Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1992"

Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale: Scheherazade in Dystopia

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's novel The Handmaid's Tale is narrated by a Scheherazade of the future, telling her story to save her life. But whereas the Sultan of the Arabian Nights asks for Scheherazade's stories, Atwood's handmaid is locked into silence; to tell her tale is to risk her life. Her narrative itself is a criminal act, performed in secret and lost for many years. By narrating the story of the repressive republic of Gilead, the handmaid inscribes both her victimization and her resistance. Built on a woman's desire to tell her story, the novel is a provocative inquiry into the origins and meanings of narrative. Among the issues it explores are, first, the narrator's relation to her tale: the simultaneous fear and desire to narrate one's story, and the attempt to create a self through language; second, the nature of narrative itself: the ambiguity of language, and the multiplicity of interpretation.

Time and Western Man

Abstract: The 1927 Time and Western Man, originally to be entitled The Politics of the Personality, is generally considered to be the most important expression of Lewis’ philosophical beliefs.1 The whole work is an attack on what Lewis calls ‘time-philosophy’, which he claims to be a consensus established among philosophers and literati that serves an ultimate political end: the reduction of men to mechanical, manipulable producers in an industrial dystopia, as described in The Art of Being Ruled. The book is divided into two parts. The first part treats the dissemination of the time-philosophy in a vulgarised form in literature. The second part examines the beliefs of several contemporary philosophers. Lewis greatly generalises the nature of the time-philosophy in such a way that he is able to find traces of it in the work of almost all his contemporaries. The general argument of Time and Western Man is easily expressed. Lewis associates philosophies that celebrate time, and therefore change, with instability of self and society. Philosophies that emphasise space — particularly his own — he identifies with stability and common sense. The time-philosophers emphasise the self within history as part of a process, and therefore, according to Lewis, tend to a mechanistic view of history and of the self which eliminates entirely the free agency of the independent subject. These time-philosophers, then, whether operating at the level of literature or philosophy, are contributing to the dawning of an age of the machine in which all are enslaved and manipulated on Pavlovian principles, dreaming a collective dream of the progress of history towards the millenium. Conversely, those who insist that space rather than time is the essential human medium — and Lewis’ principal ally in this is Bishop Berkeley — refuse to fetishise time and change, and cultivate the intelligence as a reflection upon the world and not a mechanical function of matter. This in turn creates a stable and temporally continuous self. One passage from Time and Western Man is worth quoting at length to indicate how fundamental a conflict Lewis held this to be: So from, say, the birth of Bergson to the present day, one vast orthodoxy has been in the process of maturing in the world of science and philosophy. The material had already collected into a considerable patrimony by the time Bergson was ready to give it a philosophic form. The Darwinian Theory and all the background of nineteenth century materialist thought was already behind it. Under the characteristic headings Duration and Relativity the nineteenth century mechanistic belief has now assumed a final form. It is there for anyone to study at his leisure, and to take or leave. It will assume, from time to time, many new shapes, but it will certainly not change its essential nature again till its doomsday; for I believe that in it we have reached one of the poles of the human intelligence, the negative, as it were. So it is deeply rooted, very ancient, and quite defined. (TWM, 103)

Representation and Authority in Ethnographic Film/Video: Production

Abstract: ecent discussions in the anthropological literature point out ethical and epistemological problems that arise when ethnographers assume the authority to represent others in articles and books. The epistemological problems relate to the paradox of translation: how can an ethnographer make the strange familiar, yet keep it strange? In other words, if a musicculture is truly very different from one's own, how is it possible to understand it "in its own terms" if its terms are incomprehensible except when translated into one's own? And once translated into one's own terms, of course, the music-culture is no longer understood in its own terms. Many popular ethnographies, I am convinced, can be read as projections of utopia or dystopia (Colin Turnbull's The Forest People and The Mountain People come to mind at once), whether unconsciously so or consciously (as in Claude Levi-Strauss's Tristes Tropiques). In other words, they tell us more about "us" than "them." And how could it be otherwise?

Vineland and Dystopian Fiction

Abstract: Pynchon's Vineland (1990) presents a vivid and chilling picture of contemporary America as a land of lost hopes and broken dreams, a place where huge, impersonal forces have subtly gained the power to dictate the courses of individual lives. It therefore has much in common with the modern tradition of dystopian fiction, as its setting in 1984 indicates, including, in addition to George Orwell's 1984 (1949), Yevgeny Zamyatin's We (1924) and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932). All these dystopian fictions involve an opposition between rationality (usually the cold rationality of official control) and irrationality (typically the irrational passion of human feeling). This conflict between society and individual, or reason and passion, figures in dystopian fictions in a variety of ways. For example, the authoritarian governments depicted by authors of dystopian fiction tend to regard sexuality as a focus for social control of individual lives, just as those who rebel against such governments often consider sexual emancipation an important part of their rebellions. Dystopian governments also frequently proscribe practices (like the taking of mind-altering drugs) that might lead to alternative states of consciousness or ways of viewing reality. The treatment of the rationality-irrationality and society-individual oppositions by Zamyatin, Huxley, Orwell and Pynchon can be usefully illuminated within the framework of theories of modern culture like those proposed by Michel Foucault. Indeed, the treatment of this issue in dystopian fiction resonates with a number of modern theoretical debates concerning the merits of reason as the paradigm of modern society.

Science, Myth and Utopia

Abstract: Insofar as it embodies the myth of progress, the dream of utopia is arguably the most characteristic, certainly the most appropriate, literary expression of a scientific culture. Yet it is not surprising that the twentieth century, plagued by two World Wars and a succession of escalating regional conflicts, by totalitarian regimes and existential Angst, has been more notable for its deeply pessimistic dystopias than for its utopian visions. Scientific method and reductionism, which encourage the refuting of propositions and promote cynicism about ideals and values, have further deterred many writers from utopian fantasy which depends on positing viable alternatives to the actual, and hence involves genuine creativity de novo. It has been much easier — and more intellectually respectable — to envision dystopias which require merely selective extrapolation from actuality.

Ideology and Utopia in Recent Soviet Literature

Abstract: In the last five years, and particularly since the toppling of the Berlin Wall, Soviet Russians have increasingly confronted the inadequacies of Marxist-Leninist ideology. This "revaluation of values" has taken place in a number of arenas, from historical reassessments of Lenin's achievements to philosophical debates to the restructuring of public rituals such as those on May Day and November 7. The literary-intellectual debate has contributed considerably to discrediting MarxistLeninist thinking and Stalinist practice. Nowhere has this rethinking expressed itself more strongly than in the powerful backlash against the utopian premises informing Soviet ideology. Such sentiments took shape in the sudden appearance in Soviet journals of a large number of earlyand middle-twentieth-century dystopian novels and the massive response to them. The list of examples is truly astounding. In 1986, Platonov's "Juvenalian Sea" ("Iuvenil'noe more," Znamia) appeared, followed in 1987 by his Foundation Pit ("Kotlovan," Novyi mir). Three more dystopias were published in 1988: Platonov's Chevengur, in Druzhba narodov, Orwell's Animal Farm ("Skotnyi dvor") in Rodnik [Latvia], and the most famous of Russian dystopias, Zamiatin's We ("My") in Znamia. In the same year two works, which in the West are not usually seen as dystopias, were published and hailed for their antiutopian qualities: Kafka's The Castle ("Zamok") in two translations in Inostrannaia literatura and Neva and Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon ("Slepiashchaia t'ma") in Neva. In 1989, Orwell's 1984 appeared in Novyi mir, and Animal Farm appeared in a second translation as "Ferma zhivotnykh" in Literaturnyi Kirgizstan. This series of publications has triggered a shock of national self-recognition and has become an important focal point for broad ideological reevaluation. The point of my discussion here is to examine both the "constitutive" and "pathological" aspects of this reception process, on one hand, that is, how it opens the future to new ideological models and fresh possibilities for literary expression and, on the