| abstract |
At the core of this dissertation is the idea that "we are what we remember," or in other words, it matters what memories we build our collective identity upon because they will tell us who we are capable of becoming in the future. Relying on Michael Rothberg's concept of a "knot of memory," I contend that rather than being relegated to separate temporal and cultural sites, the Bible and science fiction are entangled threads in an unfinalizable, ever-expanding knot of cultural memory and thus creativity. Considering this, I theorize intertextuality as a kind of fluidity characterized by overflow, seepage, and depth and offer a historiography of the genre of science fiction. I argue that Exodus is itself science fiction, a claim that operates on several levels simultaneously: within the story-world, at the level of narrative composition, and in the readerly communities of the world beyond the text. Furthermore, I attempt to reauthorize readerly subjectivity by radically expanding the textual universe within which we think about the Bible, and I highlight the pitfalls of biblical scholarship that only looks backward in a desire to unearth origins.
In this project, I am interested in the process of meaning-making (the how and the why) and its entanglement with memory and intertextuality more than I am interested in developing an authoritative reading or methodology for any given text. Biblical texts and science fiction novels both imagine new worlds into being and are simultaneously bound by the problems of the context in which they were composed. I bring insights gleaned from the field of memory studies into conversation with theories of large-group psychology, intertextuality, utopian studies, and cultural studies to demonstrate that engaging science fiction and biblical narrative together creates an expansive arena within which to imagine liberative futures, and in turn, remember the past. In doing so, I read Exodus together with Pierce Brown's Red Rising series to explore what we stand to gain from reading and interpreting with an eye toward questions of futurity and an imagination for more livable worlds.
|
