Presented at The International Conference on Literature and Environment in East Asia, Okinawa, Japan.

1. The Reign of Chaos in a
Posthuman World: An
Ecocritical Analysis of a
Video Game Resident Evil
6
The International Conference on Literature
and Environment in East Asia
ASLE-Taiwan
Yi-Wei Evan Chin
Tamkang University
2014.11.23

2. Introduction
• There are eight major constituents of the arts
include painting, sculpture, architecture, music,
literature, dance, drama and film. Now game is
the ninth art.
• The name of Resident Evil in Japanese is バイオ
ハザード, which means Biohazard. But it is called
Resident Evil in the Western area. It is a horror
survival puzzle solving game.
• There is an adaption movie directed by Paul W. S.
Anderson, but the plot of the movie is completely
different from the original one.
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3. Introduction
• Marc Ryan argues that the video game can
potentially be art is the claim being made.
• The relationship between technology and art
is a whole.
• Matthew Screech wrote in his book Masters of
the Ninth Art:
Each artist has successfully turned the ninth
art into an unique and distinguishing feature of
cultural life (2).
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4. Timeline of the Release Years
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Mary Shelly’s Frankenstein

6. The Zombies in Contemporary
Literature
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7. The Organizations
• Bioterrorism Security Assessment Alliance
• American Secret Service Organization
• Umbrella Corporation – Research Organization
of B.O.W (Bio-Weapons)
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8. The Characters in Resident Evil 6
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9. The Plot of Resident Evil 6
• By the President’s side is his friend, Leon S. Kennedy
and United States Secret Service agent Helena Harper.
Leon is forced to face the infected and mutated
President, and kill him. Helena leads Leon to the Tall
Oaks Cathedral amidst the zombie outbreak to rescue
her sister, Deborah. By the time the pair reaches
Deborah, she had already been infected with the C-
virus, and the pair are forced to kill her. Along the way,
the two encounter Ada, and Helena then discloses to
Leon that she was blackmailed by National Security
Advisor Derek C. Simmons, into aiding the
assassination of Benford.
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10. The Plot of Resident Evil 6
• After Deborah is killed, Leon and Helena escape
through the catacombs and are attacked by a
shark-like monsters. After going down a large
waterslide they eventually kill it with an explosive
barrel. As they drop out from the tunnel, they
witness the thermobaric sterilizing of Tall Oaks,
just like Raccoon City. Derek C. Simmons left the
Agency in a hurry and is headed for China. Leon
states that they're going to China. Because he
knows that China is under a biocrisis.
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11. Chris Redfield & Leon S. Kennedy
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12. Albert Wesker & Jake Muller
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13. Derek Simmons & Helena Harper
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14. Ada Wong & Carla Radames
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15. Oppression to Women and Nature
• The ecofeminist Val Plumwood denfines that
Ecofeminism has contributed a great deal both
to activist struggle and to theorizing links
between women’s oppression and the
domination of nature over the last two
decades.
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16. • Plumwood provides her philosophical concept
of holism as a solution to human/nature
dualism. Breaking down dualism is the
resolution which involves “remaking the
relationship so as to remove the features of
denied dependency” (123).
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17. Myth of Feminism, Socialism and Materialism
• Post-humanism
• Donna Haraway’s feminist image of cyborg
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18. What is a Cyborg
• A cyborg is a cybernetic organism, a hybrid of
machine and organism, a creature of social reality
as well as a creature of fiction. Social reality is
lived social relations, our most important political
construction, a world-changing fiction.
• The cyborg is a matter of fiction and lived
experience that changes what counts as women's
experience in the late twentieth century. This is a
struggle over life and death, but the boundary
between science fiction and social reality is an
optical illusion.
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19. What is a Cyborg
• This kind of analysis of scientific and cultural
objects of knowledge which have appeared
historically since the Second World War prepares
us to notice some important inadequacies in
feminist analysis which has proceeded as if the
organic, hierarchical dualisms ordering discourse
in 'the West' since Aristotle still ruled. The
dichotomies between mind and body, animal and
human, organism and machine, public and
private, nature and culture, men and women,
primitive and civilized are all in question
ideologically.
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20. A Manifesto
• One consequence is that our sense of
connection to our tools is heightened. The
trance state experienced by many computer
users has become a staple of science-fiction
film and cultural jokes. Perhaps paraplegics
and other severely handicapped people can
(and sometimes do) have the most intense
experiences of complex hybridization with
other communication devices.
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21. A Manifesto
• High-tech culture challenges these dualisms in
intriguing ways. It is not clear who makes and
who is made in the relation between human and
machine
• Biological organisms have become biotic systems,
communications devices like others. There is no
fundamental, ontological separation in our formal
knowledge of machine and organism, of technical
and organic.
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22. A Manifesto
• As Haraway says, there is no psychological
problem.
• She borrows Zoe Sofoulis’s argument that in
Sofoulis’ unpublished manuscript on Jacques
Lacan, Melanie Klein, and nuclear culture,
“Lacklein”, the most terrible and perhaps the
most promising monsters in cyborg worlds are
embodied in non-oedipal narratives with a
different logic of repression, which we need to
understand for our survival.
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23. Phallic Mother
• This idea is Haraway’s contribution.
• A 'final' irony since the cyborg is also the awful
apocalyptic telos of the 'West's' escalating dominations
of abstract individuation, an ultimate self untied at last
from all dependency, a man in space. An origin story in
the 'Western', humanist sense depends on the myth of
original unity, fullness, bliss and terror, represented by
the phallic mother from whom all humans must
separate, the task of individual development and of
history, the twin potent myths inscribed most
powerfully for us in psychoanalysis and Marxism.
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24. Real Case - Monsanto Company
• Monsanto Company is a publicly traded
American multinational chemical and
agricultural biotechnology corporation
headquartered in Missouri.
• The company formerly manufactured
controversial products such as the insecticide
DDT, PCBs, Agent Orange, and recombinant
bovine somatotropin (a.k.a. bovine growth
hormone).
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27. American Comics
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28. Book about Monsanto Company
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29. References
• 唐娜．哈洛威(Donna Haraway)著，《猿猴．賽伯格和女人(Simians, Cyborgs,
and Women: The Reinvention of Nature)》(張君玫譯)(台北：學群，2010)。
• 吉爾．德勒茲(Gilles Deleuze)著，《電影I (Cinema I)》(黃建宏譯)(台北：遠流，
2003)。
• 史密斯．傑佛瑞(Jeffery M. Smith)著，《欺騙的種子：揭發政府不想面對、企
業不讓你知道的基因改造滅種黑幕(Seeds of Deception: Exposing Industry and
Government Lies About the Safety of the Genetically Engineered Foods You’re
Eating) 》(張木屯譯)(台北：臉譜，2012)。
• http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil:_Damnation
• http://residentevil.wikia.com/Resident_Evil_6
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monsanto
• http://enjoylohas.pixnet.net/blog/post/23949812-
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• http://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E7%B1%B3%E7%B3%A0%E6%B2%B9%E4%BA%8B%
E4%BB%B6
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