Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1994"

Dystopian Literature: A Theory and Research Guide

Abstract: Introduction A Guide to Selected Modern Cultural Criticism with Relevance to Dystopian Literature A Guide to Selected Utopian Fictions Dystopian Fiction A Guide to Selected Dystopian Drama A Guide to Selected Dystopian Films Bibliography Index

The Dystopian Impulse in Modern Literature: Fiction as Social Criticism

Abstract: Introduction: Utopia, Dystopia, and Social Critique Zamyatin's We: Anticipating Stalin Huxley's Brave New World: The Early Bourgeois Dystopia Orwell's 1984: The Totalitarian Dystopian after Stalin The Bourgeois Dystopia after World War II Postmodernism with a Russian Accent: The Contemporary Communist Dystopia Skepticism Squared: Western Postmodernist Dystopias Postscript: Literature and Dystopia Works Cited

The Flight from the Good Life: Fahrenheit 451 in the Context of Postwar American Dystopias

Abstract: Surveying the American scene in 1958, Aldous Huxley recorded his dismay over the speed with which Brave New World was becoming realized in contemporary developments: “The nightmare of total organization, which I had situated in the seventh century After Ford, has emerged from the safe, remote future and is now awaiting us, just around the next corner.” Having struck a keynote of urgency Huxley then lines up a series of oppositions between limited disorder, individuality and freedom on the one hand, and order, automatism and subjection on the other in order to express his liberal anxieties that political and social organization might hypertrophy. Huxley sums up an abiding fear which runs through American dystopian fiction of the 1950s that individuals will lose their identity and become the two-dimensional stereotypes indicated in two catch-phrases of the period: the “organization man” and the “man in the grey flannel suit. ” William H. Whyte's 1956 study diagnoses the demise of the Protestant ethic in American life and its replacement by a corporate one which privileges “belongingness. ” The result might be, he warns, not a world controlled by self-evident enemies familiar from Nineteen Eighty-Four, but an antiseptic regime presided over by a “mild-looking group of therapists who, like the Grand Inquisitor, would be doing what they did to help you.”

Writing so to Speak: The Feminist Dystopia

Abstract: The aim of this study is to highlight a neglected tradition of women's experimentation with the dystopian genre. The dystopia has been marginalised in critical work on speculative fiction as a sub-genre of the utopia; I argue here for a reading of the 'bad place' as a distinctive and potentially radical genre. The thesis concentrates on contemporary women's fiction (post-1969) and two issues in particular. In the first part of the study, I focus on texts such as Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, Michele Roberts' The Book of Mrs Noah, and Suzette Haden Elgin's Native Tongue, to examine the ways in which feminist writers use the non-realist form of the dystopia to foreground and challenge the cultural silencing of women. I discuss literary form, narrative authority, and language as especially important areas in this challenge. In the second part, I describe the dystopia as a subversive representational space in which the construction of feminine identity can be re-imagined. To demonstrate this, I consider the representation of the maternal body; feminine desire, and gender and space. Primary texts here include Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains, Elizabeth Baines' The Birth Machine, and Rebecca Brown's The Terrible Girls. I am also interested in points of connection between the feminist dystopia and feminist critical theory. My readings of the primary texts also consider feminist theoretical work on language, motherhood, the female body, and desire. An historical overview of the feminist dystopia is provided in the form of a primary bibliography (1877-1993).

Dirty Harriet/ Blue Steel : Feminist Theory Goes to Hollywood

Abstract: In a 1989 made-for-TV movie, Prime Target , veteran policewoman Angie Dickinson, on the track of a serial killer who is knocking off one young female rookie after another, grimly practices her marksmanship on the precinct target. Behind her an avuncular, grey-haired senior cop looks on. "Who do you think you are," he growls, "Dirty Harriet?" If "Dirty Harriet" is what our Angie, who has grown up, grown old, and got rich playing women agents of the state, now thinks she is, she has come a long way from the days when she, Sharon Gless, and others were still unlined, and television's women cops symbolized the rule-bound but humanist face of policing rather than its violent, retributive, even anarchic profile. In that favored and rapidly mutating fantasy narrative, generated by and responding to the discourses and internal debates of second-wave feminism, the presence and power of female police were at first represented as a positive effect of feminism, taking neglected women's issues onto the streets and into the courts. And although the story lines often opened up another, more unfinished and clouded reality, highlighting the uneven development of sexual politics in the maledominated force, it was through women's affirmative presence there that these scripts textualized the possibility of a Utopian balance between equality and difference under the law. "Dirty Harriet" films, on the other hand, belong to a later, still current, and distinctly dystopian staging of both feminism and its eighties backlash, holding hands across genres to create a daisy chain of films which depict women as actively, even pleasurably, violent,

Utopian/Dystopian Literature: a bibliography of literary criticism

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The inventions of paradise: the Caribbean and the Utopian Bent

Abstract: In the con/texts that this essay takes as circum-Caribbean, there is a complex tradition to the myth-making, myth-mocking appeal of the utopian bent. In his drama of the Haitian Revolution, The Tragedy of King Christophe, Martinique's Aime Cesaire has Vastey state the case both flamboyantly and precisely: "This extraordinary concretion of ours is situated at the focal point of every ebb and flow. That's where God has put us. Our back to the Pacific; before us Europe and Africa, on either side, the Americas." One apparent consequence of such variousness is that the circum-Caribbean forever promises to be, or risks being, itself only in patterns of crossbred genealogies that are as much Taino and Aztec as Hindi, Yoruba, and Congo. Moreover, the aw(e)ful plausibility that matter and mind can be reconstituted in ideal forms has produced its own array of dead ends and fresh beginnings, in circumstances that are shaped as much by Spanish Golden Age comedia as by the space-of-faith opposition that pits Babylon against Ethiopia in Rastafarian symbology. Christopher Columbus was no less engaged, accordingly, when in his third voyage he found himself in the "Terrestrial Paradise" and freshwater spaces between Trinidad and Venezuela, and there conjoined the myth-making, myth-mocking tradition that would be equally manifested when slave-hunting dogs were bred in Cuba or Jamaica for use in Haiti. It is not for nothing, then, that a Derek Walcott would resolutely explore the view that the New World was "wide enough for a new Eden / of various Adams"; or that a Pablo Neruda would conceive of the circum-Caribbean at once as the "waist / where two oceans marry" and as the "gathering place for the tears"-also "of two oceans." Poetics Today 15:4 (Winter 1994). Copyright ? 1994 by The Porter Institute for Poetics and Semiotics. CCC 0333-5372/94/$2.50. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:49:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms 686 Poetics Today 15:4 The myth-making and myth-mocking identification of the Caribbean/ New World with the utopian bent has a complex tradition. The pushpull consequences have included passing comments on the utopian propensity, as in, say, Roger Garaudy's Alternative Future, with its observation that "the birth of capitalism and the sudden broadening of man's horizon during the Renaissance directly influenced Thomas More to situate his Utopia (1516) in Cuba, Campanella his City of the Sun (1623) in Peru, and Bacon to write The New Atlantis" (Garaudy 1974: 107). The tradition also generated a set of critical filters through which Spanish Golden Age playwright Lope de Vega, for one, dramatized the conversion and the clash of cultures in his 1598 El nuevo mundo descubierto por Cristobal Colon (The new world discovered by Christopher Columbus). As it is, then, Lope de Vega's comedia is one in which we get to hear the Devil's dystopian complaint at the Court of Providence that the Columbus enterprise would be nothing but an act of usurpation in a world that could be neither moral nor new. "Oh, Blessed court," he protests, "why are you sending Columbus / to renew my evil deeds?" But this curious "boca de maldad" (voice of evil) despair, who begs the court, "No me hagas este agravio" (Do not inflict this injury on me), provokes a response that is couched in terms of manifest destiny: "La conquista se ha de hacer" (The conquest is fated). Thereafter, the pattern of responses becomes one in which "oro," "armas," and "indios espantados" (gold, arms, and terrified Indians) are as foregrounded as "una Cruz grande verde" (a large green Cross [Vega 1965 {1598}: 34-35]). From the beginning, then, dystopian sub/versions were always part and parcel of the onslaught of idealism and the attendant assault on paradise in the Americas. And such is the case in chronicle after chronicle-as is readily apparent in the extraordinary blindness and insight with which Columbus reported on his first Caribbean contacts at "the Great Landing in Barcelona" in April 1493, an event that Alejo Carpentier has aptly described, in The Harp and the Shadow, as the "first great spectacle of the West Indies, with authentic men and animals presented before the public of Europe" (Carpentier 1990 [1979]: 122): I, Christo Ferens [Bearer of Christ], have been in the land of the Great Khan from where the spices come. The people are loving and gentle and fit to be Christians. They are docile and will make good slaves. The distance is not half what the mathematicians would have it. (Foss 1974: 18) Relevant, too, is the con/fusion of values that we get in Gonzalo Fernandez de Oviedo's latter-day (1535-57) history of the Indies. From Oviedo, as from the more celebrated Bartolome de Las Casas (although the two men were remarkably divided in their allegiances), This content downloaded from 157.55.39.153 on Mon, 19 Sep 2016 04:49:16 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms Johnson ? Inventions of Paradise 687 we learn that "the New World ... was a victim of the 'conquistadors, who would more accurately be called depopulators or squanderers of the new lands,' and of 'private soldiers, who like veritable hangmen or headsmen or executioners or ministers of Satan [caused] various and innumerable cruel deaths . . . as uncountable as the stars."' Thus did Oviedo pass judgment even as he was himself declaring that gunpowder used against Indians ("dirty, lying cowards who commit suicide out of sheer boredom, just to ruin the Spaniards by dying") should be considered incense to God (Sale 1990: 158; see also Keen 1990 [1971]: 79; Hanke 1971: 106).1 Of course, so conflated a judgment does have a somewhat peculiar affiliation with, say, the view of Francisco Lopez de Gomara, in whose historia of 1552 "the discovery of the Indies" would be represented as "the greatest event since the creation of the world, excluding the incarnation and death of Him who created it" (Sale 1990: 224).2 Ultimately, in the more or less balanced accounts of the Caribbean that result from Derek Walcott's getting down to business in one of his memories-of-the-future "New World" poems, we learn that

From Utopian to Dystopian World: Two Faces of Feminism in Contemporary Taiwanese Women's Fiction

Abstract: sues related to gender and sex were explored in their works, few of them challenged directly the underlying patriarchal assumptions and ideologies. Chinese women writers and their writing have long been marginalized and classified under the diminutive term Gueixiu pai (feminine group), a category in which conventional themes of love, marriage, and romantic relationships are dealt with in a predictable, stylized form and from a sentimental perspective. With the emergence of feminist consciousness, however, some women writers began expressing their personal experiences and political concerns openly in their works in a more experimental way. Representative among these writers are Li Ang, Lu Xiulian (Lu Hsiu-lien), li Yuanzhen (Lee Yuan-chen), and Zhen Xinyi. Amid tremendous social pressure and disapproval, they expose sexual inequality long embedded in the patriarchal culture by exploring new themes, images of women, and literary forms. Lu Xiulian's Zhe sange nuren (These Three Women; 1985) and Li Ang's Shafu (1983; Eng. The Butcher's Wife) are historic landmarks of fiction by two important women writers from Taiwan that express female consciousness. On the surface, in terms of characters, subjects, and literary forms, these two novellas are written from seemingly contrasting points of view. "These Three Women" focuses on modern Taiwanese intellectual women's search for a

Orgy of Looking: The Construction of the L.A. Rebellion in the British Press

Abstract: This analysis is about the reporting of the L.A. Rebellion of 1992 in Great Britain and in particular one photograph of it that was widely circulated in the European press. I have never been to Los Angeles, but I feel as though I know it. From its future, glimpsed in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982), to its present on T.V. in the series L.A. Law, to its past in detective stories, from Dashiell Hammett's novels to Starsky and Hutch in the '70s--Los Angeles is a place that I know, but do not know at all. L.A. is a repetitive multiplicity of overlapping, conflicting, and contradictory representations that each contribute to a conglomerate image. As Mike Davis succinctly describes it: "The ultimate world-historical significance and oddity of Los Angeles is that it has come to play the double role of utopia and dystopia for advanced capitalism."(1) Across the wealth of images, stories, and legends Los Angeles is a representation that is over-determined. By over-determined I mean--in the psychoanalytic sense--that a representation is always a compromise, a result of a layering of meaning that cannot be reduced to a single content. Thus the analysis of any image ought to open up that sedimented and congealed layering of overdetermined cultural meanings. In the same way, no doubt, the L.A. Rebellion--the instigation of which was attributed to the unjust acquittal of four white police officers on trial for the beating of Rodney King in 1992--was an over-determined event. On the afternoon of April 30, 1992 the image of L.A. erupted on the media highways of Britain's TV., radio, and regional evening newspapers as a dystopia. London's regional newspaper, the Evening Standard featured a front-page headline, "TORCHING OF LOS ANGELES," with a half-page color photograph below it. The photograph, "wired" from L.A. through Reuters to the newspaper's London office, showed a row of five police officers standing in front of several burning buildings. That same evening the national daily newspapers were busy preparing their issues for the following early morning editions. The next morning, May 1, their front pages were dominated by news of the "riots." The image that was preferred by most of these newspapers was the same photograph used the previous night by the Evening Standard. Significantly all but one of the "Tory papers" (those more or less politically affiliated with the governing Conservative Party) chose to use this image on the front page. Inside the newspapers further coverage was given, with The Sun even abandoning its "page three" habit of showing naked-breasted "pin-up" photos of women for three subsequent issues to make way for more photos of the L.A. riots. Interestingly, the two liberal newspapers (non-party affiliated) The Independent and The Guardian both used the same rather indistinct black and white photograph, while the "labour" tabloid The Mirror, in isolation, considered an incident about Princess Di to be noteworthy front page news. But it was the picture of a row of police standing firm in front of burning buildings that confronted most newspaper shop and kiosk customers that morning with the usual row of (Tory) newspapers, The Star, The Sun, The Daily Telegraph, The Daily Express and The Times announcing the same event using the same photograph. From the plethora of representations available of L.A., this one photograph demands an analysis as the picture that gave the U.K.'s newspaper readers their first impression of the riots. More than seven million people bought newspapers that morning with that photograph staring back at them, and the actual readership of newspapers is estimated at double or triple the circulation figures. Here, the common assertion that newspapers compete with one another in the content of their pages to maximize profitability and circulation figures is given a practical test. On May 1, 1992 the front page editorial stance among the Tory papers was virtually unanimous. …