{"id":115,"date":"2016-02-11T12:04:21","date_gmt":"2016-02-11T12:04:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/messengersfromthestars.letras.ulisboa.pt\/journal\/?post_type=article&p=115"},"modified":"2018-01-22T22:35:34","modified_gmt":"2018-01-22T22:35:34","slug":"editorial-n1","status":"publish","type":"article","link":"https:\/\/messengersfromthestars.letras.ulisboa.pt\/journal\/archives\/article\/editorial-n1","title":{"rendered":"Editorial – N.1 (2016)"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Messengers From The Stars<\/em>\u00a0\u2013 No. 1 (2016)<\/strong><\/p>\n

Guest Editor: Ljubica Matek
\nCo-Editors: Adelaide Meira Serras, Ana Rita Martins, Jo\u00e3o F\u00e9lix<\/p>\n

Our first message from the stars, \u201cAnd the stars look very different today\u201d<\/strong><\/p>\n

We are very excited to present the first issue of Messengers from the Stars: On Science Fiction and Fantasy<\/em>, a literary journal dedicated to publishing blindly peer-reviewed academic papers on science-fiction and fantasy literature which, we hope, will contribute positively to the area of literary, cultural, visual and\/or film studies and, as such, to a better understanding and appreciation of fantasy and science fiction. Continuously on the border between being marginal (as a literary genre) and mainstream (as a genre with ample audience and fan base), science-fiction and fantasy are often the subjects of informal discourse. It is our desire as editors to provide another platform for literary, scholarly discourse on the two genres. It may be a somewhat bold assumption (and an enthusiastic expectation), but it seems that in our post-postmodernist, some would say transmodernist (Epstein et al. 1999), hypermodernist (Lipovetsky 2005), automodernist (Samuels 2008), or digimodernist (Kirby 2009) times marked by a strong turn toward posthumanism, transhumanism, and biopolitics, fantasy and science-fiction may turn out to be more and more relevant as literary modes of representation of human experience.<\/p>\n

The first issue brings you five papers covering a wide spectrum of topics. Nuno Marques\u2019 paper<\/a> on poetry and science fiction seems a very timely, although completely accidental, reaction to the recent unexpected and globally mourned death of one of the most original musicians of the (predominantly) twentieth century, David Bowie, well-known for his verses on space travel and the isolation of the individual.\u00a0 Nuno Marques\u2019 reading of Richard Brautigan\u2019s poem \u201cAll Watched Over By Machines of Loving Grace\u201d reveals it to be a dystopian ecotopia, a critique of the eco-utopias of the 1960s and a witness to the necessity of machines and of technological solutions for environmental problems.<\/p>\n

Milan Jovanovi\u0107\u2019s paper<\/a> situates Serbia as the most probable place of origin of the vampire legends and points to written records of the word \u201cvampire\u201d dating back to the thirteenth century \u2013 centuries before the Western literature adopted the motif of the bloodsucker. Jovanovi\u0107 provides insight into Serbian folklore and beliefs related to vampires and suggests the possibility that the term \u201cvampire\u201d actually is of Serbian origin, although the etymology of the term that denotes these fantastical creatures is still \u2013 very appropriately \u2013 shrouded in mystery.<\/p>\n

Diana Marques<\/a> focuses on the sword as the object of power, honour, status and authority in George R. R. Martin\u2019s The Song of Ice and Fire<\/em> and in the Middle Ages, a historical period which enlightens and inspires Martin\u2019s novels and fantasy in general. Marques suggests that the rich symbolism of swords informs the owner\u2019s identity, the sword becoming a constituent part of the person who owns it.<\/p>\n

Alexandra Cheira\u2019s paper<\/a> provides a reading of A. S. Byatt\u2019s \u201cThe Djinn in the Nightingale\u2019s Eye\u201d which centres on Gillian Perholt as a female Aladdin and suggests that the story explores both the limitations in women\u2019s lives and the way to overcome them by insisting on female autonomy, on the one hand, and learning through storytelling, on the other.<\/p>\n

Finally, Jorge Martins Trindade<\/a> focuses on fantasy\u2019s quality of representing life through its refusal of a mimetic representation of reality. He reads Jorge de Sena\u2019s O F\u00edsico Prodigioso<\/em> as a fantasy novel, which represents the \u201cdiabolical mirror\u201d reflecting an image that is in fact a synthesis of humanity.<\/p>\n

Our journal also encourages creative writers to send us their (shorter) contributions with which we hope to promote not only scholarly but also literary and art production. The first issue features Lu\u00eds Filipe Silva’s “Falstaff (Variations of the libretto by Arrigo Boito)<\/a>“, whose grim (post)colonial and ecocritical rewriting of Shakespeare’s The Merry Wives of Windsor<\/em> conveniently serves to mark the 400th<\/sup> \u00a0anniversary of the great Bard’s death.<\/p>\n

So, feel free to glance towards the stars and enjoy their messages as we bring them to you.<\/p>\n

Ljubica Matek<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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