Andrew Milner | |
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Born | Andrew John Milner 9 September 1950 |
Nationality | Australian/British |
Occupations |
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Spouse | |
Children | 3 |
Parents |
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Relatives |
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Academic background | |
Alma mater | |
Thesis | John Milton and the English Revolution (1977) |
Doctoral advisor | Alan Swingewood |
Influences | Lucien Goldmann Raymond Williams |
Academic work | |
Discipline | sociology of literature |
School or tradition | cultural materialism |
Institutions | |
Notable students | Adam Bandt |
Main interests | science fiction,utopia and dystopia |
Notable ideas | post-culturalism,apocalyptic hedonism |
Andrew John Milner (born 9 September 1950) is Professor Emeritus of English and Comparative Literature at Monash University. From 2014 until 2019 he was also Honorary Professor of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick. In 2013 he was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies at the Institut für Englische Philologie,Freie Universität Berlin.
Milner was born in Leeds,UK,the son of John Milner and Dorothy Ibbotson. He was educated at Batley Grammar School and later at the London School of Economics,where he studied sociology. He graduated with a BSc (Econ) degree,with honours in Sociology,in 1972 and a PhD in the Sociology of Literature in 1977. He married Verity Burgmann,the Australian political scientist and labour historian,in 1977. They have three sons. [1] He is a member of the Melbourne Cricket Club and an inaugural member of the Melbourne Victory Football Club.
Milner was politically active,by turn,in the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament,the Labour Party Young Socialists,the Vietnam Solidarity Campaign,the International Socialists,the Socialist Workers Party (Britain) and,in Australia,People for Nuclear Disarmament. [2] In the early 21st century he appears to have joined the Australian Greens. [3]
Milner's academic interests include literary and cultural theory,the sociology of literature,utopia,dystopia and science fiction. His work has been published in English in Australia,India,the US and the UK and has been translated into French,German,Portuguese,Chinese,Persian and Korean. He first attracted attention for work,strongly influenced by Lucien Goldmann,on the sociology of 17th-century literature. Subsequently,he has become better known for his advocacy of Raymond Williams's cultural materialism and for studies of utopian and dystopian science fiction. He also has a strong interest in the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu. [4]
Andrew Milner began his academic career teaching Sociology at the London School of Economics in 1972. He subsequently taught in Sociology at Goldsmiths,University of London;in Cultural Studies at the University of Leeds;and in the Centre for Comparative Literature and Cultural Studies at Monash University,where he was appointed to a chair in 2000. He was Director of the Centre 2001-2003 and Deputy Director 2004–2010. When the University merged its programs in Comparative Literature and English in January 2012 he became Professor of English and Comparative Literature. He retired in 2013 and was appointed Professor Emeritus before proceeding to a position in English at the Freie Universität Berlin. He also held visiting appointments in the Centre for Philosophy and Literature at the University of Warwick,the Theory,Culture and Society Centre at Nottingham Trent University,the School of English at the University of Liverpool and the Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies at the University of Warwick.
Milner's first book,John Milton and the English Revolution,was an application of Goldmann's 'genetic structuralist' sociology of literature to the political,philosophical and poetical writings of John Milton,the great poet of the English Revolution. It argued that the seventeenth-century revolutionary crisis had witnessed the creation and subsequent destruction of a rationalist world vision,which found political expression in the political practice of 'Independency'. A detailed analysis of Paradise Lost,Paradise Regained and Samson Agonistes interpreted the poems as articulating distinct and separate responses to the problem of defeat,whether actual or potential,and to the triumph of unreason over reason. Literature,Culture and Society was published in two editions,the first in 1996 and the second,very substantially revised,in 2005. Both develop a substantive account of the capitalist literary mode of production,focussing on technologies of mechanical reproduction and social relations of commodification. The differences between editions are evidence of Milner's growing interest in comparative literature and science fiction studies. Two of the additional case-studies in the second edition reflect both interests,a third the latter alone.
Milner's concern with Williams's theoretical legacy inspired Cultural Materialism,published in 1993,and Re-Imagining Cultural Studies,published in 2002. Both traced the continuing influence on literary and cultural studies of the kinds of cultural materialism developed by Williams and his successors. They also stressed the differences between Williams and Richard Hoggart,arguing that the label 'culturalism' could not properly be applied to both. Milner argued that Williams had stood in an essentially analogous relation to the British 'culturalist' tradition as Bourdieu and Michel Foucault to French structuralism and Jürgen Habermas to German critical theory. Cultural materialism was therefore best understood,not as culturalist,but rather as positively 'post-culturalist'. In 2010 Milner published,under the title Tenses of Imagination,an edited collection of Williams's writings on utopia,dystopia and science fiction.
Locating Science Fiction is arguably Milner's most important,potentially paradigm-shifting,book. Academic literary criticism had tended to locate science fiction primarily in relation to the older genre of utopia;fan criticism primarily in relation to fantasy and science fiction in other media,especially film and television;popular fiction studies primarily in relation to such contemporary genres as the romance novel and the thriller. Milner's book relocates science fiction in relation not only to these other genres and media,but also to the historical and geographic contexts of its emergence and development. Locating Science Fiction sought to move science fiction theory and criticism away from the prescriptively abstract dialectics of cognition and estrangement associated with Fredric Jameson and Darko Suvin,and towards an empirically grounded understanding of what is actually a messy amalgam of texts,practices and artefacts. Inspired by Williams,Bourdieu and Franco Moretti's application of world systems theory to literary studies,it drew on the disciplinary competences of comparative literature,cultural studies,critical theory and sociology to produce a powerfully distinctive mode of analysis,engagement and argument. The concluding chapter is preoccupied with environmentalist thematics occasioned by Milner's growing interest in Green politics.
In 2023 Milner co-authored Science Fiction and Narrative Form with David Roberts and Peter Murphy,a book inspired by and in a sense a sequel to Georg Lukács's The Theory of the Novel. Science Fiction and Narrative Form argues that science fiction steps beyond the limits of the orthodox novel in three ways. First,it is able to conceive society in ontological and theological terms,that is,in terms which see the world and individuals as integrated rather than fragmented. Second,it is able to present future historical grand narratives that tie human characters to social destinies. Third,it is comfortable with the structures and assumptions of epic forms of writing and narration,allowing scope for authors to narrate and depict comprehensive world pictures rather than narratives of alienation and fragmentation.
In 2015 Milner published an article on climate fiction co-authored with three research assistants,Rjurik Davidson,Susan Cousin,and Milner's son James,who writes as J.R. Burgmann. Thereafter Milner and Burgmann collaborated on a series of journal articles on climate fiction,science fiction,and world systems theory. In 2018 Burgmann published an edited collection of Milner's essays. Their collaboration culminated in 2020 with the co-authored Science Fiction and Climate Change,2022 in paperback with minor changes.
A utopia typically describes an imaginary community or society that possesses highly desirable or near-perfect qualities for its members. It was coined by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, which describes a fictional island society in the New World.
Utopian and dystopian fiction are subgenres of science fiction that explore social and political structures. Utopian fiction portrays a setting that agrees with the author's ethos, having various attributes of another reality intended to appeal to readers. Dystopian fiction offers the opposite: the portrayal of a setting that completely disagrees with the author's ethos. Some novels combine both genres, often as a metaphor for the different directions humanity can take depending on its choices, ending up with one of two possible futures. Both utopias and dystopias are commonly found in science fiction and other types of speculative fiction.
Raymond Henry Williams was a Welsh socialist writer, academic, novelist and critic influential within the New Left and in wider culture. His writings on politics, culture, the media and literature contributed to the Marxist critique of culture and the arts. Some 750,000 copies of his books were sold in UK editions alone, and there are many translations available. His work laid foundations for the field of cultural studies and cultural materialism.
An academic discipline or field of study is a branch of knowledge, taught and researched as part of higher education. A scholar's discipline is commonly defined by the university faculties and learned societies to which they belong and the academic journals in which they publish research.
Fredric Ruff Jameson was an American literary critic, philosopher and Marxist political theorist. He was best known for his analysis of contemporary cultural trends, particularly his analysis of postmodernity and capitalism. Jameson's best-known books include Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991) and The Political Unconscious (1981).
Science fiction studies is the common name for the academic discipline that studies and researches the history, culture, and works of science fiction and, more broadly, speculative fiction.
John Frow is an Australian writer of literary theory, narrative theory, intellectual property law, and cultural studies. He is currently a professor of English at the University of Sydney.
Cultural materialism in literary theory and cultural studies traces its origin to the work of the left-wing literary critic Raymond Williams. Cultural materialism espouses analysis based in critical theory, in the tradition of the Frankfurt School.
Verity Nancy Burgmann is Adjunct Professor of Politics in the School of Social Sciences at Monash University and Honorary Professorial Fellow in the eScholarship Research Centre at the University of Melbourne, where she is Director of the Reason in Revolt website. In 2013 she was Ludwig Hirschfeld Mack Visiting Professor of Australian Studies in the Institut für Englische Philologie at the Freie Universität Berlin.
The sociology of literature is a subfield of the sociology of culture. It studies the social production of literature and its social implications. A notable example is Pierre Bourdieu's 1992 Les Règles de L'Art: Genèse et Structure du Champ Littéraire, translated by Susan Emanuel as Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (1996).
A dystopia, also called a cacotopia or anti-utopia, is a community or society that is extremely bad or frightening. It is often treated as an antonym of utopia, a term that was coined by Sir Thomas More and figures as the title of his best known work, published in 1516, which created a blueprint for an ideal society with minimal crime, violence, and poverty. The relationship between utopia and dystopia is in actuality, not one of simple opposition, as many dystopias claim to be utopias and vice versa.
Peter Beilharz is an Australian sociologist. He is professor of critical theory at Sichuan University, Chengdu, PRC. Previously he was professor of sociology and remains Emeritus Professor at La Trobe University, Melbourne. He is adjunct professor at Curtin University, Perth, Western Australia. Beilharz is founding editor of the international journal of social theory Thesis Eleven published by Sage.
Cultural studies is a politically engaged postdisciplinary academic field that explores the dynamics of especially contemporary culture and its social and historical foundations. Cultural studies researchers generally investigate how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power associated with, or operating through, social phenomena. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender, and generation. Employing cultural analysis, cultural studies views cultures not as fixed, bounded, stable, and discrete entities, but rather as constantly interacting and changing sets of practices and processes. The field of cultural studies encompasses a range of theoretical and methodological perspectives and practices. Although distinct from the discipline of cultural anthropology and the interdisciplinary field of ethnic studies, cultural studies draws upon and has contributed to each of these fields.
Climate fiction is literature that deals with climate change. Generally speculative in nature but inspired by climate science, works of climate fiction may take place in the world as we know it, in the near future, or in fictional worlds experiencing climate change. The genre frequently includes science fiction and dystopian or utopian themes, imagining the potential futures based on how humanity responds to the impacts of climate change. Climate fiction typically involves anthropogenic climate change and other environmental issues as opposed to weather and disaster more generally. Technologies such as climate engineering or climate adaptation practices often feature prominently in works exploring their impacts on society.
Ecofeminism is a branch of feminism and political ecology. Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyse the relationships between humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective on Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist ecofeminism. Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion, contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Thomas Patrick Moylan is an American-Irish academic, literary and cultural critic, Professor Emeritus in the Department of Language, Literature, Communication and Culture at the University of Limerick. Moylan's academic interests are in utopian studies and critical theory, science fiction studies, cultural studies, American studies, and Irish studies.
Phillip E. Wegner is a professor in the Department of English and the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar in English at the University of Florida.
David Gordon John Roberts is an Australian professor of German studies. He was awarded a Ph.D. at Monash University in 1968, supervised by Leslie Bodi. His main areas of research are modern German literature, socio-aesthetics of literature and the arts, and the aesthetic theory and cultural history of European modernism.
Music, in a Foreign Language is the first novel by physicist Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 1994. It won the Saltire Society First Book Award for that year, in a ceremony broadcast on STV.
Locating Science Fiction is a 2012 book on science fiction literary criticism by Andrew Milner.