Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 1997"

Untapped Potential The Representation of Disability/Special Ability in the Cyberpunk Workforce

Abstract: In the 1980s an identifiable sub-genre of science fiction known as cyberpunk addressed the speculative integration of information technology into everyday experience. Variants of cyberpunk fiction are both celebratory and critical of these imaginative explorations. However, a common narrative diegesis is the dystopian account of social life under postindustrial corporate capitalism. Unlike other genres, a feature of this fiction is the use of incidental disabled characters. They are used as part of the articulation of the cultural anxieties of the able-bodied concerning new technology and the social organisation of work. One preoccupation of cyberpunk is the relationship between the body and cyberpunk technology. As the human body, in this fiction, is increasingly measured against superhuman standards, cyberpunk visualises a future of common disability in the work environment. Members of this workforce fear disability in a future where they have lost their civil rights, have little welfare provision and w...

Transformations of language in modern dystopias

Abstract: Preface Introduction to the Language of Dystopia "Plus 'Parfaite' et Moins Libre" "It's a Beautiful Thing, the Destruction of Words" "Milk with Knives in it" Newspeak, Nadsat and the Evolving Nature of Dystopian Language(s) Language and the Feminist Dystopia "You Never Know Where it Begun Realy" Apprehension ex nihilo: Claiming Mastery Over the Word Bibliography Index

The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition

Abstract: (1997). The Calculus of Love and Nightmare: The Handmaid's Tale and the Dystopian Tradition. Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction: Vol. 38, Women Writers, pp. 83-95.

Images of a Networked Society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Abstract: It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of a computer revolution that will change our society perhaps more radically than the Industrial Revolution, and likewise a commonplace that the literary imagination has often gone before us in envisioning not only the shape but the possible significance of such changes. A striking example is E. M. Forster's dystopian story "The Machine Stops" (1909), which deserves renewed attention as the computer age accelerates and as the breakup of the Soviet Union may make Orwell's world of totalitarian control and fear, 1984, seem less imminent than Forster's of satisfied individuals sitting, before their networked personal computers. Forster scholars have frequently either ignored "The Machine Stops," Forster's only portrayal of a future world, or devoted only a couple sentences or paragraphs to it; through the 1970s many judged it a limited creation. Those treating it at greater length have typically focused on how it develops Forster's recurring humanist concerns about connection--of individuals with themselves, senses plus spirit, or individuals with each other and with the natural world--while some recent critics have looked at narrative technique. But some scholars, including those critical of the story, have also seen it as prophetic. And beginning with Mark Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare (1967), discussions of the story began to appear in another kind of forum: books and articles on science fiction and dystopian fiction. "The Machine Stops" has come to be hailed as influential, the earliest of the twentieth-century dystopias exploring attitudes toward science and technology.(1) Even the more recent of such commentaries have focused on the story's portrayal of technology in general: for example, people do not have to work and have become soft since the machine works for them. These analyses either predate the widespread use of home computers or do not discuss them. Further, none devotes sustained attention to the religious issues so central to the story. By looking at intersections between religious thinking and computerization in "The Machine Stops," this essay can explore some key questions about the effects of computerization on our lives and values. The citizens in the world of "The Machine Stops" live in individual cells, empty except for a chair, a desk, and the controls of a machine. What happens to people's relationship to a power outside themselves, and to their relationships with each other, when their days are increasingly spent in relationship with a networked communication device? I will explore these issues through images and metaphors, assuming as does Robert Frost in his "Education by Metaphor: A Meditative Monologue" that humankind's most profound thinking is metaphorical. First, Forster portrays an entirely indoor society, a society that looks only at the man-made. This condition began well before the citizens' underground life, as people had increasingly homogenized the earth: "What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?" (10). Then the environment was somehow poisoned, made uninhabitable for all higher life forms, so that people had to move underground--all this written decades before nuclear fission, bomb shelters, and the Swiss's reputed ability to house their entire nation in shelters under their mountains. Forster is of course not alone in imagining the future city as underground. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) places the workers, the Morlocks, underground, while the Eloi live above. Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), based on the novel by Thea von Harbou, shows an aboveground society of the well-to-do undergirded by workers in a hellish world of overwork and steam. In these cases, however, note that there is a clear division: an at least apparently good life above ground and a hell below. In "The Machine Stops," all inhabit an underground "good life" that is hell. Moreover, the issue of class, so important in those other works and in Forster's own novels, is nonexistent here. …

The Bodypolitics of Feminist Science Fiction: Elisabeth Vonarburg’s Le Silence de la cité

Abstract: The Bodypolitics of Feminist Science Fiction: Elisabeth Vonarburg's Le Silence de la cite Lorie Sauble-Otto Whether Utopian or dystopian, feminist science fiction is an emerging field of interest in Cultural and Literary Studies, as well as Women's Studies, and to use Jenny Wolmark's phrase, is at the cutting edge of culture (113)^ From freedom of sexuality to pregnancy and childbirth, feminist science fiction writers are exploring the female body in space and imagining its liberty, and sometimes in Dystopia, its bondage This essay centers around the emergence of feminist science fiction as the realm wherein women writers reinvent themselves and their bodies, thus the process of reproduction This theme of reproduction as oppression is what Sara Lefanu calls the hallmark of the feminist incursion into science fiction (57) Also, I would like to promote, as does Marleen Barr in Feminist Fabulation: Space/Postmodern Fiction, the canoniza- tion of what she calls feminist fabulation, and correspondingly, the instructional validity of the genre^ chy continues to define feminists As Barr states: patriar- and threatening texts (espe- cially science fiction written by women and men) as second-class (15) If, as Barr elaborates, feminist fabulation is a springboard for subversive thought, a literary space of personal transformation which can inspire social and cultural transformation, then it could serve as an empowering experience in the classroom (227) The theme of appropriation of women's bodies, procreative and their offspring is central to Elisabeth Vonarburg's fiction In Le Silence de la cite, Vonarburg ventures into a realm where total metamorphosis is a reality and parthenogenetic con- ception of children becomes the key to survival in a post-apocalyp- tic world This essay will pinpoint a few of the specific ways in which the author's writing calls into question or problematizes the discourse of male-dominated reproductive technology As Emily capacity Martin has suggested in The Woman in the Body: A Cultural Analysis of Reproduction, feminist reconstructions of the discourse of repro- ductive technology can be empowering: Imagining technology being used to control those who ordinarily use it to control others throws the power relationships into focus (58)

Into the melting pot: utopian and dystopian themes in edmund white's travels in gay america.’

Abstract: The decent society one might long for would be as respectful of individual difference as it would be solicitous of collective welfare. Such a vision is still in the process of being formed, or being imagined, and feminism and gay liberation, which demand a rethinking of private life and its connections to politics, can be one locus in which that transformation occurs. (Edmund White, States of Desire: Travels in Gay America)

Sinclair Lewis's Cautionary Tale It Can't Happen Here (1935).

Abstract: Today Sinclair Lewis's novel It Can't Happen Here (1935) is widely known only by its title, which is often quoted without any attribution to (the ironic intention of) the author, the first American winner of the Nobel Prize for literature in 1930. In literary studies ICHH is usually considered in the tradition of the dystopian novel (e.g., Jack London's The Iron Heel. Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's 1984), but because Lewis grounded his satirical-realistic novel in an intricate wealth of historical and contemporary detail, ICHH has over time been ignored or dismissed as a literary‘period piece’too demanding for today's reading public. However, in light of the 20th century struggle between democracy and totalitarianism, and particularly in view of the current resurgence of right-wing extremism world-wide, a re-examination of Lewis's political cautionary tale in historical context, based on archival work in the Sinclair Lewis Papers (Yale) and the Dorothy Thompson Papers (Syracuse) as well as on extensive research into the contemporary literature and subsequent scholarship, should also demonstrate its continuing relevance.

Review of No Virtue in Accident: Behavioral Analysis and Utopian Literature, by Bobby Newman

Abstract: Readers of Behavior and Social Issues will likely find this an interesting little book. It is 100 word processed pages long, not formally typeset, and is in part a collection of the author's previously published essays which appeared in The Behavior Analyst. Two reciprocal themes are present: how behavior analysts and humanists have interacted with each other in print, and how behavior analysts and commentators on utopian writing have had similar exchanges. As Newman has ably argued at greater length elsewhere (Newman, 1992), to a great extent, behavior analysis is the application of humanistic philosophy. Unfortunately influential segments within the humanistic camp are either unfamiliar with, or reject, the compelling parallels between the two fields, and behaviorism has fared less well at the pens of the humanists than the latter have at those of the former. One thing I learned from this book is that humanists, like members of many disciplines, can be divided into hard and soft varieties, with the former stressing reason, science, and critical thinking, (materialists and realists, in a philosophical sense) and the latter holding the view that humanity is a more elevated aspect of the universe than can be accounted for by science. Most (but not all) of the criticisms of behaviorism come from the latter group. Behaviorists (notably Skinner) have contributed numerous constructive applications to the literature on utopian cultures. Regrettably, commentators on this literature have often chosen to interpret these contributions as either satire, as dystopian, or in the worst case as the foundation for a totalitarian state ruled by skilled behavioral manipulators, a regime made more pernicious by the fact that