A Study On The Dune Trilogy Under The Theory Of Science Fiction Cognitive Estrangement

Frank Herbert is one of the great masters of American science fiction.He creates many SF novels,the most influential of which is the Dune series.Dune,written in the1960 s,became the first novel to win both the Hugo Award and the Nebula Award as soon as it was published.Dune,Dune Messiah,and Children of Dune constitute the Dune trilogy.The trilogy is a masterpiece of the New Wave period and holds an important position in the history of American SF literature.By endowing a distant chronotope with encyclopedic details,Herbert explores issues such as man’s relationship to technology,nature,religion,politics,etc.The science fiction cognitive estrangement theory proposed by Darko Suvin is supported by the concepts of scientific cognition,estrangement and novum.It holds that SF is the writer’s estranging expression of the real world under the premise of scientific cognition,and the spectacle presented by the text constitutes the unique aesthetic characteristics of the genre.Based on cognitive estrangement theory,this thesis regards the Dune trilogy as Frank Herbert’s textual experiment,so as to study its scientific cognition,estranging form and content,and the novum paradigm presented in the work.This paper points out that the Dune trilogy is a textual experiment to explore and deduce the possibility of the future,a form of literature reflecting reality under the condition of new technology,and has the initiative of referring to social reality.The thesis is divided into five chapters.The first chapter is an introduction,which introduces Frank Herbert’s Dune trilogy and its research status at home and abroad,overviews cognitive estrangement theory proposed by Darko Suvin,and elaborates the research questions and significance of this thesis.Chapter two to chapter four is the main body of the thesis.Each chapter starts with the core concepts of cognitive estrangement theory and analyzes the text features presented in the Dune trilogy.The second chapter explores the scientific cognition of the trilogy from the perspectives of ecology,cybernetics and religion.The third chapter discusses the estrangement techniques of the trilogy from its form of language and narrative content.The fourth chapter deals with the novum paradigm presented by the trilogy as a soft SF classic and the cognitive transcendence and social significance of Frank Herbert’s writing.The fifth chapter is the conclusions,summing up the aesthetic and experimental characteristics of the novel,affirming Herbert’s SF literary creation practice,and pointing out the trilogy’s useful reference for the creation of SF literature.The Dune series is Frank Herbert’s deduction of the future changes in human society,responding to the real problems of American society after World War II in the form of science fiction.Nowadays,as science and technology are advancing rapidly,SF literature provides us with an indirect strategy to observe reality by constructing imagination of the future.