Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2002"

Hanging Out in the Virtual Pub: Masculinities and Relationships Online

Abstract: From the Publisher: "Hanging Out at the Virtual Pub provides a richly detailed and theoretically mediated understanding of gender's significance in online-game playing. This examination of the behavior of educated techno-elites helps us understand communities and larger social trends. Kendall's vision is neither utopian nor dystopian. People will buy this timely book."-Anita Allen, professor of Law and Philosophy, University of Pennsylvania "This wonderful book is readable, enjoyable, and lively, providing a fascinating look into a world not known by many. It will appeal to those who have interests in computers and the friendship communities that evolve in cyberspace, as well as to those working on gender and race issues."-Peter Nardi, author of Gay Men's Friendships:Invincible Communities Author Biography:Lori Kendall is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Purchase College—State University of New York.

Spaces of Utopia and Dystopia: Landscaping the Contemporary City

Abstract: Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that a...

Western Utopianism/Dystopianism and the Political Mediocrity of Critical Urban Research

Abstract: This paper seeks to summarise the interplay between utopian and dystopian thinking throughout the twentieth century with a particular focus on the city. The gradually shrinking appeal of the socialist utopia and its replacement with the globalised free–market as a ‘revanchist utopia’ left socialist utopian thinking in a state of disarray towards the end of the previous century. Utopian thinking, both as a literary and political genre has been rendered marginal in contemporary political practices. Urban dystopia, or ‘Stadtschmerz’, is now prevalent in critical Western thinking about city and society. It is concluded that the declining political impact of critical urban research is caused partly by its lack of engagement with crafting imaginative alternative futures for the city. The works by Sennett, Sandercock and the Situationists, among others, may contain elements to reverse the current utopian malaise in urban research.

Autonomy as utopia or dystopia

Abstract: This chapter explores a contemporary conventional wisdom of western culture: the understanding that autonomy is an unalloyed virtue, a version of utopia to be pursued without qualification precisely because it is viewed as unequivocally desirable and virtuous. The modern association with individual or collegial freedom, self-determination and self-expression give autonomy its laudatory and seductive appeal. Autonomy is not a utopia in the sense of a vision of a good place such as the Utopia imagined by Thomas More or the Utopian vision that inspired the architects of Huxley's Brave New World. In the modern world, Utopias continue to be imagined: Utopias are being actively devised, developed and studied. That said, we are inclined to view this interest, including the present volume, as a minority pursuit that is unlikely, in the contemporary context of widespread cynicism and disillusionment with grand(iose) experiments and their associated 'grand narratives', to have a mass appeal. We avoid seeking to contribute to a debate about specific Utopias or dystopias since they are often difficult to distinguish, as one person's vision of virtue is another's view of vice. Instead we believe that it is relevant to give attention to practical, mundane Utopian efforts efforts that are often so taken for granted as to be almost unrecognizable as Utopian in inspiration (see also Law and Mol, this volume). Amongst these we count 'autonomy', a desired condition that, as we have just noted, is widely assumed to be an unalloyed virtue, a version of utopia to be pursued without qualification or challenge. Yet, when subjected to critical scrutiny, the call to become autonomous can, we contend, be seen to have a dark side when the self-discipline of subjects is directed toward undeniably evil rather than virtuous objectives. The twin tower terrorism of September 11th could clearly be seen to have been perpetrated in the name of the autonomy of those who choose to sacrifice their lives for a strong and, it might be said, Utopian religious cause. Such appeals are not unequivocally distinct from other versions of utopia that are often criticized for their programmed rather than self-determining characteristics. There are numerous examples of these programmed Utopias in John Carey's (1999) anthology but what they share in common is the elimination of real people (ibid, xii) and

Hypochondriac geographies of the city and the new urban dystopia

Abstract: This paper questions the 'peculiar epistemological framework of problems' (p. 107) through which the city has come to be considered in the academic and policy arena, in politics of both the Left and Right, and in urban sociology, planning, architecture and other areas of urban study. Baeten argues that contemporary terminology, for example, displays a negativity towards the city, a fear of the unknown city, by turns explicit (in a discourse which favours a lexicon of 'exclusion', 'deprivation' and 'polarization') and implicit (an 'urban renaissance' presumably emerges from an urban Dark Age). In these current projections of dystopia the author identifies parallels with 19th-century obsessions and frameworks of urban morality - the categorization of an underclass, and positioning of the city's poor as 'deserving' or 'underserving'. Baeten uses recent work on Orientalist constructions of the Other in a bid to contest such negative presentation of the city in current urban studies. There are interesting link...

Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: Sierra Leone as ‘the white man's grave’

Abstract: This paper explores the power of dystopian imaginations. It does so by examining the form and function of dystopias in colonial contexts, both in general and through one particularly salient and si...

Imagining Surveillance: Utopian Visions and Surveillance Studies.

Abstract: This paper considers the role of utopian (and dystopian) visions in the study of surveillance, arguing that the fiction in written or filmic form offers much that is stimulating to surveillance studies. The article focuses on four recent examples of such texts: The Truman Show, Gattaca, Code 46 and The Traveller. It argues that all present differing visions that move far beyond the nightmare of George Orwell (or indeed Michel Foucault) to present a more nuanced view.

Must the Advance of Science Advance Global Inequality

Abstract: One long cited rationale for doing and funding Western modern sciences has been that such research advances social welfare in egalitarian ways. Yet the long service of these sciences to militarism, nationalisms, profit–maximizing, and the desire for social control would seem to provide compelling evidence, at least in the contemporary era, against the happy relation imagined in this rationale. This essay reviews the older utopian and dystopian responses to the title question, and examines their assumptions about the nature of science which no longer are empirically or theoretically justifiable. It then identifies themes in recent empirical and theoretical work which point the way to a more realistic understanding of the kind of philosophy of science necessary to contribute to sciences in the service of social justice. Philosophies of science, like the sciences on which they reflect, always participate in larger social discourses.

Conspiracy rhetoric at the dawn of the new millennium: A response

Abstract: EMILE DURKHEIM ONCE OBSERVED: "There is perhaps no collective representation which is not, in some sense, delirious" (qtd. in Moscovici, 1987, p. 157). I begin this response by acknowledging that we all might be more prone than we realize to the powerful, often beguiling nature of conspiracy appeals. As Stewart, Smith, & Denton (1994, pp. 52-53) observe, a "conspiracy may be real or imagined, but the process is the same; a chain of apparently unrelated events or actions is linked to reveal concerted actions and intentions to cause all sorts of social, economic, political, religious, and moral problems." (1) In the process, it is sometimes difficult to distinguish reality from fantasy. It also may be difficult to avoid delirium. The Continuing Appeal of the Birch Society Robert Welch once publicly asserted that Republican Senator Robert Taft had died of cancer that had been passed on to him by Soviet operatives through "a radium tube planted in the upholstery of his Senate seat" (Pipes, 1997, p. 37). The description of this absurd scenario can take on the patina of legitimacy when, for example, such claims are made in a cold war setting where reputable sources report that KGB agents, in an effort to get a British spy out of a room, smeared a poisonous substance on a chair and made the intended victim violently ill. Telling the real from the imaginary can be a difficult and demanding task. There are legions of subjective judgments attached. The reference to Welch is, of course, a not so subtle transition to Professor Stewart's essay. Stewart rightly observes that the changing context of the times has everything to do with the believability and potential acceptance of conspiratorial forces. In fact, the social, historical, geographic, temporal, and contextual dimensions of change help account for the popularity or demise of particular conspiracy accounts. In the John Birch Society, we encounter a remarkable longevity and persistence. Professor Stewart persuasively documents why this is the case. I believe the Birchers have latched on to a classic conspiracy model; it is made even more complete because it is imbued with transhistorical significance through what Stewart terms "interlocking conspiracies." Indeed, Stewart gives a convincing account of how the Society made the transition from one conspiracy context to the next. In Stewart's apt phrase, it was an "effortless shift." This shift is particularly striking since we are now in the post-Soviet, post-Cold War era. Welch's guiding principles help establish the generic parameters of conspiracy discourse. Key themes, like the "cancer of collectivism," the master conspiracy tracing its roots to the secret 18th century Bavarian society that came to be known as the Illuminati, all the way to the "invisible government" represented by the nefarious agents of Trilateral Commission and the Council on Foreign Relations, to the god and devil terms associated with the New World Order, and the attribution of a moral decline associated with the "family," strike, one and all, old familiar refrains. Indeed, the characters and actions emerge like family members in a long lost but constantly resurrected picture album handed down through the generations. In this company and with these images, an article such as "My Mother the State" becomes a generic warrant for all that is wrong with America and a clarion call to action against "wrongdoers" (see e.g., Goldzwig, 1987). Thus, in conspiracy, active participants and dupes alike march inexorably toward the precipice of impending disaster. Ostensibly, only true believers can stanch the rising tides of ruin. What is most convincingly documented in Professor Stewart's account is a vivid description and analysis of a rhetoric of dystopian logic that has accomplished transgenerational influence through a contextually constructed substitution of terms--each of which blurs distinctions as they chain out over time. …

Utopia, Dystopia, and Cultural Controversy in Ever After and The Grimm Brothers' Snow White

Abstract: Two film retellings of fairy tales from the 1990s exemplify how familiar fairy tales can be reshaped to address major cultural preoccupations. On the one hand, the utopian narrative Ever After affirms neohumanistic values such as deep memory, knowable origins, and teleology in narrative and culture. In contrast, The Grimm Brothers' Snow White is postmodernist and dystopian, hybridizing apocalyptic and Gothic narrative structures and themes, and drawing on modern phenomena such as "the beauty myth," to present characters playing out an old story to an outcome which resists both teleology and closure.

Visions of a new Jerusalem : predictive fiction in the Second World War

Abstract: The Second World War has become central to British political culture. Narratives about the Blitz and the “New Jerusalem” sought by the 1945 Labour administration are frequently evoked to justify and contextualise contemporary political action. Increasingly, however, the nature of these narratives has been called into question by historians of the period. This thesis contextualises the imaginative fictions of the Second World War within relevant political and historiographical traditions. Focusing on fictions that imagined future or alternative societies, it is argued that there were a number of hidden discourses that called into question values that are assumed to have been dominant. The thesis goes on to examine the implications of these alternative discourses for both the historiography and literature of the period. A number of linked genres are identified that deal with possible futures or alternatives to British society. Fears about impending catastrophe and invasion are examined alongside imaginative presentations of fascist and communist societies. Finally the dystopian and utopian fiction of the period is examined and compared with non-literary fears and hopes about the post-war world. Through close engagement with the culture of the Second World War this study asks fundamental questions about the relationship between past, present and future. Examining how politics and culture interact, it aims to contribute to rethinking the way in which literature is studied and to argue for a reassessment of the historiography of the Second World War.

Aldous Huxley's Americanization of the Brave New World Typescript

Abstract: When Aldous Huxley revised the Brave New World typescript (1) between 27 May and 24 August 1931, he strove to Americanize his dystopia. His cleverest expedient was to ink in additional insults to Henry Ford, so that a novel that began as a satiric rendition of the future according to H.G. Wells grew increasingly anti-Fordian. With Ford as synonym and stand-in, each new uncomplimentary use of his name further condemned the World State for being America writ large. Mustapha Mond's jurisdiction forms part of an insanely rational society for which several of Huxley's finest holograph insertions blame America's archetypal technocrat. In the choicest of emendations herein called Americanizations, Huxley writes a new paragraph of two short sentences: "Ford's in his flivver," murmured the D.H.C. "All's right with the world." This paragraph becomes the last two of 15 lines on TS 49; the other 13 lines are typewritten and only tightly edited. Lives in the brave new world are "emotionally easy" Mustafa Mond boasts, because the interval "between desire and its consummation" (BNW 50) has been eliminated. Huxley added a fervent outburst from the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning to complete this vignette. (2) Huxley's two-sentence autograph addition discredits its utterer, castigates Our Ford, and ridicules the brave new world. Despite the D.H.C.'s piety, all is not "right" in the World State. The opening pages of chapter 3 switch back and forth from Mond's impromptu history lesson to Lenina's conversation with Fanny Crowne about irregularities in Bernard Marx's sex life. The World Controller's speech to the D.H.C.'s new students about the splendors of the brave new world is undercut by Lenina's growing dissatisfaction with promiscuity and Bernard's penchant for solitude. A travesty of religious sentiment, the lines about Our Ford resemble slogans such as "Everybody's happy now," one of many bromides brave new worlders use to reassure themselves that the World State is the perfect place. Given a bookless society of nonreaders, one doubts the Director knowingly makes a literary allusion. Nevertheless, Huxley reveals an embarrassing contradiction between Robert Browning's robust optimism and the new situation parodying it. Instead of God overseeing the universe from heaven, brave new worlders envision Our Ford superintending their affairs from his "flivver," a slang expression for a small, inexpensive automobile, hence a decline misrepresented as apotheosis. (3) In Browning's closet drama Pippa Passes (1841), a young girl from the silk mills of Asolo hopes to improve everyone she encounters on her annual holiday. As she passes by singing "God's in his heaven--/ All's right with the world!" (Browning 15), her words confound Sebald and Ottima, an adulterous couple who have just murdered the latter's dotard husband. Stung by remorse, they atone through double suicide. Pippa's song voices Browning's "basic view" of the universe: "under an omnipotent, benevolent God, all must, at least in a cosmic sense, be right with the world," Kenneth L. Knickerbocker contends (Browning xvi). Due to the influence that Pippa's songs have on several parties during her daylong release from Ottima's husband's silk mill, "All is a hit righter." This sense of augmented rightness is absent from the brave new world because standards have been lowered. Proof sheets substitute "All's well with the world" (PS 50) for "Ali's right," which is quoted correctly in typescript. The brave new world trivializes Browning's conception of a totally responsible God. Indifferent to questions of rightness, this supposedly utopian society only seeks wellness, "the maintenance of well-being" as Mond later defines it (BNW 209)--effortless comfort without the bother of a metaphysics. TS 49 is partly blank. It could be a retyped leaf that ends at midpage "to fit a pre-existent following page" (Wilson 31). …

The End of the Road: David Cronenberg's Crash and the Fading of the West

Abstract: "A point is that which hath no parts, or which hath no magnitude" Euclid ". . . Shall he drive His horses upward, brign again day? It will but rise to die" Seneca, Thvestes In Crash, David Cronenberg negotiates our ambivalent attitudes toward death and destruction on the roads, as well as the attractions of car crashes, using the car and the architecture of contemporary road systems as symbols of the convergence between humanity's unconscious desires and its technological artifacts. Cronenberg's film, like Ballard's novel, is an exploration of the ambiguous fascination and excitement of the car crash and the latent identity of the machine. This exploration re-examines the contentions of some basic genres. It is a "road film" in the sense that it's an eccentric examination of the cult of adventure, journey, and discovery that has animated that form. Ballard is British and Cronenberg Canadian, but Crash seems peculiarly American since its narrative deals with the exhaustion of the civilizing process, and of the final expenditures of the horizontal, forward-moving momentum that drove this enterprise. It is energy incipient to the western, the biker film, and all manner of male-oriented identity that affirms the potency of a burgeoning society. In Crash, the traditional journey of discovery becomes a downward spiral, a frustrated, ever-circling implosion of the defeated bourgeois self at the end of the millennium. Although the film was condemned in England as "a movie beyond the bounds of depravity"1 (Walker 36), Cronenberg's film does not fit well within the traditions of pornography. Clearly, sexual arousal in its audience is not the primary motive of the film, and, more significantly, none of the characters seem able to relate to one another in an emotional way. For this reason, in part, Cronenberg himself has described the film as "anti-pornographic" (Mendik 17). Arousal can hardly be on the agenda since Ballard, faithfully adapted here, has long been concerned with the "death of affect," a concept now basic to postmodernity that has been applied by Ballard in various locations to describe, rather moralistically, the depletion of bourgeois life. Cronenberg's evocation of sex seems iconic: Deborah Kara Unger leans on a balcony, pulling aside her gown to expose her bare buttocks as if to quote fashion photography, or Dali's "Young Virgin AutoSodomized by Her Own Chastity." Pornography is employed here as the end product of the culture of representation that has dissolved all lived experience through the filters of mediation. Other critics, picking up on the film's sense of surgical precision and its fascination with technology, attempted to locate Cronenberg's Crash in the tradition of science fiction. Many of Ballard's novels, including Crash, certainly adopt a number of sci-fi formations, including the metaphysics and biophysics of time and space-time paradigms and the ontologies of psychic realities. Unlike Ballard's novel, however, Cronenberg's Crash deals with the technology of the present rather than that of the future, and, in fact, is interested in the future only as a perspective from which to understand the current moment. It has been observed that the movie "looks and feels as if it were made long, long ago in a parallel universe," (Rodley 6), a reference to its mise en scene of pillars and pylons, crash barriers, disused hangars and gas stations, dumped cars and derelict parking lots. This is no sci-fi dystopia, but a coruscating vision of the horror that is to be found in the bleak everyday of contemporary life. Indeed, if Cronenberg's Crash fits into a tradition at all, it is that of the road movie-albeit in the form of a hardcore, apocalyptic, end-time variant. As Cronenberg makes explicit, the car crash is to the traditional road movie what the sex scene is to the classical romantic comedy--the unspoken culmination, the hidden act toward which all others tend, the secret, implicit, concealed finale. …

The Janus Face of the German Avant-Garde: From Expressionism Toward Postmodernism

Abstract: 1. The Historical Avant-Garde and Literary Crisis 1. Expressionism: The Janus-faced Agon. 2. The Dadaist Anti-Art Event in Zurich and Berlin, or the Return of the Literary Text II. The Crisis of the Avant-Garde in Political Exile 3. From Weimar Culture to Political Exile: Two Phases/Faces of the Crisis of the Avant-Garde 4. The Self-Effacement of the Avant-Garde Author, or the Metamorphosis of Surrealist Myth into Action: Carl Einstein and the Anarchist Movement during the Spanish Civil War (1936-7) 5. The "Image Sphere" vs. Mataphor. Walter Benjamin Debating Expressionism. 6. The Avant-Garde against Itself: George Grosz and Bertolt Brecht - from Postexpressionist Berlin to the American Exile, and the Postwar Cold War Aftermath III. The Avant-Garde at a Standstill 7. Gottfried Benn and Nietzsche 1937/8: The Aporia of Writing History in "Wolf's Tavern" 8. Utopia/Dystopia - from Expressionism to Hans Magnus Enzensberger: The Avant-Garde at a Standstill

Oedipus in Dystopia: Freud and Lawrence in Aldous Huxley'sBrave New World

Abstract: Jreuďs role in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, has been much discussed, but little consensus has emerged, partly because of Huxley's apparent ambivalence about Freud's ideas and his growing reluctance, after he had written the novel, to admit that he had ever been in agreement with Freud's conception of human nature. In a 1960 interview, Huxley said, "I was never intoxicated by Freud as some people were, and I get less intoxicated as I go on."1 Although some have taken this statement as an unequivocal denial of any affinity Huxley may have had for Freud,2 it reads less as a repudiation of Freud than as a confession that Huxley was indeed "intoxicated" by Freud to a certain extent when he was younger, although he certainly never reached the stage of feverish zealotry achieved by some of his contemporaries.3 Indeed, Huxley's half-hearted protestations against Freud have prompted insinuations about the motives behind them. For instance, Charles Holmes claims: "throughout his life Huxley rejected Freud, though the tone and intensity of his rejection varied. Given Freud's emphasis on sex and Huxley's near-obsession with it, the rejection implies unconscious resistance incompletely understood."4 Philip Thody has undertaken to explain this "resistance" in biographical terms:

Terror in the Texts: Technology - Law - Future

Abstract: This paper is concerned withlaw's failure and need to manifest theessentiality of technology for the West. Thiswill be shown through a critical reading of therelated fictional and juridical projects ofAmerican golden age science fiction and spacelaw. This analysis involves sensitivity to theterrors that bind together technology, law andthe future. It is argued that cornucopia, thevictory of modernism through technology, ispresented in science fiction and space law asterrorised by its other – dystopia. Thisterrorising means that cornucopia activelyresists dystopia. However, this resistiveenterprise is flawed – cornucopia never escapesdystopia. Alternative images of humanity andtechnology are needed to escape these flawedimaginings of the West. The paper concludesthat the cyborg offers the potential for aregenerative thinking about technology and law.

The Kingdom of Science: Literary Utopianism and British Education, 1612-1870

Abstract: Preface Introduction 1. Shakespeare's Utopian Tempest and Education by the Book 2. New Atlantis and the Chiliastic Utopias 3. Bacon's Commonwealth Offspring 4. The Scribleran Revolt against Education to Extend Human Empire 5. Utopia as Process and the Liberal Revolution 6. Utilitarian Compulsory Utopia 7. The Second Generation Utilitarians 8. Dickens's Utilitarian Dystopia and the Death of the Social Commons Conclusion Notes Index

Dystopian Female Images in More's Utopia

Abstract: Thomas More’s famous work Utopia has justly been the object of a voluminous amount of scholarly work insofar it started an original fashion of literary and cultural form. In spite of the distinct interpretations, which have come to light throughout the years, the wish to present a bettered world in exercise stands out as a major goal of his work. The dream to convert his England into a more productive society using the current knowledge and manufacturing processes, and in so doing, to construct a more egalitarian commonwealth highlight as tangible objectives for More’s progressive project. However, in terms of gender, Utopia’s harmonic world vision is denied, the humanist view that prevails in his dream world being a patriarchal one. There, men are granted better chances of living according to their own merits and efforts, both as individuals and citizens, their roles in the public sphere no longer depending on chancy birth rights and privilege. Notwithstanding this new political structure, women seem to linger on men’s shadow, deprived of an autonomous contribution in public affairs. They remain males’ subordinated, their traditional functions and duties keeping them off from growing into adult and complete human beings some women were about to claim. Thus, in our contemporary view, the discrepancy between male and female spheres in More’s proposal, inasmuch as it produces a draw back effect in a commonwealth to-be, may introduce a dystopian element in his eutopia, which contradicts the pursuit of happiness purpose for everyone.

The Provocations of Lenina in Huxley's Brave New World

Abstract: As befits a Juvenalian satirist, indignantly, bitterly, misanthropically chastising his culture, Aldous Huxley often expresses outright disgust with the entire human species. In Antic Hay (1923), his second novel, an anonymous old man tells Theodore Gumbril, the protagonist, as they look at London's suburban houses, "What disgusts me is the people inside the architecture. The numbers of them, sir. And the way they breed. Like maggots, sir, like maggots. Millions of them, creeping about the face of the country, spreading blight and dirt wherever they go; ruining everything." (1) He then forecasts that the world will soon become "a pretty sort of bear garden ... a monkey house ... a warthoggery" (264). Five years later, in Point Counter Point (1928), this vision has deepened into the "modern Bestiary" of parasitical animals, who are "damned, destroyed, irrevocably corrupted." (2) Here Spandrell complains to Mark Rampion that the beings around them are "ambitious of being angels; but all they succeed in being is either cuckoos and geese on the one hand or else disgusting vultures and carrion crows on the other," (3) excellent metaphors for a satirist become fabulist. It is equally obvious, however, that Huxley reserved especial bile for the female of the species, whose presence provokes even more heated rhetoric. In Antic Hay, for example, Mercaptan tells Myra Viveash, "ces femmes! They're all Pasiphaes and Ledas. They all in their hearts prefer beasts to men, savages to civilised beings," and the anonymous gentleman, watching Myra as she walks down London's King Street, acidly thinks: "Vicious young women. Lesbians, drug-fiends, nymphomaniacs, dipsos--thoroughly vicious nowadays, thoroughly vicious." (4) Indeed, he is correct so far as the women in the world of Antic Hay go, because they are depicted as dangerous predators, ranging from the serpent-like Rosie Shearwater to the "sullen and ferocious" Zoe, to the Sphinx-like, "bored" Myra who announces that "`to-morrow ... will be as awful as to-day'." (5) These women pale, though, when compared to Lucy Tantamount of Point Counter Point. Lucy, "the consummate flower of this charming civilization," bluntly warns that she needs victims, and Philip Quarles describes her as a "man-eater" (6) She wants "to be herself ... ruthlessly having her fun." (7) These characterizations, misogynist as they are, do not get in the way of Huxley's Juvenalian vision, but they do hint at a potential imbalance in this vision. The misogyny, everywhere evident in Huxley's novels written before 1931, does become a serious narrative issue and a thematic problem in Brave New World (1932). A careful consideration of Lenina's attitudes, decisions, and actions shows that the overlay of misogyny careened Huxley into contradicting his ideas, into failing to see that Lenina is more heroic in her resistance to the Fordian world than are the men his narrative praises, and into taking an unearned and mean-spirited revenge on Lenina. In brief, Lenina's resistance goes unnoticed in the novel because of the novel's misogyny, but it can go unnoticed no longer, given feminism's attention to such marginalized characters. This misogyny has, of course, not gone completely unnoticed in Huxley criticism. In one of the more inclusive discussions, Milton Birnbaum notes that women in Huxley's world "are seen chiefly in relationship to the males" and only "occupy a satellite position." And in an enlightening general discussion of misogyny in dystopias, Deanna Madden concludes that the men in Brave New World "have a spiritual dimension that the women lack ... mired in the physical, the women interfere with or prevent the men from achieving spiritually" and that "Huxley's misogyny has its obvious roots in a more general inability to accept the body." (8) At least once in his career, then, misogyny disastrously impeded characterization, theme, and intention and virtually deconstructed his book before the eyes of his readers. …

Dystopia and artifice in late twentieth-century visual culture

Abstract: The premise in this thesis is that in the context of the late twentieth-century visual culture of the West, a condition of dystopia is distinct. I argue that since the Sixties, developments in computer technology (‘new technologies’) have unleashed worlds of artifice and that the visual media are the prime mediators in perpetuating dystopia. I argue that the human sensory real has always been and still is intertwined with the artifice of dream worlds, but demonstrate that most utopian constructs, such as the current ones regarding globalism and technological utopia, are still not pleasant places although they intend and purport to be exactly that. My interpretation of the late twentieth century is that there are many coexisting worlds and different concomitant and layered spaces of both real and virtual kinds. It seems to have become impossible to fully verify the ‘real’ observed experiences and observations, and cyberspace can become as real as the ‘real’. The main argument is that, in particular, technoreals as artificial ‘Other’ have come to co-exist with the sensory real. It is demonstrated that technology is still a tool used for achieving ideological (and political) objectives; that at present there is an essential awareness of the dominance of technology and of the threat of technology-out-of-control.

"Fancy's Images": Reinventing Shakespeare in Christine Edzard's the Children's Midsummer Night's Dream

Abstract: Over the course of the 1990s, Shakespeare films enjoyed an unprecedented resurgence. Movies such as Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1997) and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream ( 1999) stretched the bounds of Shakespearean cinematic representation, providing structures that revivified the Bard for modern consumption. More recently, Julie Taymor's Titus (2000) and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) have continued the reanimating process: their films present the plays as dystopian reflections upon the anxieties and preoccupations of the late twentieth-century mindset. Now there is a further Shakespearean filmic outing to add to the catalogue-Christine Edzard's The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, which was released in 2001. But rather than mobilizing Shakespeare's play to accommodate the interests of an older generation of spectators, Edzard finds in it specifically childlike concerns. For this is a film performed entirely by children of between eight and twelve years. Not only does such a casting decision represent an event unique in Shakespearean cinematic history; it also enables the director to bring back to our understanding of the dramatist a sense of wonder and invention, qualities that, in adulthood, can sometimes be quickly compromised. Throughout a distinguished career, Edzard has established herself as a significant voice in the reinterpretation of classic writers. Born in Paris in 1945. Edzard worked with Franco Zeffirelli on his Romeo and Juliet (1968) before founding with Richard Goodwin, in 1975, Sands Films. The studios occupy two vast warehouse spaces in Rotherhithe, South London, and among the productions of the company have been a six-hour film adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1987) and a television feature, The Fool (1989), based on the philanthropic reflections of Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). An exploratory engagement with social malfeasance and urban ills thus animates these early cinematic endeavours, as a culmination to which Edzard directed, in 1992, As You Like It, relocating Shakespeare's pastoral comedy to London's corporate business world and articulating, through images of the blighted docklands, a trenchant condemnation of Thatcher's Britain, For The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, Edzard, and producer Olivier Stockman. have executed a similarly bold, but less obviously social move, since the drama is read in terms of children taking over a Shakespearean performance. As a result, the film becomes an exercise in a kind of debunking of Shakespearean influence, with the young performers appropriating Bardic themes to match the considerations of their own experience. It is a wonderful achievement, not least because the film was made on a tiny budget of 1.2 million and because it involved 360 children from local primary schools, many of whom had no formal acting experience. Although many reviews were positive on the film's release, others took exception to the children's lack of training, arraigning Edzard for having created "some horribly over-extended school play, in which you know none of the children" (Tookey 7) and for having allowed her performers to enact "search-and-destroy work on Shakespeare's poetry" (Andrews 12).1 These critical comments seem to me to be both unhelpful and neglectful of the film's integrity. They run shy of acknowledging the overarching directorial agenda, which is to extend the compass of the play's performative possibilities, and they fail to register a related strategy, which is to reorient the ways in which the Shakespearean corpus is transmitted and appreciated. A single scenic instance suffices to illustrate Edzard's filmic method. At the start, a group of schoolchildren gather in a wooden, Elizabethan-style private theater to watch a puppet version of A Midsurnmer Night's Dream. Quickly, the children's conversation is quieted as they become involved in the discussions and debates of the puppet Theseus and Hippolita. …

Eisenhower, King Utopus, and the Fifties Decade in America

Abstract: William Connolly (1993) once wrote that the basic concepts of political philosophy can be described as "essentially contested." He noted that a contested concept emerges when the concept is appraisive and internally complex and when its rules of application are relatively open. Thus, Connolly concluded that concepts such as "equality," "freedom," and "justice" invite a variety of contending formulations and applications. Similarly, I plan to argue that a recent decade in America functions in the same manner. In fact, in taking the fifties as an example, I also hope to show that as a contested concept, the disagreements about the normative character of the decade are so starkly drawn that the fifties seem to mimic all the qualities of utopian discourse. As such, assessments of the presidency of Dwight Eisenhower appear, admittedly in a secluded fashion, to parallel assessments of King Utopus, the founder of Utopia in Thomas More's 1516 work, as well as other founding figures in utopian fiction. Of course, Eisenhower was not a utopian founder; nor was his career identical to that of the fictional King Utopus. Nor were the fifties a utopia or even its fictional structural counterpart, a dystopia. Nevertheless, we can, I think, profitably understand the differences and fluctuations in assessments of the Eisenhower presidency by utilizing this utopian format, examining contested assessments of the fifties in the sixties, seventies, eighties, and nineties as if they were offered by utopian or dystopian guides who accept or reject Eisenhower as a utopian founder. Of course, not all decades are cast in utopian/dystopian formats, but the case of Eisenhower illustrates the cultural complexity of assessments of presidential leadership. (1) The Reign of President Eisenhower Political discourse about the fifties includes two distinct and opposite appraisive images. First, there was a sense of exuberance and search for perfection, then later a longing or regret about the decade corresponding to what Lyman Sargent (1994), in his analysis of utopian thought, called "social dreaming." Nevertheless, to many commentators, a specter haunted the fifties and was also magnified in the sixties and beyond. Perhaps, critics have suggested, the fifties were not a utopia at all but its opposite, a dystopia: a time when scoundrels ruled and the peace was maintained by demands for silence and conformity. This utopian/dystopian pairing of the fifties can be understood more fully by examining features of the concept of utopia itself. Students of the genre disagree about definition. (2) For our purposes, let us grant variations and employ one recent definition that tells us that "utopia is about how we would live and what kind of a world we would live in if we could do just that" (Levitas 1990, 1). Were the fifties a world that we would live in if we could? Many commentators in the fifties and in other decades made such claims. To William L. O'Neill, for example, the fifties were a "golden age" that "we would give almost anything for if only they could be recovered" (1995, 101, 104). Or, if utopia is a world we would live in if we could, then dystopia is a world we would least like to live in. Many commentators of the fifties and later made such claims as well. Norman Mailer concluded, for example, that the fifties were "one of the worst decades in the history of man"; and Eric Goldman described them as "the dullest and dreariest in all our history." (3) Why do disagreements about the fifties assume these features of utopian/dystopian narration? One answer, which I shall review, involves the representation of the fifties as a life of stability. Stability suggests permanence, tranquility, peace, and order-qualities that the thirties, forties, and sixties notoriously lacked. But just as stability denotes so many good and desired things, it also provokes consideration of the opposite states of stagnation, repression, and conformity. …

Challenges for Higher Education in the Information Society

Abstract: 3 INTRODUCTION 4 UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN VIEWS 6 TECHNOLOGICAL 7 SPATIAL 9 CULTURAL 10 OCCUPATIONAL 12 POLITICAL 13 ECONOMICAL 14 CONCLUSION 16 REFERENCES 18 BIBLIOGRAPHY 19 Challenges for Higher Education in the Information Society 3

Generic multiplicity in Alasdair Gray's Lanark: a life in 4 books

Abstract: This paper begins by acknowledging the ontological multiplicity which characterises the fictional world(s) of Lanark: A Life in 4 Books, and suggests the need to complement this reading by looking into its generic multiplicity. In doing so, my analysis initially focuses on the opposition between the realistic and fantastic narratives, and the revitalising effect that such a relationship brings about; then it looks into how the novel blurs the frontiers between dystopian and utopian writing as well as between fantasy and science fiction, and contends that such a melange is an effective way of providing a panoramic view of contemporary Western society; finally, my analysis pays special attention to the Epilogue, which adds a metafictional dimension to the novel, and comments on the different interpretations that may be given to this display of narrative experimentation.

George Orwell: Animal Farm-Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: George Orwell is a writer who has been appropriated by very different political regimes and opinions, pressed into service as his various critics have seen fit. Though a polemicist and satirist at heart, his anti-totalitarian ideals are expounded with deft story-telling and a simplicity that belies the ultimately complex debates to which he gave voice. The changing responses to his two classic novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), provide an illuminating account of the developing preoccupations of the second half of the 20th century. In this Readers' Guide, Daniel Lea takes a decisive path through the maze of interpretations that has accumulated around Orwell's best-known novels, examining critical reactions from the beginning of the Cold War through to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, and at the same time placing Orwell within a long tradition of dystopian writings. In exploringthe artistic, cultural and social contexts of Orwell's work, it is an essential resource for students and general readers alike.