Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival

In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 science-fiction movie, Arrival, the world is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships, an event that is going to challenge human conceptions of time, language, and free will. The movie is based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella "Story of Your Life,&q...

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Autor principal:	Chiara Patrizi
Formato:	article
Lenguaje:	EN IT
Publicado:	Università degli Studi di Torino 2020
Materias:	Sci-Fi Eerie Time Trauma America E11-143 American literature PS1-3576
Acceso en línea:	https://doaj.org/article/4c41fc90b2d64cda931fdd2f4149d1cb
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spelling	oai:doaj.org-article:4c41fc90b2d64cda931fdd2f4149d1cb2021-11-23T14:20:45ZCrossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival10.13135/2612-5641/41522612-5641https://doaj.org/article/4c41fc90b2d64cda931fdd2f4149d1cb2020-05-01T00:00:00Zhttps://www.ojs.unito.it/index.php/jamit/article/view/4152https://doaj.org/toc/2612-5641 In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 science-fiction movie, Arrival, the world is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships, an event that is going to challenge human conceptions of time, language, and free will. The movie is based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella "Story of Your Life," and both the original text and its film adaptation deal with understanding and coming to terms with otherness—alien language, time, death, grief—through the encounter of human and extraterrestrial existence and the exploration of the threshold that connects (or separates) life and afterlife. This essay examines the ways in which the novella and the film address the modes of the weird and the eerie, two concepts which have been theorized by Mark Fisher as “the presence of that which does not belong” and “a failure of absence or a failure of presence” respectively. These modes offer a key to analyzing and understanding the strategies that Chiang and Villeneuve employ to narrate a two-fold story which affects the communal as well as the individual existence. With its ostensibly impossible language, such story bears a significance that lies beyond and outside human perception. "Story of Your Life" deals with the “out of”—that outer dimension which lies beyond our experience of the categories of time and space (Fisher 24-25), not necessarily from a scientific perspective but rather from an existential one. Thus, the heptapods’ arrival raises questions (Why are they here? What do they want?) and poses challenges (How can we speak to them?) which open the way for other, more existential questions and challenges. Eventually, failure of absence (the appearance of the spaceships) and failure of presence (the death of the daughter of the protagonist) meet here, and their encounter provides a powerful meditation on the eerie feelings that haunts human agency and affects our understanding of reality. Chiara PatriziUniversità degli Studi di TorinoarticleSci-FiEerieTimeTraumaAmericaE11-143American literaturePS1-3576ENITJAm It!, Iss 3 (2020)
institution	DOAJ
collection	DOAJ
language	EN IT
topic	Sci-Fi Eerie Time Trauma America E11-143 American literature PS1-3576
spellingShingle	Sci-Fi Eerie Time Trauma America E11-143 American literature PS1-3576 Chiara Patrizi Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
description	In Denis Villeneuve’s 2016 science-fiction movie, Arrival, the world is disrupted by the sudden arrival of a fleet of alien spaceships, an event that is going to challenge human conceptions of time, language, and free will. The movie is based on Ted Chiang’s 1998 novella "Story of Your Life," and both the original text and its film adaptation deal with understanding and coming to terms with otherness—alien language, time, death, grief—through the encounter of human and extraterrestrial existence and the exploration of the threshold that connects (or separates) life and afterlife. This essay examines the ways in which the novella and the film address the modes of the weird and the eerie, two concepts which have been theorized by Mark Fisher as “the presence of that which does not belong” and “a failure of absence or a failure of presence” respectively. These modes offer a key to analyzing and understanding the strategies that Chiang and Villeneuve employ to narrate a two-fold story which affects the communal as well as the individual existence. With its ostensibly impossible language, such story bears a significance that lies beyond and outside human perception. "Story of Your Life" deals with the “out of”—that outer dimension which lies beyond our experience of the categories of time and space (Fisher 24-25), not necessarily from a scientific perspective but rather from an existential one. Thus, the heptapods’ arrival raises questions (Why are they here? What do they want?) and poses challenges (How can we speak to them?) which open the way for other, more existential questions and challenges. Eventually, failure of absence (the appearance of the spaceships) and failure of presence (the death of the daughter of the protagonist) meet here, and their encounter provides a powerful meditation on the eerie feelings that haunts human agency and affects our understanding of reality.
format	article
author	Chiara Patrizi
author_facet	Chiara Patrizi
author_sort	Chiara Patrizi
title	Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
title_short	Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
title_full	Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
title_fullStr	Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
title_full_unstemmed	Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival
title_sort	crossing the threshold of temporality: "story of your life" and arrival
publisher	Università degli Studi di Torino
publishDate	2020
url	https://doaj.org/article/4c41fc90b2d64cda931fdd2f4149d1cb
work_keys_str_mv	AT chiarapatrizi crossingthethresholdoftemporalitystoryofyourlifeandarrival
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Crossing the Threshold of Temporality: "Story of Your Life" and Arrival

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