With its over 500-page account of three decades of rising water that leads to the decline of Earth’s civilization, Stephen Baxter’s Flood belongs in the club of literature linked to the myth of Noah. Considering its generic aspect, the novel should be classified as an apocalyptic rather than post-apocalyptic story. Also, unlike most of the other works employing the theme of the deluge, it is based on scientific underpinnings, which indicates its affinity with hard science fiction. Naturally, Flood opens to multiple interpretations. For instance, it can be read both through the prism of ecocriticism or from the psychological and sociological perspectives. This paper, however, seeks to view the novel as a search for hope occurring at the intersection of knowledge and belief. Employing Michel Foucault’s post-structuralist notions of discourse, power/knowledge, subjugated knowledge and discipline, it arrives at two main conclusions. Firstly, in Baxter’s work the domain of hope displays multidimensionality, since it constitutes an assemblage of different modes (romanticism: that is, spirituality and personal attachment vs. pragmatism: that is, science and technological advancement) and discursive models (such as pragmatic idealism, scientific rationalism and balanced scepticism). Secondly, this paper argues that in Flood hope can be regarded as a complex discourse, rather than a mere category. It is imposed on others spatially (arks), through discipline and by resorting to scientific instruments.
On 20 May 2011, the Time weekly published a special report issue in its entirety covering the killing of Osama bin Laden. Clearly, owing to its thematic coherence, the Time Special Report issue could be examined through the lenses of qualitative content analysis tools. This paper, however, applies Goffman’s Frame Analysis. Based on two basic assumptions: (1) that the “frame” amounts to the structured knowledge and (2) that the language of media reports is never neutral, but highly constructed, the paper argues that the examined Time issue is fundamentally built on three frames: the “war on terror” frame, the “hero” vs. the “enemy no. 1” frame and, finally, the “indestructible USA” vs. the “primitive, yet promising Islamic countries” frame. In addition, drawing on the cognitive concepts of figure/ground organization and focalization, as well as the notion of metaphor, it investigates how the above distinguished frames are manipulated and modified.
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