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Essay / Culture Redefined: A Postmodern Study of Cinder by Marissa Meyer
Literature is still considered an accurate representation of society. In Wordsworthian terms, literature can be classified as a way for “man to speak to men,” and it elicits different layers of interpretation in each reader. It can be quite natural for a writer to incorporate the moral and cultural values present in their social environment and transcend them through their works. But explaining and experiencing a futuristic society is indeed a herculean task. And this curiosity gave birth to the genre of fantasy fiction – a world where earthlings, cyborgs, androids and animated creatures coexist. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay American writer Marissa Meyer's The Lunar Chronicles is very interested in cyborgs. These are people who can do things beyond normal human limits thanks to the mechanical elements built into their bodies. The collection includes five novels that revisit old fairy tales, including Cinderella, Little Red Riding Hood, Rapunzel and Snow White. The Lunar Chronicles begins with the novel Cinder followed by Scarlet, Cress, Fairest: Levena's Story and the epic conclusion, Winter. These futuristic retellings of old fairy tales focus on a young teenage Cinder, a cyborg rising to power and defeating the evil Queen Levena. Postmodern aspects of literature and cybernetics gave rise to science fiction. In its postmodern aspect, science and technology can be seen as an essential element in the formation of culture itself. Science may or may not have been the study of nature, but it has now become a culture to be studied like any other. Suddenly, from a practice and a set of irrefutable facts inaccessible to the study of social sciences or cultural criticism, science became first of all a socialized and ideological phenomenon susceptible to historical and sociological examination and, second, a “text” composed of representations of discourses which themselves construct dominant images and concepts about humans, animals and machines. Donna J. Haraway, an American postmodernist, considers "science as mythology." The production of scientific discourses is imbued with the components of its real situation and science fiction constitutes an essential resource for its expansion. Iain Hamilton Grant, in his article "Postmodernism and Science and Technology," states that Haraway produces "a 'hybrid' cybernetic mythology where 'nature' is a trickster, a cunning coyote, and where women and machines merge." In science fiction fandom, a cyborg cannot simply be reduced to images, but science and technology increasingly augment natural non-humans with artificial tones. Scientific discourses are told in a natural way and science has become part of culture. Haraway therefore combines the “nature-culture” hybrid of a scientifically, technologically and critically sophisticated world, and the rise of non-human beings within it. The focus of this research paper is on Cinder, the first novel in the series. The Lunar Chronicles. Cinder is a retelling of the old fairy tale Cinderella. William J. Long writes in his book English Literature: Its History and its Significance for the Life of the English Speaking World that “behind every book there is a man; behind the man is the race; and behind race are the natural and social environments whose influence is reflected unconsciously.” The words above suggest that the..