Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1995"

The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature: The Subversion of Modernity

Abstract: Modern Japan's repressed anxieties, fears and hopes come to the surface in the fantastic. A close analysis of fantasy fiction, film and comics reveals the ambivalence felt by many Japanese towards the success story of the nation in the twentieth century. The Fantastic in Modern Japanese Literature explores the dark side to Japanese literature and Japanese society. It takes in the nightmarish future depicted in the animated film masterpiece, Akira, and the pastoral dream worlds created by Japan's Nobel Prize winning author Oe Kenzaburo. A wide range of fantasists, many discussed here in English for the first time, form the basis for a ground-breaking analysis of utopias, dystopias, the disturbing relationship between women, sexuality and modernity, and the role of the alien in the fantastic.

American Film Noir: The History of an Idea

Abstract: and dystopian science fiction: in the center would be Double Indemnity, and at either margin Cat People and Invasion of the Body Snatchers. But this arrangement would leave out important titles. There is in fact no completely satisfactory way to organize the category, and nobody is sure whether the films in question constitute a period, a genre, a cycle, a style, or simply a "phenomenon."' Whatever noir "is," the standard histories say it originated in America, emerging out of a synthesis of hard-boiled fiction and German Expressionism. The term is also associated with certain visual and narrative traits, which some commentators have tried to localize in the period between 1941 and 1958. Others contend that noir began much earlier and never went away.2 One of the most comprehensive (but far from complete) references, Alain Silver and Elizabeth Ward's Film Noir: An Encyclopedia of the American Style, begins in 1927 and ends in the present, listing over 500 motion pictures of various stylistic and generic descriptions.3 Encylopedic surveys of the Silver and Ward type can be educational and entertaining, but they also have a kinship with Jorge Luis Borges's fictional work of Chinese scholarship, The Celestial Emporium of Benevolent Knowledge, which contains a whimsical taxonomy of the animal kingdom: those belonging to the Emperor; mermaids; stray dogs; those painted with a fine camel's-hair brush; those resembling flies from a distance; others; etc. Unfortunately, nothing links together all the things discussed as noir-not the theme of crime, not a cinematographic technique, not even a resistance to Aristotelian narratives or happy endings. Little wonder that no writer has been able to find the

African literature and the world system : dystopian fiction, collective experience, and the postcolonial condition

Abstract: Postcolonial writers, actively engaged in the construction of cultural identities for their new societies, often include strong utopian elements in their work. On the other hand, actual experience in the postcolonial world has been anything but utopian. It thus may not be entirely surprising that recent postcolonial literature has taken a powerfully dystopian turn. This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in African fiction, where works containing strong dystopian features have been produced by authors as diverse as Somalia's Nuruddin Farah ("Variations on the Theme of an African Dictatorship"), Kenya's Ngiigi wa Thiong'o (Devil on the Cross), Senegal's Ousmane Sembene (The Last of the Empire), Ghana's Ayi Kwei Armah (The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born), the Congo's Henri Lopes (The Laughing Cry), Ethiopia's Hama Tuma (The Case of the Socialist Witchdoctor), and Nigeria's Chinua Achebe (Anthills of the Savannah) and Wole Soyinka (Season ofAnomy). Of course, Western imaginative literature has also taken a decidedly dystopian turn in the twentieth century, but these African dystopian fictions differ from their European counterparts in certain important ways. In many ways, dystopian fiction has become a paradigmatic expression of the Western imagination in the twentieth century, a fact that poses significant problems (and opportunities) for African writers who seek to explore their own specific cultural situations within this genre. In particular, African writers of dystopian fiction face special complications in their attempts to explore new cultural identities within a quintessentially bourgeois form that seems inherently inimical to the utopian imagination. The difficulties faced by African writers of dystopian fiction are representative of those faced by African novelists in general, who must often strain against the generic characteristics of the fundamentally bourgeois form within which they write. In this sense, African writers have much in common with African-American writers, feminist writers, leftist writers, and all others who would seek to contribute to the development of cultural identities that escape the dominance of bourgeois ideology while writing within genres traditionally informed by that ideology. Noting the difficulties faced by American proletarian writers of the 1930s, who attempted to construct effective anti-bourgeois literature within the constraints of the traditionally bourgeois generic form of the novel, Barbara Foley

Orality and Literacy as Gender-Supporting Structures in Margaret Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale

Abstract: Current trends in textual studies have shifted their attention away from traditional text types toward a focus on non-literate sign systems. Specially created archives for orally transmitted text corpora stress this new orientation and the extension of literary studies to "texts" that are no longer "literary" in the narrow sense of the word, that is, "written in letters." Initiated early in this century by Milman Parry's hypotheses regarding the oral character of early Greek epics, the approach has been expanded through field studies, such as Ruth Finnegan's work on African narratives, and related attempts to define features of purely oral (non-literate) cultures. In this context, contemporary research on orality appears to be a continuation of those ethno-linguistic theories which see language as a paradigm that constitutes reality and which try to configure a certain weltbild by analyzing the structure and usage of a given language. As Edward Sapir put it: "Human beings do not live in the objective world alone, nor alone in the world of social activity as ordinarily understood, but are very much at the mercy of the particular language which has become the medium of expression for their society....The fact of the matter is that the 'real world' is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits of the group" (qtd. in Whorf 74). Whereas early linguists scarcely differentiated between different kinds of media, current research stresses the differences between cultures that are based on orality, handwriting (chirographics), print-technology (typographies), or electronic-data processing. According to the influential work by Walter J. Ong, the key terms for discussing oral cultures include: "subjectivity," "concreteness," "presence" and "context dependency"; the correlative terms for literate cultures are "objectivity," "abstract thought," "historical perspective" and "objectivizing distance" (36-57). Innocent as they seem, however, these terms can also easily be used to distinguish between the marginalized groups in society and the dominant race, class and gender. Thus in Gynesis, Alice Jardine has compiled a similar list of contrastive pairs when trying to throw light on stereotypes of masculinity and and feminity in Western culture: Male Female mind vs. body techne vs. physis vs. activity vs. passivity vs. logos vs. pathos form vs. matter same vs. other Jardine explains that these pairs are always connected with gender-specific connotations and are fundamentally linked with the Western cultural tradition as such (72), so that their recurrence in various discourses about orality and literacy is hardly accidental. A related potential danger lies in the way that on a long-term basis, oral traditions develop a tendency to support existing systems and have a conservative effect, whereas literate cultures have destabilizing and innovative potential. If these characteristics of oral cultures are consciously used by the elite of a literate culture they can be made to support hierarchical and gender-specific structures. Enforced orality is at odds with the kind of historical scope which contains a revolutionary potential and could consequently threaten the inner equilibrium of the state. By thus controlling the very structures of language and thinking, the leading class is able to consolidate the basis of its monolithic state and keep all others in their assigned positions. Although the banning of books and the ensuing "orality" of the whole population is a common topos in dystopian literature--of which a classic example is Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451--in The Handmaid's Tale Margaret Atwood adopts this dichotomy of literacy and orality in a new gendered way: she depicts not only a comprehensive power structure but one which is designed to suppress women by restricting them to an oral cultural tradition. …

Fictions of power in English literature, 1900-1950

Abstract: 1 Heroic Action: Narratives of imperial adventure. 2 Superhuman arts: Narratives of nationalistic faith. 3 Sexual dominance: Leaders and lovers in fiction between the Wars. 4 Violence: The thirties thriller and the 'gathering storm'. 5 Law: The liberal critique and the nightmare of totalitarianism. 6 Technopower: 'Leviathan on wheels' in dystopian science fiction. Bibliography Index

The matrix, cyberpunk literature, and the apocalyptic landscapes of information technology

Abstract: Perhaps no theme has so attracted the febrile imaginings of postmodern scholars as the creations--and the technological culture--of cyberpunk literature. Cyberpunk science fiction is "the apotheosis of post-modernism," in one assessment, "dystopian anticipation," in the lights of another, and "the only art systematically dealing with the most crucial political, philosophical, moral, and cultural issues of our day," as envisioned by a third.[1] For such fervor there is solid backing. A great theme in cyberpunk literature is the Matrix, an "abstract representation of the relationship between data systems," in the words of William Gibson.[2] Enormously complex and almost impossible to map, the geometry and particularities of this cybernetic space are not qualities easily defined. Among the unearthly delights of the Matrix is assessing its elusive dimensions. The broad cyberpunk literary "movement," as it is often described, blends fast-paced and imaginative writing with a pungent if admiring wariness for computers.[3] Rather more importantly, "cyberpunk" takes an often-savage delight in roaming the information networks that especially personal computers make possible. Altogether gone is the bland worship of technology that once defined science fiction; no part survives in cyberpunk. Instead there is edgy opposition, awareness of the intrusive give-and-take of everything from hi-tech drugs to the mirrored sunglasses that are a common motif in cyberpunk writing--reflective shades slamming shut unilaterally and peremptorily the "window to the soul." Yes, cyberpunk is "alienated," but hardly alien.[4] The geography is ineluctable. Punched into cyberpunk writing and the world it anoints lies a remarkable new frontier of geographical exploration and discovery, couched in a most visceral form: cyberpunk delves through the canyons of the mind by navigating pure information. For all its estimable presence, the Matrix poses nasty dilemmas, including notable quandaries for the geographers and other traders in the information of places who live and breathe for maps and the mappable. While conventional libraries are challenged by computer data, so too are the descriptive powers of cartographers--not a group, as Jorge Luis Borges once suggested, generally known for being easy to intimidate.[5] What is the structure, the map, of this informational nether world?[6] That it exists is certain enough. Net statistics show a rate of growth that leaves no doubt about the current existence of this world that is exposed in bits and bytes. The world created is cyberspace--a territory of facts and lies; of binary naughts and ones; sustained by data packets, ethernets, and network links; a virtual reality existing in the eyes of the beholder, wherever, in Michael Benedikt's phrasing, "electricity runs with intelligence."[7] Yet, for all their value as speculative devices for positing the dimensions of future society, cyberspace and the Matrix are here now: And the Yakuza would be settling its ghostly bulk over the city's data banks, probing for faint images of me reflected in numbered accounts, securities transactions, bills for utilities. We're an information economy. They teach you that in school. What they don't tell you is that it's impossible to move, to live, to operate at any level without leaving traces, bits, seemingly meaningless fragments of personal information. Fragments that can be retrieved, amplified ...[8] As any number of commentators on the technological scene note, computers are useful these days, not as dandy encapsulations of technological wizardry, but for the legion ways that computer networks offer to improve an otherwise all-too limited human capacity to communicate and absorb information. That 1990s daily life is enmeshed with computers is obvious, if not always welcome: witness e-mail addresses that appear in professional paper abstracts, the World Wide Web, online catalogs that all major university libraries maintain, computer-accessible bank accounts, Wired, electronic chat groups, or (now yesterday's news) the BBS--the computer bulletin board. …

The "Straight Mind" in Russ's The Female Man For years I have been saying Let me in, Love me, Approve me, Define me, Regulate me, Validate me, Support me. Now I say Move over. (?7.2:140)

Abstract: In The Female Man Joanna Russ contrasts our present-day heterosexual society with two revolutionary alternatives: a utopian world of women and a dystopian world of women warring with men. The Female Man, both science fiction and utopian novel, operates as what Monique Wittig in The Straight Mind (hereafter, SM) calls a literary "war machine" (69). The goal of such a war machine is "to pulverize the old forms and formal conventions. It is always produced in hostile territory" (SM 69). Russ's war machine confronts hostile territory-the heterosexual institutions that regulate gender-in tones that are variously hilarious, furious, and parodic. Her purpose in The Female Man is to trick the reader into recognizing the problem of "contrarieties": "You can't unite woman and human any more than you can unite matter and antimatter" (138, 151). In deploying this literary war machine, Russ critiques-in a manner similar to Wittig's T7he Straight Mind and her utopian novel Les Guerilleres (1969) heterosexual institutions that regulate gender, showing how two representatives from a world similar to ours respond to those institutions. She also shows two alternative worlds that further undermine, but do not offer solutions to the ways in which heterosexual institutions regulate gender. Ultimately, Russ's war machine succeeds by reappropriating language, as illustrated by one character's change into the female man. The Female Man takes place in four worlds inhabited by four J's, very different women who share the same genotype: Jeannine Dadier (who lives in 1969 in an America that never recovered from the Great Depression), Joanna (who also lives in 1969, but in an America like ours, and who merges at times with Joanna Russ, the author), Janet Evason (who lives in the all-female utopian future of Whileaway), and Alice Reasoner, christened Jael (who lives in the dystopian future where Womanlanders are at war with Manlanders). These worlds constitute "worlds of possibility," but are not linearly related, so neither Whileaway nor Jael's world is "our future" (?1.6:6-7, ?8.5:16061). The novel presents multiple configurations of a visitor-guide utopia: Janet,

The Discourse of Sweetness in Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here

Abstract: In "For Whom Things Did Not Change," the second story in Ama Ata Aidoo's collection No Sweetness Here, a young man recounts the talc of a bad yam. In it he tells how Nanaa cuts a slice of a large yam; it is rotten. Then she cuts another slice, and another, and another. All are rotten. Finally, she gouges out the head of the yam. It is brown and soft. Rotten. The young man, Kobina, draws from the childhood parable a significance for the corrupt social context of modern Ghana: What was it that ate it up so completely? And yet, here I go again, old yam has to rot in order that new yam can grow. Where is the earth? Who is going to do the planting? Certainly not us - too full with drink, eyes clouded in smoke and heads full of women. (Aidoo 22) The image of soil and regrowth, here stated emphatically and then rejected as implausible, goes to the heart of a good deal of Africa's writing. Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a depiction of the unhappy confluence of tribal mores and colonial dictates, puts forward land, the soil, and the possession thereof, as one of the indices of defeat and victory. Wilson Katiyo's A Son of the Soil articulates that powerful bond between the African sensibility and the fruitful earth that has nurtured life and has been loved for countless generations. Ngugi's Weep Not Child places the ownership and farming of land firmly at the center of debate as it characterizes the fate of an individual swept onward, bewildered, toward the certainty of majority-rule independence. But the agrarian attachments of the so called "first generation" of African writers are not shared by Aidoo. Her preoccupation with "land" and "growth" is not primarily linked to a postcolonial discourse on agricultural, or cultural, or religious usurpation - though these issues certainly inform the background of her perceptions. She makes relatively little of the image of "earth" and "planting" in No Sweetness Here. It is a minor issue in the collection's title story (61); there is only occasional mention elsewhere. More directly, she is concerned with what Homi Bhabha has described as "the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world . . . as the paradigmatic place of departure" (Bhabha 21). It is the immediate predicament of Ghana's cultural and political hegemony that defines the context of her discussion, and her narrative affinity is with a present-future nexus rather than with retracing an indigene-colonial hypothesis. In effect, she shifts the emphasis of her discourse away from explication of why things came to be as they are toward speculation as to how things may be altered. In Bhabha's terms, Aidoo takes as her paradigmatic starting point the experience of the present, without in any way disavowing the past as the informer of present consciousness, and strives to re-evaluate and re-define the aspirations of the future in relation to a present, dystopian actuality. Aidoo's commitment to the issues and problems of the present has always been determined. In an interview she gave in the early 1970s she insisted that "I cannot see myself as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra because you see, there are so many other problems" (McGregor 19). More than 20 years later she is still asserting contemporary issues as the pre-eminent focus of her writing: "It's like suffering from a permanent migraine. . . . Meanwhile everyone expects us, and we expect ourselves, to solve all our problems instantly. Whew!" (Chew and Rutherford 4) the Nigerian poet, Tanure Ojaide, has argued that "for us Africans literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. . . . It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian" (Ojaide 17). Certainly, the idea of constructive participation and debate is vibrant in the first wave of African writers, like Cyprian Ekwensi, Amos Tutuola, and Camara Laye; but it is equally apparent in the work of the "second generation" (Larson 245) of authors, like Ayi Kwei Armah and Wole Soyinka. …

Idealism and Dystopia in Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius

Abstract: The erstwhile narrator of Borges's dense and raveled fiction, 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius," concludes: 'Tlon is surely a labyrinth, but it is a labyrinth devised by men, a labyrinth destined to be deciphered by men." Labyrinth indeed! There's the rub, for many men will "decipher" it (as is their wont) in many different ways. Quot homines, tot sententiae. But some won't decipher it at all. Even Borges himself admits that the story is one of his best, but that it was too complex and too involved to be included in his personal anthology. Andre Maurois evades the issue entirely by confessing that the tale "gives food for endless thought," but he does not find it necessary to produce a single instance of such thinking. Others believe it to be an innocent, simple, autobiographical tale: "Oppressed by physical reality and . . . the turmoil of Europe . . . Borges sought to create a coherent fictional world of the intelligence. This world is . . . adumbrated in 'Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.' Tlon is no 'irresponsible figment of the imagination' The [final section is] projected as a kind of tentative utopia." At the opposite extreme, it has been perceived as an exemplary postmodern metafiction, and even as trenchant satire.

Teaching Dystopias: The Value of Religious Questioning.

Abstract: College and university faculty are working diligently to diver sify reading lists and look at familiar works through new lenses. We continue to explore ways to increase active study of values in the classroom. Through many means we help students to explore their prejudices and preconceptions. But in one area we often back off, leaving limited preconceptions in place or actually causing them to become further entrenched: religious thinking, religious imagination. A general education worth its name should encourage explora tion of religious questions, not in the sense of calling into ques tion particular systems of faith or specific practices, but rather of considering the large, central questions of existence as they have been asked over the centuries and across the globe. What is the summum bonum? What values are worth personal and societal allegiance? What meaning can we find in an existence bound by mortality and beset with suffering? Is there a divine power? The likely etymological root of the word religion?religare, to bind (O.E.D.)?suggests that the core of religious questioning is ex ploring to what we should bind ourselves and by what we are bound. Not only did the United States's first universities affirm the importance of such exploration, but so has mainstream think ing in our own century: for example, D. G. Hart cites a 1943 AAC (American Association of Colleges) report that empha sized a " 'liberally educated person' needed to be 'sensitive to all the values that endow life with meaning and significance.' This necessity required an acquaintance with humankind's attempt to understand the meaning of life through 'art and literature, phi losophy and religion' " ("American" 1994, 206).

Strangers in Paradise: the Unhappy Marriage of Feminism and Conservatism

Abstract: The quotation, taken from Margaret Atwood’s novel, The Handmaid’s Tale, expresses an anxiety about the way in which the demands of feminist radicalism may issue in moral and political conservatism. Atwood’s novel is set in a future North American society, Gilead, where, as a result of nuclear accidents and AIDS, the population is seriously depleted, most survivors are sterile and the future of the human race is threatened. In this society women, particularly women of child-bearing age, are rare and valuable commodities. They are protected from all forms of sexual assault, harassment and violence; pornography is banned and the streets are safe for women to walk in. Many of the legal demands of 1970s feminists have been satisfied, but the resulting society is not a feminist utopia; it is a dystopia whose origin Atwood traces not simply to natural and scientific disaster, but also to the combined effects of earlier moral conservatism and feminist radicalism. The narrator, Offred, looks back on the earlier society (North America in the mid-1980s) and recalls her mother’s ‘pure’ feminism, her involvement in anti-pornography book burnings and Reclaim the Night marches. She reflects on her mother’s political aims and concludes; ‘you wanted a woman’s culture. Well, now there is one. It isn’t what you meant, but it exists. Be thankful for small mercies.’