Call for Abstracts

Alien and Philosophy

Edited by Kevin S. Decker

The Blackwell Philosophy and Popular Culture Series

Please circulate and post widely.

Apologies for cross posting.

To propose ideas for future volumes in the Blackwell series please contact the Series Editor, William Irwin, at williamirwin@kings.edu

If you have comments or criticisms for the series, please contact the series editor after reading “Fancy Taking a Pop?” and “Writing for the Reader: A Defense of Philosophy and Popular Culture Books”

Abstracts and subsequent essays should be philosophically substantial but accessible, written to engage the intelligent lay reader. Works focusing on the four Alienfilms are sought (abstracts incorporating Prometheus will be considered). Contributors of accepted essays will receive an honorarium.

Possible themes and topics might include, but are not limited to, the following:

Ripley as heroine and as clone: existentialism and the ass-kicking female lead; Alien phenomenology: pacing, atmosphere, settings; Does personhood extend to undercover corporate android agents? “Perfect organisms”: predation and death in the philosophy of biology; H.R. Giger and the Aesthetics of Alien; Is Alien a rape movie?; Philosophy of fear: Alien, It! and The Thing; Dystopia in the Alien movies; Mountains of madness: the influence of Lovecraft on the Alien universe; “What you might rather leave behind you”: the legacy of Vietnam and Aliens as military sci-fi; Burke’s gambit: the ethics of bioweaponry; Ripley, Newt and the ethics of care; the lessons of the Weyland-Yutani Corporation for business ethics in Aliens and Aliens³; infestation as a metaphor for physical and sexual violence in Aliens³; Foucault, madness and biopower on Fury 161; “What is it like to be an Alien?”: the hybrid Ripley clone or the Xenomorph in Alien: Resurrection; Beautiful Gore? Alienversus Alien: Resurrection on violence and the sense of taste; “I’m a stranger here myself”: the uses of community in a post-apocalyptic world.