation of the post-lapsarian soul seems to obscure ‘what is truly horrendous: that exile is irremediably secular and unbearably historical; that it is produced by human beings for other human beings’. [3] I want therefore to hold the metaphor in abeyance; yet also to keep it in mind for later use, because it wonderfully illuminates, first, some central facets of the phenomenology or inner sense of exile, of the existential alienation or opposition most displaced persons feel toward where they were displaced from and displaced to; and second, some of the cognitive and creative uses to which displacement can be put.
88 Reasons To Watch Donnie Darko Again
written by: Daniel Hernandez
web.mit.edu/djh/Public/do...easons.txt
Some of them:
.....
43. [motif]
The jet engine has a spiral painted on it. These are painted to tell if the engine is spinning. The Fibonnaci spiral is based on the mating patterns of rabbits.
48. [politics]
The first line in the movie is "I'm voting for Dukakis."
53. [politics]
When Jim Cunningham is arrested, his employee Linda Connie claims that he is the victim of "a vast conspiracy,"
66. [terrorism]
The jet engine that falls in Donnie's bedroom tears through the American flag he has on his ceiling.
85. [mythology]
The Pontiac Trans Am vehicle in the film has a phoenix painted on the hood. The phoenix is an Egyptian mythological bird that consumes itself by fire and resurrects from the dead.
Full grown man wearing a bunny suit.
"the name Roberta Sparrow always struck me as a name that means or signifies something, but I don't know what."
When the police make all the English students write "they made me do it" on the chalk board, the scene starts with them calling a "Sam Bylan" or some such. The camera pans to Donnie. They call Donnie's name, and he goes up to write next to line #8. Afterwards, there is a shot of the officer's clipboard.
Has anyone pondered the fact that because Donnie is successful in going back in time and dieing, he is now not in a position to uncover Jim Cunningham’s pedo ring? So, not everything is “solved” by his sacrifice.
Quote:Donnie: [reading poem in class] A storm is coming, Frank says / A storm that will swallow the children / And I will deliver them from the kingdom of pain / I will deliver the children back the their doorsteps / And send the monsters back to the underground / I'll send them back to a place where no-one else can see them / Except for me / Because I am Donnie Darko.
by FourthBase » Mon Nov 05, 2007 12:59 pm
And 26 year-old Richard Kelly says he wrote 'Donnie Darko' in a few weeks.
I think he's a conduit for a dense web of keyword hijackings and meme decoys to hide, not expose, starting with this Darko Suvin eclipsed by Kelly's title and which is now almost a figure of speech in some circles.
Donnie Darko' is filled with allusions to paedophelia and ritual abuse, like the Johnny Gosch kidnapping, the McMartin pre-school scandal, and the Franklin Cover-up.
When the keywords or plot components of a scandal are fictionalized and out of context, it helps to pre-bias the brain away from the reality. So this serves to cover up the reality, not nudge the ignorant towards it.
by Pele'sDaughter » Wed May 13, 2009 7:07 pm
In this trippy sequel to Donnie Darko, Donnie's younger sister, Samantha (Daveigh Chase), sets out for Hollywood, only to become stranded in a remote town where she begins to have visions concerning the end of the world. Now she and best friend Corey (Briana Evigan) must unravel the mystery -- and confront their own demons -- before the world is doomed. Chris Fisher directs this genre-bending thriller that also stars Jackson Rathbone.
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