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Popular Culture Review
which is usually deemed to privilege sheer escapism over meaning, and whose
cultural significance is more sociological than artistic. The success of Blade
Runner or of The Matrix, as well as the cult status of films such as David
Cronemberg’s eXistenZ or Alex Proya’s Dark City indicate that the recipient of
popular cultural artifacts cannot be conceived anymore as a monolithic entity in
search of mindless entertainment, for it has become receptive to issues that were
traditionally the domain of a higher cultural level. Through the exploration of
fundamental ontological issues, postmodern Science Fiction, whether written or
filmed, shows that our traditional, canonically sanctified cultural dichotomy has
become obsolete: when we are expressing our doubts regarding our
phenomenological consciousness and our relationship to the Real, there is no
more “high” and “low” culture, but only Culture.
West Virginia University
Universidad Complutense (Madrid, Spain.)
Daniel Ferreras Savoye
Fernando Angel Moreno
Notes
1 It remains, for instance, debatable whether Avatar actually deserved the universal
attention it received in terms o f cultural significance, and we are indeed entitled to
wonder what will actually remain o f the narrative referent once the special effects
become outdated.
2 19th Century French Writers Guy de Maupassant and Sir Arthur Conan Doyle are but
two among the most illustrative examples o f popular writers turned canonical.
3 See, for instance, the abundant scholarly bibliography devoted to the Washosky
brothers’ Matrix.
4 See the famous hoax perpetrated by Alan Sokal, who succeeded in publishing an utterly
absurd essay entitled “Transgressing the Boundaries: Towards a Transformational
Hermeneutics o f Quantum Gravity” in the prestigious, supposedly refereed journal,
Social Text; see also the anthology Theory’s Empire, which collects 49 essays dedicated
to denounce the tragic consequences o f postmodern theory upon the fields o f Literary and
Cultural Studies.
5 Said element or event must be unexplainable rather than unexplained, the latter
corresponding to the structure o f the traditional detective story as established through the
works o f Conan Doyle or Agatha Christie: the enigma presented in a detective narration
is merely unexplained , and for a limited time only since the acting detective will
eventually explain it; the Fantastic, on the contrary, presents the unexplainable for,
regardless o f the protagonist’s success in surviving the supernatural threat, the
epistemological questions raised by the sudden appearance o f an irrational phenomenon
remain without satisfactory solution.
6 We can easily distinguish the Fantastic from Science Fiction, for the narrative universe
o f the earlier corresponds to our reality with one or several added supernatural
phenomenon/a, while that o f Science Fiction presents an different reality that may be
futuristic or grounded upon an alternate course o f history, such as Phillip K. Dick’s The
Man in the High Castle, which tells the story o f a 20th Century where allies have lost the
war and the Nazis have triumphed.
7 In order to bypass the impositions o f rigorous critical language, many postmodern
critics have adopted a lyrical, would-be artistic tone, which allows for a much greater