Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1996"

Film Architecture: Set Designs from Metropolis to Blade Runner

Abstract: The explosion of space architecture and filmic imagery, Anthony Vidler sites of desire - the Weimar street film, Anton Kacs "Algol", "Aelita", "Metropolis" - visions of the future city, Dietrich Neumann like today, only more so - the credible dystopia of "Blade Runner", Michael Webb New York - the rise and fall of a celluloid city, Donald Albrecht. (Part contents)

Impossibility fiction : alternativity, extrapolation, speculation

Abstract: Peter STOCKWELL: Introduction. I. ALTERNATIVITY. David SEED: Mankind Vs. Machines: The Technological Dystopia in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano. Andrew BLAKE: T.H. White, Arnold Bax, and the Alternative History of Britain. Lucie ARMITT: Re-theorising Textual Space: Feminist Science Fiction (And Some Critical Limitations). Andrew BUTLER: Science Fiction as Postmodernism: The Case of Philip K. Dick. II. EXTRAPOLATION. Carolyn BROWN: Utopias and Heterotopias: The 'Culture' of Iain M. Banks. Antony ROWLAND: Silence and Awkwardness in Representations of the Jewish Holocaust, The Bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and a Projected Nuclear Holocaust. Ben LAWSON: George S. Schuyler and the Fate of Early African-American Science Fiction. Victoria MAULE: On the Subversion of Character in the Literature of Identity Anxiety. III. SPECULATION. Mark JONES: J.G. Ballard: Neurographer. James KNEALE: Lost in Space? Exploring Impossible Geographies. Michael BRADSHAW: Mary Shelley's The Last Man (The End of the World as We Know It). Dave HINTON: Jurassic Park and the Generic Paradox in Science Fiction Film. Derek LITTLEWOOD: Uneasy Readings/Umspeakable Dialogics. Index.

More's Utopia and the Utopian Inheritance

Abstract: A.D. Cousins and Damian Grace edit this unique collection of scholarly essays that focus on More and academic skepticism. The contributors analyze philosophical problems in the historical contexts of More's Utopia, with scholarly investigations of his legacy of imagining and attempting to found the "good place". Contents: Utopia and Academic Skepticism, Damian Grace; Prosperity and Intellectual Needs: The Coherence and Credibility of More's Utopia, Aleksandar Pavkovic; Utopia and the Franciscans, Dominic Baker-Smith; The Idea of a Commonwealth According to the Essenes and St. Thomas More's Utopia, Miguel Martinez Lopez; More's Utopia, Callenbach's Ecotopia, and Biosphere 2, Elizabeth McCutcheon; To Build a Christian Utopia in the Pacific: The Sandwich Islands in Early American Protestant Missionary Activity, James McCutcheon; More, Montaigne, Voltaire and Matthew Arnold: Thoughts on the Utopian Vision, John C. Olin; The Islands of Utopia and Voltaire's Country of Eldorado, Clare M. Murphy; Ever "More": Utopian and Dystopian Visions of the Future 1890-1990, Fred Stanley.

Totalitarian Art and the Nemesis of Modernity

Abstract: The streams of visitors and extensive media coverage of the Art and Power exhibition held at the Hayward Gallery last winter demonstrated the intense fascination which culture exerts when it is shown vigorously adapting to a habitat which many would assume to be as hostile to it as Mars to an orchid: totalitarianism. The natural tendency of reviewers for the quality press has been to use the exhibits as a catalyst to formulating personal views on the relationship between twentieth-century art and politics. By way of contrast I would like to focus attention not on the exhibition but its catalogue, and suggest that, considered in its own right as an illustrated collection of scholarly essays, it represents a cogent revisionist position on the relationship of modernism to fascist, Soviet, and 'totalitarian art', and marks a considerable advance on the bulk of what has been written in canonic works on these topics. The tone is set by Eric Hobsbawm's introduction which, in stressing how the authoritarian regimes, both left and right, of the interwar period represent a caesura with liberal concepts of progress, recognizes that they saw themselves 'not as maintaining or restoring or even improving their society but as transforming and reconstructing it. They were not landlords of old buildings but architects of new ones' (p. 11). A common denominator of Fascism, Nazism, and Soviet Russia was that their fusion of populism with authoritarianism led to 'power mobilizing art and people as public theatre', thereby creating the 'theatre state' (p. 15). In a brilliant essay on the 'battle for art' David Elliott then complements this theme by stressing that 'the dictators ofthe 1930s were the apotheosis of modernity'. However, their rejection of the liberal humanist notion of the primacy of the individual artist's sensibility led them to be both 'aggressively modernizing' (p. 31) yet radical in their rejection of Modernism, at least in its individualist, subjectivist aspect even the embrace of Modernism in fascist Italy was qualified by the urge to appropriate it into the celebration of the supra-individual ethical state, and eventually gave way to a predilection for revivalist monumentalism in civic architecture as part of the cult of Romanita. Elliott relates this aesthetic to the attempt in each regime to bring about cultural revolutions, conceived as an integral part of 'the process of purging or cleansing through which each "threatened" nation could be healed and made whole'. In carrying out this self-imposed mission the new states became 'hermetic, self-referential bodies which set out consciously to establish new world orders' (p. 33). From early on in the catalogue, therefore, the contours of a theory are clearly delineated according to which the cultural policies of the three regimes under consideration cannot be divorced from their messianic vision of the capacity of the state to regenerate society and hence lead humanity out of the quagmire of liberalism into a new, heroic phase of civilization. The official art which resulted, especially in the sphere of architecture, reflect this regenerationist, 'palingenetic' thrust, calling into question the naive assumptions of the dominant paradigm according to which fascism was a reactionary, antimodern phenomenon based on barbarian nihilism. The excellent essays on Italian Fascism informed by this premise refute Umberto Eco's simplistic judgement cited in the introduction that 'Mussolini did not have any philosophy, only a rhetoric' (p. 16): the mythic, and hence deeply ideological thrust of Fascism towards a reborn Italy can be seen everywhere at work in its aesthetics, and it was because Mussolini consistently presented himself as the prophet and incarnation of the nation's renewal that his personality cult remained intact for as long as it did. By the same token, the exhibition demonstrated that the Nazis pursued their plans for the reconstruction of German culture with the same zeal with which they implemented the eugenic fantasies which nourished them, and that the utopian impetus behind the Russian Revolution persisted long after it had borne poisonous fruit in the dystopia of the Gulags (the visionary building schemes of Soviet architects in the 1930s and 40s were among the most impressive displays of the entire exhibition). The aesthetics of these regimes also contrast significantly with those of anti-communist, but merely 'para-fascist' authoritarian regimes which promoted an essentially conservative, restorationist ethos. The difference is brought out vividly in the section of the exhibition devoted to the Spanish Civil War, which concludes with photographs of the gigantic crucifix erected with Republican forced labour in the Valley of the Fallen outside Madrid. The cross is a fitting symbol of the fusion at the heart of Franquismo (though not of Falangism, which was genuinely fascist) between traditional conservative values and the crushing power which the modern military state wields over the individual.

There Is a Story To Go with Every Figure in the Picture: Kurt Vonnegut talks about science, fiction, and dystopia

Abstract: Kurt Vonnegut was interviewed by Francisco Collado in the writer's Manhattan residence on 15 November 1995. As humorous and satirical as his readers might expect, Vonnegut was ready to talk about his past and future fiction, and to comment on his current understanding of life and human beings. Born on 11 November 1922, Vonnegut had just celebrated his seventy-three birthday when I approached him in his Manhattan house. I was charged with a full list of academic questions about his works and his personal views in 1995. As happens in his books, then and there I found out that truly life and fiction are separated only by a tenuous web: Vonnegut is himself a black comedian, sardonic and ironical, a chain-smoker in whose very moods and answers you can perceive traits similar to the ones present in his imaginary personages Kilmore Trout, Rabo Karabekian, or Eugene Debs Hartke. However, as he stated laughing, Hartke was a Lieutenant Colonel and Vonnegut himself only a private. My list of ordered questions soon dissolved among his chuckling and laughing: more than once I had to mentally reorder my views on his fiction to finally conclude that his own behavior simply mirrors that mystery of his prose: complexity but clarity, experimentation but simple results.

Tinkering toward Utopia, or Dystopia? A Philosophical/Policy Perspective on Educational Reform

Abstract: Over the past 100 to 150 years, education has become a potent social­ izing force. I t has been used as a tool to pursue social and pol i tical goals, not just the educational goal of an in­ formed individual . Education is often used to support a pol itical agenda, such as the Americanization of immi­ grants and the buttressing of the demo­ cratic principles of government. Be­ cause of its tremendous potential to socialize and direct the populace toward specific goals, the control of the public school curriculum and the organization of public schools is often a battleground for competing ideolo­ gies. Therefore, any reform of public education i s of great consequence to the nation . Typically there is an underlying stated, and sometimes not stated, polit ical/social agenda that drives educational reform . Education for education's sake is not the usual goal of reform. It is appropriate and essential to ask of educational reform: a better education to do what , to serve what end, and for whose benefit?

Mugging for the Camera: Narrative Strategies in Brazil

Abstract: Brazil has a curious history. Terry Gilliam, a former member of Monty Python's Flying Circus, created a dystopia so devastating, and yet so compelling, that Universal refused to release it without a massive editing job, reshaping it to match the expectations of the public-and the studio marketing strategists. Gilliam would not agree to their changes and made a dramatic and highly public stand, ultimately winning control over editing, but guaranteeing a lack of marketing support that doomed the film at the box office. He remarked afterward that life was imitating art in a nightmarish way. It isn't surprising that the film would dismay a conservative Hollywood studio since it defies categories and deliberately subverts the act of categorization. It practices defamiliarization with a vengeance. In fact, vengefulness was taken to be a prime motivation for Gilliam by some critics. One, in a scathing assessment, said it is "an all-out audience assault" (David Sheehan qtd. in Mathews 77). Even Gilliam, in an interview, suggested his object was to confound his viewer: He describes the film as a "form of cinematic mugging. It starts rather funny, and it lures people around the corner with a lollipop-and, once you get around the corner, pow! It's too late to escape. It's claustrophobic-you're trapped and it won't end; it ends again and again and again and again. People get resentful, but that's what nightmares are like" (Bennetts 16). What is this nightmare and how does it organize its assault on the viewers' expectations? The story, about a man who becomes trapped in the bureaucracy when he meets and tries to join the girl about whom he has literally been dreaming, begins at 8:49 p.m. somewhere in the twentieth century according to messages superimposed over an opening shot of clouds. From the start we get conflicting signals-we know the precise moment, but not the year. The mise en scene continues this deliberate confusion by proposing a weirdly nostalgic future that has computers with keyboards that look like ancient upright Underwood typewriters, telephones that have to be plugged in like old switchboards, and architecture that combines Bauhaus elements with Stalinist Modern ornateness. As Salman Rushdie puts it, the "idea of the future is somewhat out of date" (52), and we wonder if this "somewhere in the twentieth century" isn't somehow everywhere in the twentieth century, a melange of our century's cultural history. Another critic, focusing on the architecture in particular, says, "the present and future are conjoined via the device of a postmodern cityscape in which traces of modernist high rises and pyramid and glass towers intermingle with debris from revival architecture and urban sprawl" (Staiger 22). Unlike the clean, unified designs of the sort of future found in Star Trek or the mythic time of Star Wars, this future has lots of the present in it and is a disorderly mingling of dysfunctional elements. This setting, aside from its confusion over time, is dark, labyrinthine, and entropie.1 The only panoramic views we see are via the cameras; there is no high ground that provides a clear orientation through the maze for the characters, and everything seems incredibly dingy, broken, worn out. This is also far from a classless society, as the dwellings reflect an obvious hierarchy. Sam's apartment is plain, a unit in a soulless but clean tower block; his mother's flat is luxurious and Edwardian in its tastes; the Butties' flat is working class in decor and faces a grimy airshaft-like atrium in which dirty children play at a brutal new version of cops and robbers and, on occasion, torch cars for fun.2 The mise en scene has much to say about deception. The fabulcfi world is one in which deception is the norm and appearances count for far more than reality. Facades are ubiquitous. Though the lobby of the Ministry of Information is built on a monumental and fascist scale, dwarfing those processed through it, its offices are jumbled, chaotic, and mean even to the point that two cubicles share one desk that the office workers fight over, pulling it back and forth through the wall. …