Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1993"

Raiding the Icebox - Reflections on Twentieth-Century Culture

Abstract: "Raiding the Icebox" presents an alternative history of 20th-century art and culture, focusing especially on the rise and fall of modernism. Beginning with an analysis of the role of Diaghilev and the Russian Ballet, Wollen argues that modernism has always had a hidden, suppressed side which cannot easily be absorbed into the master-narrative of modernity. He suggests, through reconsiderations of Matisse's Moroccan paintings and the work of the great fashion designer, Paul Poiret, that the history of high art cannot be written separately from that of performance and design. Wollen reviews the hopes, fears and expectations of artists and critics such as the Bauhaus movement, as fascinated by Henry Ford's assembly line as they were by the Hollywood dream factory, concluding with Guy Debord's caustic dystopian vision of an all-consuming "Society of the Spectacle". Finally, Wollen chronicles the emergence of a subversive new sensibility in the underground films of Andy Warhol and explores some of the unexpected new cultural forms which non-Western artists are taking as modernism enters into crisis and the century drawn to a close: reversing the rules of the game and raiding the icebox of the West. "Raiding the Icebox" is a kaleidoscopic review of the avant-gardes and radical subcultures of the 20th-century which shows how some of the most powerful artistic statements of our era have redrawn the line between high and low art in a provocative way.

The Mediation of Technology and Gender: Metropolis, Nazism, Modernism

Abstract: If, as many have claimed, aesthetic modernism can be defined by its relation to technology, perhaps no other single work condenses so many aspects of this relationship as Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926). There, modernism's fears of and fascination with technology are given overdetermined representation. Andreas Huyssen, in one of the more perceptive analyses of Metropolis, has argued that the film is an attempt to resolve "two diametrically opposed views of technology": an "expressionist view" that emphasizes "technology's oppressive and destructive potential" and the "unbridled confidence in technical progress and social engineering" oft "the technology cult of the Neue Sachlichkeit."I Huyssen has elsewhere suggested that the whole of the twentieth-century avant-garde may be defined by its experience positive or negative of technology.2 Yet, viewing Metropolis, much less modernism in general, in terms of a dialectic between utopian and dystopian views of technology may obscure as much as it clarifies. It makes little sense, for example, to categorize Italian futurists, Soviet constructivists, and architects of the German Werkbund simply in terms of their technological utopianism. Although these movements do tend to see technology

Discriminating utopian from dystopian literature: Why is walden two considered a dystopia?

Abstract: Skinner thought of Walden Two as a utopia, but many literary critics consider it a dystopia. The present paper examines works by several authors of utopian literature in an effort to determine what elements lead critics to classify works as "dystopian." Common elements seem to include (a) suspicion of scientific social planning, (b) the unhappiness of the characters portrayed, (c) suspicion of sources of control of behavior outside the individual, (d) violation of a presumed inherent need to struggle, and (e) suspicion of behavioral methods of governance. The elements Walden Two shares with other utopias and dystopias are examined, and the conclusion is offered that Walden Two could not be considered a dystopia for any of the traditional reasons. Instead, the negative view of Walden Two seems to be an outgrowth of literary devices and general negative reactions to behavioral determinism.

Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, Art

Abstract: "Paradise Dislocated" offers a re-reading of William Morris's neglected poem, "The Earthly Paradise". While most critics have seen this work as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that "The Earthly Paradise" is, in fact, central to Morris's political vision - indeed the most radical manifestation of that vision. Skoblow argues that the poem constitutes a far-reaching critique not only of the capitalist order of late 19th-century England but of the fundamental suppositions of Romanticism, suppositions that are intricately linked to the psychosocial dynamics of capitalist culture. Morris's work, as Skoblow presents it, is at once rooted in the late Romantic traditions and a subversion of that tradition in favour of an alternative idea of the imagination - a materialist imagination that is itself both akin to the historical materialism of Marxist theory and a transformative challenge to that theory. Morris emerges as a critical revisionist of both Romantic and Marxist doctrine. "Paradise Dislocated" explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole.

From V . to Vineland : Pynchon's Utopian Moments

Abstract: Critics have only just begun to retrieve the elements of utopian thinking in Pynchon, following the publication of Vineland (1990). Pynchon's most explicitly political text so far, Vineland has prompted politicization of his earlier work against the tradition of mostly formalist Pynchon criticism. Tracing a trajectory from V. (1 963) to Vineland, from his first to his latest novel, I would like to suggest that one possible point of entry into the political in Pynchon is through his utopianism, broadly understood as "social dreaming" (Sargent 3). The movement from V. to Vineland corresponds to Pynchon's critique and rejection of what I call the utopia of modernity, and his subsequent embracing of a different utopianism that may offer correctives to the dystopian, postmodern world portrayed in Vineland. This reading also reflects the postmodernist ambivalence toward utopia as both a negative and a positive sign.

In the Name of the Father Chronotopia, Utopia, and Dystopia in Ti Jean l'horizon

Abstract: F IVE HUNDRED YEARS AGO (plus one), a bold voyager from Genoa sailed west into modernity by “ discovering” a new conti­ nent. Five centuries later (give or take a few years), looking west from Europe in a blur of ethnocentric and phallocentric myopia, Tzvetan Todorov still pronounces “ us all” heirs to Columbus—even though gallantly dedicating La Conquête de l ’Amérique “ to the memory of a Mayan woman devoured by dogs.” Looking east from America, Edouard Glissant had already bypassed Europe whence, according to Todorov, all originated (their books were published within a year of each other by the same press). Searching for alternative beginnings, Le Dis­ cours antillais glimpsed an African history at once denied and erased.1 It would seem that the oppositional reading of the collision of two worlds was fated to continue indefinitely. However, similarities are often more telling than differences: both the scholar from the Old World and the scholar from the New World defined “ the question of America” as a circular quest that doubles back upon itself in time and space simultaneously. This movement constitutes the narrative “ chronotope” of our thinking about the continent.2 To the historian of ideas, the voyage leitmotiv that marks our contemporary meditation on the “ New” World comes as no surprise; the mysterious (is)land to the west has been a common topos from the Greeks onward. For the Ancients, this locus classicus reenacted radical beginnings in the characteristic gesture of Myth, Ur-time enfolding and enfolded into Ur-place.3 In its modern variations, the quest for the perfect place (Eu-topia) has uncovered either its non-existence (U-topia) or its trans­ formation into the regimented structures of dystopia, unfolding a textual drama of containment played upon an obviously ideological stage. The modern Utopia, argues Fredric Jameson, is an attempt at circumventing