In this response paper I will discuss what it means for a something to be a “cultural work” and how Ender’s Game qualifies as one. In particular, that Ender’s Game qualifies as a cultural work for many reasons, but the two I will be specifically focusing on are how our culture values someone who rises above misfortune and the fear of the unknown.
In her book, Science Fiction: A Guide for the Perplexed, Sherryl Vint defines a cultural work as “…their role in imagining a world that is in some way different from the one we take for granted and their power to create mythologies that help us grasp the experience of human life in a world dominated by scientific thinking.” What I think Vint means by this is that it cultural works such as science
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Fear has the power to control one’s life, a lot of decisions that people make are based off of this powerful emotion and the instinctive reaction we often have to it. In the book, the I.F. is scared the Buggers are going to come back and their first response is not to learn more about the buggers, but to continue to fear them and that the logical first response is to attack them and destroy every last Bugger.. They don’t know anything about these aliens, after one attack they decide they must be evil, and create a battle school to train extremely smart children to fight and ultimately demolish the Bugger race and save the earth. The kids in battle school are trained to respond to this fear of the unknown the past generations have created and instilled in them, trained from an extremely young age, to fight against their basic instincts and attack this enemy they’ve grown up hearing is evil and must be destroyed.
In this response paper I discussed what it meant for a something to be a “cultural work” and how Ender’s Game qualified as one. In particular, that Ender’s Game qualified as a cultural work for many reasons, but the two I specifically focused on was how our culture values someone who rises above adversity and the fear of the