The hermeneutic of dehumanization in science fiction

• Main Author: Bantug, Jinkee O.
• Format: text
• Language: English
• Published: Animo Repository 1995
• Subjects: Science fiction > History and criticism; Hermeneutics; Humanism
• Online Access: https://animorepository.dlsu.edu.ph/etd_bachelors/1316
• Institution: De La Salle University

This paper studies science fiction as a literary genre and consequently unravels its significance in the realm of literature. The author of this study attempts to free science fiction from certain prejudicial notions such as its inherent lack of aesthetic value to situate it in a much larger project. This is because the generic history of science fiction is heading towards a more noble role as the society's contemporary mode of expression and disproving the unfair notion that it is just a good entertainment.This paper discusses the movement of the science fiction genre from metonymy towards metaphor. The metonymic phase in the generic history of science fiction treats it in extrapolative form. Extrapolation in science fiction is the same as in mathematics, i.e., it is concerned with the continuation of a present trend into the future. Science fiction as metonymy (logical extension of reality) was greatly influenced by the promise of technological utopia during the height of scientific and technological activities in the last century and in the early years of twentieth-century. But the latter part of the twentieth-century witnessed the emergence of contemporary science fiction which is more concerned with the metaphorical representation of the greatest enigma of our times, i.e., dehumanization.The author of this paper believes that science fiction as a literary work is consummated only with the hermeneutical experience of reading it. This paper describes the achievement of this new perspective in reading science fiction. But this is not an exposition on the theoretical methodologies of hermeneutics, but rather an invitation for self-understanding and self-interpretation as a human being in the face of this technological alienation.