Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2001"

Utopia : the search for the ideal society in the western world

Abstract: Preface. Introduction: Utopia, Themes and Variations. I: Before Utopia. Sources and Matrices. The Sources of Utopia: Ancient, Biblical, and Medieval. Traditions: Plato's Atlantis, the True Utopia. II: Other Worlds. The Blossoming of the Utopian Genre, from Thomas More to the Enlightenment. Utopia and the New World, 1500-1700. The City as Intellectual Exercise. Mundus novis and renovatio mundi. Messianic and Utopian Currents in the Indies of Castille. Utopia and the Reformation. Daniel Defoe and the Robinsonade. III: Utopia in History. From Revolutions to the First World War. Utopia and Revolutions. Fin-de-Siecle Landscape against a Background of Ruins. Socialism and Utopia. French Literature and Utopia in the Nineteenth Century. IV: Utopia and Dystopia in the Twentieth Century. Utopia and Anti-Utopia in the Twentieth Century. Communal Movements in the Twentieth Century. Avant-gardes and Utopia in the Twentieth Century. How Does it Look in Utopia?. Utopia and Totalitarianism. Utopia and the Late Twentieth Century. A View from North America. Utopia and the Philosophical Status of Edified Space. Concluding Essays. Symbolic Bankruptcy. Utopia Face to Face with its Representations. Society as Utopia

World Literature and Global Theory: Comparative Literature for the New Millennium

Abstract: It has become a sign of living in the present to note the increasing globalization of the world the transnationalism of the currents along which capital, goods, labor, persons, and information flow; the interconnectedness of diverse cultures; the networks and internets that, despite their inequitable distribution, have nonetheless become the icons of rapidly changing, intricately interlinked societies. Global consciousness, speaking everywhere with the inexorable voice of the new, also appears to tow traditional academic bodies of knowledge within its orbit: "adapt," it seems to say, "or die." This Darwinian choice between adaptation and death has of course already been made, its iteration in the present tense serving to obscure the creeping changes long wrought on our disciplinary institutions, critical theories, and pedagogical practices by an ever more heterogeneous global sensibility. Globalization, understood as a process of cross-cultural interaction, exchange, and transformation, is certainly as old as any currently recognized academic field and in most cases far older, whether we take as its starting point the post-modern, post-colonial acceleration of spatiotemporal connection, the nineteenth-century capitalist expansion of imperial nations, the fifteenth-century formation of a world system dominated by mercantilist states and divided into core and peripheral zones, or even the trade routes of the ancient and medieval world.1 But contemporary globalization is of course far more than the mirror image of its various historical antecedents, bearing at its disposal unprecedented economic and cultural forces of connection (if one is Utopian) or homogenization (if one is dystopian).2

Dystopian Fiction East and West: Universe of Terror and Trial

Abstract: Gottlieb juxtaposes the Western dystopian genre with Eastern and Central European versions, introducing a selection of works from Russia, Poland, Hungary, and Czechoslovakia. She demonstrates that authors who write about and under totalitarian dictatorship find the worst of all possible worlds not in a hypothetical future but in the historical reality of the writer's present or recent past. Against such a background the writer assumes the role of witness, protesting against a nightmare world that is but should not be. She introduces the works of Victor Serge, Vassily Grossmam, Alexander Zinoviev, Tibor Dery, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, and Istvan Klima, as well as a host of others, all well-known in their own countries, presenting them within a framework established through an original and comprehensive exploration of the patterns underlying the more familiar Western works of dystopian fiction.

Cartoons from Another Planet: Japanese Animation as Cross-Cultural Communication

Abstract: Geisha, samurai, kimono, sushi, sumo ...eccentric mind-boggling animation? For years, Japanese animation has been heralded as an exciting, albeit bizarre, artistic phenomenon from the same country that introduced us to the tranquil Zen garden and the shockingly hard-working businessman. Despite often being stereotyped as nothing more than senseless cartoons featuring cutie-pie romping pocket critters, anime, as it is commonly called, is a delightfully inventive reference manual into the world of Japanese symbols, folklore, religion, history, social musings and aesthetic traditions. When audience members are no longer exclusively Japanese, anime unexpectedly becomes a vehicle for cross-cultural communication. Examining the history of anime distribution and fan appreciation in America is a free-for-all revelation into the effects of cultural appropriation, as well as a reflection of Western mores and artistic preferences. It also serves as an example of how art forms can cross national boundaries, uniting audiences from all over the globe under the guise of pure unadulterated entertainment. Disney fans beware; the following just might have dear Uncle Walt spinning in his cryogenic freezer! Don't Call Me a Cartoon Once upon a time, in a far away land, there lived a beautiful princess trapped in a shining castle. One moonlit night, a handsome prince rode up on his brilliant white horse and rescued her to live happily ever after. Unfortunately, being the cyberpunk flesh-craving gamine cyborg that she was, the princess had to neuromancer his brain, then decapitate and eat him. Naturally the prince, a genetically engineered resistance fighter, willingly sacrifices himself to her vampire-like appetite in accordance to his people's code of honor. But I digress... This is not your father's animation. Nor is it really yours. Or is it? Welcome to the world of Japanese animation, a world where any imaginable subject, setting, or theme can pretty much find itself represented in the likeness of entertainment. Anime (a term borrowed from the French by the Japanese to refer to the entire medium of animation, but adopted by the West to refer solely to animation from Japan, go figure) is an art form used to tell stories in ways barely even alluded to in Western animation. In America especially, with the Disney name brand practically inseparable from the word "animation," this particular art form unfortunately suffers a restricted and limited fate. Animation here is predominantly kiddy fair (or at least stereotyped as such), stuck in the overly exhausted realm of fairy tales with manufactured happy endings and token animal sidekicks voiced by television comedians who were annoying enough before they were animated. American animation that veers away from the socalled harmless Disney model (Bambi is excluded; I still find it traumatizing!) always seems to be forced into sub-cultural, limited exposure film festivals labeled with names such as "Sick and Twisted." This is not to say that anime (also called Japanimation) is only intended for older viewing generations. Much of it is highly geared to appeal to youngsters of a variety of ages. Japanese animation, however, does have a much freer palette from which to choose its audience and subject matter. It is hard to think of any cinematic or literary genre that is not represented in anime. Within the medium of Japanese animation, you can find: wrenching dramas, cheesy romances, storybook adventures, spooky thrillers, historical fantasies, robot shows, gothic fairy tales, slapstick parodies, futuristic dystopias, sports dramas, sci-fi series, gimmicky sci-fi series, sexy cyberpunk techno-- mythologies, misogynistic violent pornography, sword and sorcery stories, spoofs of sword and sorcery stories, epic environmental cautionary tales, Norse Goddess romantic comedies, not to mention your normal, everyday life family soap operas. All of this is achieved with nowhere near the stratospheric budgets allotted to big Disney productions, which tend to reach skyward of $100 million. …

Radicals on the Road: The Politics of English Travel Writing in the 1930s

Abstract: In the 1930s, the discourse of travel furthered widely divergent and conflicting ideologies - socialist, conservative, male chauvinist and feminist - and the major travel writers of the time revealed as much in their texts. Evelyn Waugh was a declared conservative and a fascist sympathizer; George Orwell was a dedicated socialist; Graham Greene wavered between his bouregois instincts and his liberal left-wing sympathies; and Rebecca West maintained strong feminist and liberationist convictions. Bernard Schweizer explores both the intentional political rhetoric and the more oblique, almost unconscious subtexts of Waugh, Orwell, Greene and West in his study of travel writing's political dimension. "Radicals on the Road" demonstrates how historically and culturally conditioned forms of anxiety were compounded by the psychological dynamics of the uncanny and how, in order to dispel such anxieties and to demarcate their ideological terrains, 1930s travellers resorted to dualistic discourses. Yet any seemingly fixed dualism, particularly the opposition between the political left and the right, the dichotomy between home and abroad, or the rift between utopia and dystopia, was undermined by the rise of totalitarianism and by an increasing sense of global crisis - which was soon followed by political disillusionment. Therefore, argues Schweizer, travelling during the 1930s was more than just a means to engage the burning political questions of the day: travelling, and in turn travel writing, also registered the travellers' growing sense of futility and powerlessness in an especially turbulent world.

Dystopian Futures: Time-Travel and Millenarian Visions in the Poetry of Anna Barbauld and Charlotte Smith

Abstract: Science-fiction and fantasy writing have always been, and continue to be, literary genres to which women writers are particularly attracted. In her study of women's science fiction, Sara Lefanu argues that among other things providing an appeal for women writers, is the fact that 'SF offers a language….for the interrogation of cultural order', an order in which they usually inhabit a maginalised position. [1] Within the various categories usually grouped together under the heading of science fiction, are two sub-genres which she identifies as being of particular interest: Utopias and Dystopias. In her discussion of feminist re-workings of these genres however, Lefanu concentrates on contemporary texts. In this essay, I want to examine the way in which these genres have previously been appropriated by women writers, by revisiting futuristic texts by two female poets of the Romantic period. The two poems that I am going to focus on, Charlotte Smith's 'Beachy Head' and Anna Barbauld's Eighteen Hundred and Eleven, both use the fantastic device of time-travel to provide a vision of the ruins of British and European civilisation, and in my analysis of these texts I will be drawing on the theories of fantasy writing put forward by Rosemary Jackson in her critical study, Fantasy: A Literature of Subversion. Jackson points out that 'a literary fantasy is produced within, and determined by, its social context' and consequently, 'though it might struggle against the limits of this context, often being articulated upon that very struggle, it cannot be understood in isolation from it'. [2] The dystopian visions of Smith and Barbauld are linked by a number of key features, which suggest that they are products of shared historical moment. In particular, both women tap into what might be termed the millenarian anxiety at the beginning of the nineteenth century. This kind of anxiety is not in itself wholly confined to this particular fin-de-siecle, as Malcolm Bradbury observes: "the turning of a century has a strongly chiliastic effect; it helps distil men's millenarian disposition to think about crisis, to reflect on history as revolution or cycle, to consider, as so many fin-de-siecle and aube-de-siecle, minds did consider, the question of endings and beginnings, the going and coming of the world." [3] [1] Sarah Lefanu, In the Chinks of the World Machine: Feminism and Science Fiction (London: The Women's Press, 1988) p.23. [2] Rosemary Jackson, Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion (London and New York: Routledge, 1981) p.3. [3] Malcolm Bradbury and James McFarlane (eds), Modernism: A Guide to European Literature, 1890-1930 (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1976) p.51.

Nationalism, Cross-Culturalism, and Utopian Vision in South African Utopian and Dystopian Writing 1972-92

Abstract: Reading 1984 fifty years after its first publication, one is still embar? rassed by Orwell's grim enactment of utopia as a closed and nightmarish system of manipulative structures beyond human agency or remedy. More than any other literary text in the Western world, this novel evokes the ultimate triumph of totalizing doctrines eschewing social change or readjustment and the futility of individual resistance against repressive structures and ideologies.1 In his seminal study The Womb of Space (1983), Caribbean writer Wilson Harris has challenged the legacy of Orwellian dystopianism and the "claustrophobic ritual" emerging from it, the ongoing tendency, that is, to fashion either crudely apocalyptic or purely scientific versions of the future:

Micropolitics of Media Culture: Reading the Rhizomes of Deleuze and Guattari

Abstract: This book focuses on the micro-political implications of the work of Gilles Deleuze (and Felix Guattari). General philosophical articles are coupled to more specific analyses of films (such as "Fight Club" and "Schindler's List") and other expressions of contemporary culture. The choice of giving specific attention to the analyses of images and sounds is not only related to the fact that audiovisual products are increasingly dominant in contemporary life, but also to the fact that film culture in itself is changing ("in transition") in capitalist culture. From a marginal place at the periphery of economy and culture at large, audiovisual products (ranging from art to ads) seem to have moved to the centre of the network society, as Manuel Castells calls contemporary society. Typical Deleuzian concepts such as micro-politics, the Body without Organs, becoming-minoritarian, pragmatics and immanence are explored in their philosophical implications and political force, whether utopian or dystopian. What can we do with Deleuze in contemporary media culture? A recurring issue throughout the book is the relationship between theory and practice, to which several solutions and problems are given."

Roads to Dystopia: Sociological Essays on the Postmodern Condition

Abstract: In these eight essays, Lyman (sociology, Florida Atlantic University at Boca Raton) argues that postmodern epistemologies provide a disservice to those who struggle for freedom. Bringing scrutiny to the American Dilemma, the Jewish Question, the role of cinema, and the place of community, he examines American discourses on race. Particular atte

City and Nation: Rethinking Place and Identity

Abstract: This compendium offers a textured historical and comparative examination of the significance of locality or "place," and the role of urban representations and spatial practices in defining national identities. Drawing upon a wide range of disciplines - from literature to architecture and planning, sociology, and history - these essays problematize the dynamic between the local and the national, the cultural and the material, revealing the complex interplay of social forces by which place is constituted and contributes to the social construction of national identity in Asia, Latin America, and the United States. These essays explore the dialogue between past and present, local and national identities in the making of "modern" places. Contributions range from an assessment of historical discourses on the relationship between modernity and heritage in turn-of-the-century Suzhou to the social construction of San Antonio's Market Square as a contested presencing of the city's Mexican past. Case studies of the socio-spatial restructuring of Penang and Jakarta show how place-making from above by modernizing states is articulated with a claims-making politics of class and ethnic difference from below. An examination of nineteenth-century Central America reveals a case of local grassroots formation not only of national identity but national institutions. Finally, a close examination of Latin American literature at the end of the nineteenth century reveals the importance of a fantastic reversal of Balzac's dystopian vision of Parisian cosmo-politanism in defining the place of Latin America and the possibilities of importing urban modernity.

Fortress Dystopia: Representations of Gated Communities in Comtemporary Fiction

Abstract: Introduction Things are getting decidedly inhospitable in parts of suburbia these days. The casual passerby in cities as diverse as Los Angeles, Chicago, Manila, and Sydney may readily find neighbourhoods enclosed in a series of protective security measures. In an urban world now so fearful of home invasions-a term almost unheard of two decades ago these communities are designed to keep intruders at bay and reflect something of both the inhabitants inside and the greater society beyond the walls. Iron gates, invasive security cameras, the quasi-death-threats of security firms, two-metre high walls and armed security patrols are now no longer foreign to many suburbs across the globe. The "gated community" phenomena, as it has come to be known, has not passed unnoticed by either Hollywood or the literary community of the West. This is hardly surprising-the suburbs surrounding Hollywood were one of the first places these fortress estates of the modern style were ever constructed. Writers, television producers, and film directors have turned their attention to this growing trend, finding much in the arising of suburban battlements that can be manipulated and adapted to both chronicle a tale and comment upon the greater world as we comprehend it. This paper investigates the portrayal of gated communities in popular culture. Firstly, the way in which cities and suburbs are depicted in contemporary fictions is discussed. Second, a reasonably straightforward definition of gated communities is given. Third, the various stereotypes and characteristics of these communities are assessed as they are represented in the imaginations of authors and screenwriters. The discussion is not a jeremiad-prophesying the doom and destruction of the city should it embrace further the gated form. Instead I wish to assess the perceptions and attitudes expressed in popular culture about the nature of urban life and the impacts of this "new enclosure movement." The Imagined City Before we begin dissecting portrayals of fortified suburbs, it is wise to consider how the City has been presented in late 20th century fictions. The "Imagined City" of contemporary fictions, especially that of science fiction, "is in part a consequence of the difficulty in explaining the nature of the city in a way that satisfies on an economic, political, social or cultural level" (Johnson). This has been the case throughout the last century. From films like Fritz Lang's Metropolis (1926), through Jean-Luc Godard's Alphaville (1965), and Ridley Scott's Blade Runner (1982) to Tom Grimes' novel City of God (1995) and beyond, the Imagined City has been represented as "idea"-more than simply urban form and cultural milieu. And often this vision has been dystopic. Many depictions have tended towards illustrating a fragmentation of community, a rise of controlling technologies, and a tangible sense of loss from what once was. Blade Runner clearly depicts "a post-apocalyptic future city" wherein "all the cultures of the world appear to be packed together in a smoky urban core throbbing with impending violence" (Soja 319). While all tends not to be well in the Imagined City, the entity of suburban form has also been subjected to such treatment. A litany of portraits, the "Imagined Suburb," have come forth to paint the average Western suburban landscape as a conformist, soul-less, cultural desert where life behind the picket fences is undoubtedly dysfunctional. The most common depictions are of the vacuousness of suburban landscapes and life, and of the facades of the average suburbanite-novels like George Johnston's My Brother Jack (1967) and J.G. Ballard's Crash (1973), and films such as Todd Solondz's Welcome to the Doll House (1996) and Happiness (1999), and Sam Mendes's American Beauty (1999) being good examples. Others show the "suburban dream" turned "post-suburban nightmare" replete with traffic, disinvestment and violence-see Robert Altman's Short Cuts (1993), Joel Schumacher's Falling Down (1993), or Alex Proyas's The Crow (1994). …

New Foundations: On the Emergence of Sovereign Cyberstates and Their Governance Structures

Abstract: This chapter contains sections titled: The Sovereignty of Cyberspace, Crypto Anarchy, Shifting Borders, The Emergence of Law in Cyberspace, Utopia, Dystopia, and Pirate Utopias, Notes

The new religious right versus media wrongs: afa fights temptation

Abstract: Critical examinations of The X-Files support the contention that its formula for success included narrative originality, social commentary, and cultural resonance to a degree rare in prime time network commercial entertainment television, but not so uncommon within the tradition of TV science fiction. Science fiction in broadcast history, although neglected critically for its associations with the populist leanings of genre criticism on one hand and the lowbrow reputation of broadcasting on the other, is rich with examples of memorable and enduring programming. To name just a few-Orson Welles' "War of the Worlds" (1938), Alcoa Presents/One Step Beyond (ABC, 1959-1961), Rod Serling's The Twilight Zone (CBS, 1959-1964), The Outer Limits (ABC, 1963-1965), The Invaders (ABC, 1967-1968), Star Trek (NBC, 1966-1969), Night Gallery (NBC, 1970-1973), Kolchak: The Night Stalker (ABC, 1974-1975), V (NBC, 1984-1985), Something Is Out There (NBC, 1988), and "Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction?" (Fox, 1995)-most of these the subject of remakes, sequels, franchise spinoffs, feature adaptations, or feature serializations, and most enjoying six degrees of separation from The X-Files (Fox, 1993-2002). Susan Sontag's 1965 "The Imagination of Disaster" stands among the earliest considerations of the cultural functions of science fiction. Even though she focuses on 1950s Hollywood science fiction cinema, aspects of her argument have been found applicable to examinations of television (Delapa; Murray). Not simply did she inventory generic properties and their recurring combinations across the body of fifties science fiction films, Sontag brought social history to bear upon their study. She asserted the march of world events as the genre's circumscribing frame of reference and identified the specter of the 20th century's demonstrated technologies for mass atrocity as science fiction film's political unconscious. Imaginings of alternate cosmologies and allegorical fantasies find structural points of departure and frames of reference in the destructive excesses to date of human enterprise. However, asserting a much-debated proviso to her formulation, Sontag wrote, "There is absolutely no social criticism . . . in science fiction films" (233). By its beautifying and neutralizing effects, science fiction normalizes the extremes of modern human existence-relentless banality and unimaginable terror. Although Sontag denied social criticism as a function of science fiction film, her assertions have nonetheless informed contemporary elaborations that argue that science fiction film and television intersect with broader systems of social meaning to engage intertextual modes of address that, in turn, cultivate and support sophisticated spectator and viewer practices (Sobchack; Kuhn; Telotte; Penley et al.; Lavery, Hague and Cartwright; King and Krzywinska). For example, place and location in science fiction rarely, if ever, function independently from diegetic frames of social organization. Within science fiction landscapes, environments driven by science and technology lend generic specificity to characters, con-flicts, and plots. Science fiction themes speak to the interface between human social existence and advancing scientific technologies. Moreover, the resulting scenarios find comprehension according to an era's lexicon for imagining the inconceivable. Thus, science fiction performs a particular historical function of negotiating present and pressing social concerns through cautionary fantasies of alternate realities. Science fiction's poles of dramatic conflict echo a given generation's lived challenges to humanity's status as a material and moral force-those historical challenges recast in utopian/dystopian narrative space. The more recent trend towards cultural studies extends genre criticism's identifications of characteristic structural and narrative properties that undergird science fiction film and television production and marketing. …

Even better than the real thing: Counterfeit realities and twentieth century dystopian fiction

Abstract: In recent years, the theme of artificial and/or mediated reality has been recurrent in popular cinema (The Matrix, The Truman Show, The Cell, etc.). This trend reflects a growing awareness of how information technologies obfuscate traditional boundaries of what is real and what is not. The article draws a cultural background to these films, and, by extension, to our so-called age of information by examining a number of older fictional works in which technologies of representation and simulation are explored in more or less dystopian terms. In a trajectory including otherwise unrelated works, such as J. K. Huysmans’ Against Nature and William Gibson’s Neuromancer, we find a number of familiar themes and images presented with a striking degree of continuity: the neglect of the body, the deterioration of social and familial bonds, the loss of history and literary culture, the retreat from reality into a world of engineered hallucinations.

Having arrived, time to move on: Coupland's Brentwood as an experiment with space and time

Abstract: In “Brentwood Notebook” the Canadian author Douglas Coupland depicts Brentwood, an affluent community on the outskirts of Los Angeles, as a place that in many ways hardly deserves our attention, but that for some of its characteristics may nevertheless serve as a symbol of our hypermodern Western society at the close of the 20th century. Coupland's essay can be interpreted as a challenging experiment with time and space. His Brentwood has various faces and they are evoked in a text that relies on a number of creative and disciplinary traditions, including cultural philosophy, social and cultural geography, new journalism, and literature. His representation of Brentwood is not only based on his personal observations, but it is also informed by three powerful cultural myths, involving notions generally associated with utopia, dystopia, and the ideal of upper class suburban life. If we are to grasp the meaning of the “Brentwood Notebook” properly, we should focus on what the text reveals about this Californi...

Dystopian Modernism vs Utopian Feminism: Burdekin, Woolf, and West Respond to the Rise of Fascism

Abstract: Utopian visions have come increasingly under attack during this century of world wars, nuclear threats, capitalist and technological domination, poverty, genocide, and other horrors; dystopian visions have tended to replace them.2 Speaking from our postmodern moment, Seyla Benhabib clearly articulates the conflict between these modes of thought that I would like to explore in the works of three writers in England in the 1930s, a key decade for the shattering of utopianism. Benhabib asserts that, on the one hand, Enlightenment-inspired utopias of ‘the wholesale restructuring of our social and political universe according to some rationally worked-out plan’ to lead toward ‘human emancipation’ have ‘ceased to convince’.3 While numerous reasons exist for this shift in belief, I agree with those who see the impossibility of utopianism as due in part to the congruence of utopian and fascist-totalitarian thought most abominably displayed in the Nazi deathcamps. As a feminist, on the other hand, Benhabib is reluctant to give up wholly on utopian impulses, for feminist thought usually includes both a critical and a visionary project, and imagines a world transformed for the better; she declares: ‘utopian thinking is a practical-moral imperative. Without such a regulative principle of hope, not only morality, but also radical transformation is unthinkable.’4

Voices from the Void: The Genres of Liudmila Petrushevskaia

Abstract: Sally Dalton-Brown. Voices from the Void: -The Genres of Liudmila Petrushevskaia. Studies in Slavic Literatures, Culture and Society. Volume 7. General Editor: Thomas Epstein. New York: Berghahn Books, 2000. 214 pp. Bibliography. Index. $35.00, cloth. The subject of this book is an analysis of Liudmila Stefanovna Petrushevskaia's manipulation of genres. Dalton-Brown demonstrates that through her use of hybrid genres, Petrushevskaia is able to "generate textual absence, and readerly disappointment as the basis for her themes of absence, death and loss" (p. viii). Dalton-Brown's insightful analysis centers upon the themes of broken communication and the narrators' struggle to find their own voices. She writes, "Petrushevskaia's characters are all storytellers, modern-day bards, prosaic Homeric writers of their own lives; her texts focus on the voice of direct experience, in which the craftsmanship lies in creating a sense of its own absence, as if these are ordinary tales told by those without writerly skills" (p. vii). The introduction, "Petrushevskaia and Contemporary Literary Trends," provides the reader with a brief personal and literary biography of the author and a quick survey of Russian and Western criticism on her works. Specific emphasis is placed on Petrushevskaia's unique place within the contemporary Russian cultural scene as well as Petrushevskaia's contribution to the development of new literary trends. DaltonBrown argues that although the main focus of Petrushevskaia's works seems to center on the idea of "finding a voice," Petrushevskaia offers "no easy answers-no answers at all to the question of how one communicates" (p. 13). Dalton-Brown continues, "What she focuses on repeatedly is the problem of being heard..." (p. 13). The main focus of Dalton-Brown's work is Petrushevskaia's unique use of hybrid genres to render her "songs silent, her monologues multivoiced, her tales of the fantastic grimly real, her dramas farcically bathetic, her romantic histories small tales of loneliness, her poetry prosaic, and many of her skazki grimly realistic" (p. 15). The book is divided into six large chapters: "Contemporary 'histories"'; "Monologues and Requiems"; "Songs, Sluchai, Tales of the Fantastic/Dystopias, Prose Poetry"; "Skazki"; "Drama"; and "Style." Petrushevskaia's two main genres, as Dalton-Brown asserts, are those of prose and drama. Within the first, Dalton-Brown identifies seven others: contemporary histories, monologues, requiems, songs, sluchai, tales of the fantastic and prose poetry. At first glance the division into chapters that focus on each of the nine genres that Petrushevskaia employs seems logical. However, one can not help but question whether or not this undermines the stated aim of the study, to re-examine Petrushevskia's work "on how genre conventions can be transcended in an ever more inward-looking, even 'Dostoevskiian' search for the voices which come from out of the void within which her characters are so often placed" (p. …

The Rational Natural: Conflicts of the Modern in Eleanor Dark

Abstract: Indeed, it has been said that as the nineteenth century is associated with the rationalization of production, so the twentieth will be known as the period of the rationalization of reproduction (Havelock Ellis, 1937).(1) The social management of nature-science-with its professional discourses of medicine, psychology and sexology, had perhaps already won interpretive control of the Western social subject, as body and mind, by 1937, when Havelock Ellis made this belatedly prophetic pronouncement.(2) The paradoxical figure of the embodied woman as a modern, rational subject was still a problem for those discourses, however. In many cultural and scientific ventures 'woman' featured as an opaque object of study, within which the natural manifested as the location of sexual difference, but her figure was also asserting a stronger role as a rational knowing subject. The problematic this provoked can be traced interestingly in the complex negotiations between sex and reproduction that feature consistently in public discourse before the second world war in Australia; often via an engagement with new developments in the technology of contraception and the prominent and ongoing debate about abortion practice. The dilemma or problem of t he rational woman, as a central figure of these discursive contests, is the concern of much of Eleanor Dark's fiction. Sex, maternity and birth control appear as the social plots by which the rational woman's dilemma is traced in her fiction, as a destiny sometimes fatal, sometimes modern. Medicine and psychology, within the rhetorical purchase of science as a study of universalised humanity, have generally been posited as central discourses with which recognisably modernist novels interrogate the conditions of modern psychic identity. The professionalisation of medicine can be situated within a contest for the meaning of 'woman' as an identity category, a contest fought in many ideological spheres during the early decades of the century. In Australia, the historian Joy Damousi has made a convincing argument for the intertwining of the ordering principles of science, socialism and modernism, as explanatory discourses of modernity.(3) These have, in turn, occasioned particular constructions of sex and reproduction. Elizabeth Dolan Kautz, in surveying the presence of doctors and gynaecologists in modernist texts, concludes: 'The struggle for the control of the creative powers inherent in language and women's medicine dominated both the literary and medical history of the time. ('4) She declares t hat English and European 'modernist works abound with a curiously large number of characters who are doctors,' including 'the doctor present through his prescription of dangerous abortion pills for a female speaker in T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land. ('5) In Djuna Barnes' Nightwood, Dr Matthew O'Connor is a 'male abortionist with an acute case of womb envy' says Kautz. (6) Susan Squier notes that the English writer Charlotte Haldane's dystopian novel Man's World (1926) is 'critical of scientifically based reproductive control.' She argues that this: Reproduction, birth control, abortion and maternity can all operate as important discursive tropes by which redefinitions of feminine identity enter culture. Eleanor Dark's work, in some ways the most recognisably modernist of Australia's predominantly realist canon of women's writing from this period, exposes the problems occasioned by offering a rationalist ethic for a new, modern feminine subjectivity. Valerie's portrayal never sets medicine up as a publicly constructed or contestable set of practices and ideas. Indeed, it more obviously represents a modern solution for the problems of a suffering society, especially via education in the scientific techniques of birth control for the ignorant masses. Women doctors could have a significant role to play in this solution. Nevertheless, Slow Dawning does also set out to explore some of the cultural contradictions that inhere in representing women as authorities within the ordering discourses of modernity. …