Michael O'Brien

There are two main hypotheses for this thesis. The primary hypothesis is that Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Philip José Farmer and Philip K. Dick, in The Meri (Fantasy), Night of Light (SF), and VALIS (SF), respectively, require their protagonists to think mythologically to overcome the limits of their material universes. The secondary hypothesis is that, just as the aforementioned protagonists think mythologically to overcome the limits of their material universes, so is the reader forced to engage in mythological cognition to think beyond the limits of materialism. I give evidence for these hypotheses by showing that the protagonists think mythologically using mythological archetypes to challenge their perceptions regarding the ontological status of matter in their respective worlds. This leads to their deepening discovery that their material worlds are emanations of higher realms of spirit. Due to the fact mythological archetypes become representatives of spirit in these texts, mythological cognition is shown to be constructivist in character, because the authors’ blending of the concepts of ‘spirit’ with ‘matter’, causes mythological archetypes to challenge their protagonists’ perceptions. I therefore explain how this blending takes place using the theory of conceptual blending. Conceptual blending illustrates that it is the authors’ use of metaphor that blends matter and spirit. Using Jean Piaget’s constructivist philosophy, I highlight how this blending allows the protagonists to either assimilate new knowledge into their existing view of the world, or to accommodate new knowledge by updating their view to a new paradigm. Likewise, I argue that the reader is engaged in mythological cognition by being required to go through similar cognitive processes to the protagonists, to properly understand the texts. The reader is encouraged to think beyond the boundaries of materialism, so that the idealisms informing the creation of the primary texts can be properly understood in their real-world philosophical roles.

The secondary literature on The Penultimate Truth (1964), A Scanner Darkly (1977) and VALIS (1981) does not expose the genealogical formation of Dick’s spiritual self throughout these texts. Linking these novels together offers a unique perspective on Dick’s developing vision on oppression and spiritual health in the contemporary world. While analysing the three texts individually, I draw together comparisons across the texts, to generate an interpretation on Dick’s developing spiritual energy as it emerges throughout his oeuvre.

This article defines the ‘post’ part of Post-Cyberpunk as it appears in Neal Stephenson’s The Diamond Age (1995). Marketed as a Post-Cyberpunk novel, The Diamond Age adopts some of Cyberpunk’s genre-specific motifs such as setting the novel in a near-future dystopia and embedding cyberspace as a “microworld” (McHale). This article extends and adapts Brian McHale’s definition of Cyberpunk from Constructing Postmodernism (1992) to a definition of Post-Cyberpunk, while showing how Post-Cyberpunk can be considered part of the Romantic tradition. McHale defines Cyberpunk using motifs of “worldness,” motifs of “the centrifugal self,” and motifs of “death both individual and collective.” My analysis shows The Diamond Age is Cyberpunk to the extent it adopts this postmodern worldness and dissolution of self. However, the text is also Post-Cyberpunk because it subverts Cyberpunk’s motifs of individual and collective death. According to Northrop Frye, Romanticism is a “new mythology” that attempts to recover the life-affirming power of nature in magical terms. Stephenson’s subversion of death is Romantic because his protagonist Nell’s quest for a better life is a deliberate rewriting of the life-affirming concerns of Dickens’s The Old Curiosity Shop (1841). Additionally, Nell’s quest is motivated by the magical realist nanotechnological device – the Primer – which allows her to redefine her world in magical terms. I evaluate the extent to which The Diamond Age is truly Post-Cyberpunk based on Stephenson’s (mis)use of Jung’s spiritual theories and make some suggestions for thinking beyond Stephenson’s version of the genre.

This article examines how Farmer blends mythological and scientific ideas to present a universe where science and religion are reconciled in a single paradigm.  I use Fauconnier and Turner's theory of conceptual blending to analyse Farmer's blending of science and religion in the psyche of his protagonist Ramstan. I then argue that The Unreasoning Mask blends Ramstan's psyche with the universe through the stages of Joseph Campbell's monomyth. To conclude I suggest that Farmer adopts the Dionysian impulse in an attempt to unravel the unconscious of the universe itself.

Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World to define and satirize the social conditions of England at the end of the Second World War, with the specific objective of writing a novel which was both personal and social in its examination of the dark and oppressive cultural environment of the period. Bernard Marx, the central character, was written to be symbolic of the shared experience of a coerced proletariat. As a novel of social history Huxley's Brave New World satirizes the function of ideology and power in post-Fordian liberal society in an attempt to find the ends and means to creating a practical utopia. From the point of view of very recent postmodern and post-Lacanian theory Huxley's entire oeuvre can be reconsidered as containing elements of genealogical and psychoanalytical interest. There is strong evidence for the thesis that within Huxley's oeuvre, within his sociological-utopian project, there is an exploration of how desire, ideology and power have come to function throughout the history of society. It is my thesis that Huxley examined desire, ideology and power throughout his oeuvre to find how real-life agents could harness their potentialities to transform real-world societal structures and processes. Only the most recent post-Lacanian and postmodern theory can fully expose Huxley's examinations of ideology and power.

Philip K. Dick was one of the most prolific and influential SF authors of the 20th century. However, Dick’s literary success did not come without major biographical pitfalls. While Dick published thirty-nine novels in his lifetime, many of which were ground-breaking, radical reimaginings of the SF genre (such as Ubik, The Man in the High Castle and Martian Time-Slip) many were trashy, underdeveloped and rushed (Vulcan’s Hammer, Dr. Futurity, and Our Friends from Frolix 8). On closer inspection, this literary division corresponds closely to issues in Dick’s own personal life. Dick was a torn individual. On the one hand he was a literary-SF genius who pushed the boundaries of the genre by redefining postmodernism as a spiritual phenomenon (as in Ubik, A Scanner Darkly and Do Android Dream of Electric Sheep?). On the other hand, he was an alienated failure who had numerous mainstream works rejected for publication. Interestingly his moments of literary genius correspond to high points in his life when he was doing well with family, friends and spouses, and his trashy lows link closely to struggles with amphetamine abuse, the death of friends and psychotic episodes. This paper will address the fluctuating mental health of Philip K. Dick by deconstructing the narrative dynamics of A Scanner Darkly and VALIS. I will show how these texts represent forms of biographical self-exploration where Dick addresses the material causes of psychological ill-health in postmodernity (and himself), at the same time as generating transcendent salvific responses to fragmentation and alienation through creating his own postmodern theologies.

In this review for Phenomenological Reviews, Michael O’Brien discusses Tonino Griffero’s new contribution to phenomenological research, Quasi-Things: The Paradigm of Atmospheres (2017). In this intriguing philosophical work, Griffero presents a new ontological category which he enigmatically designates: ‘quasi-things’. For Griffero these mysterious entities are of a different ontological order to the conventional medium-sized dry objects, and their accompanying run-of-the-mill events, that we accept as populating everyday material reality. That said, quasi-things still affect us psychologically, possessing a relative reality all their own. Emotions for Griffero are examples of quasi-things. By shifting the focus away from the interior subjective state of a personal emotion, to the exterior reality of such an emotion’s objective existence in the world, Griffero reframes feelings as semi-physical ‘atmospheres’. Through describing the general atmospheric characteristics of quasi-things, then discussing examples (such as pain and twilight), and thereafter highlighting examples from literature and the everyday world, Griffero succeeds in producing a novel phenomenological paradigm which forces a fundamental rethink of how feelings and emotions actually exist.

This is one of a number of pieces covering events at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, which runs from 9th–25th August 2014 at Charlotte Square Gardens, Edinburgh.
Carol Ann Duffy and John Sampson performed at the Edinburgh International Book Festival on 9th August 2014.