Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2005"

From Wigan Pier to Airstrip One: a critical evaluation of George Orwell's writing and politics post-September 11

Abstract: This thesis summons a contemporary reading of George Orwell, evaluating his current role and function as novelist, essayist, and twentieth century cultural icon The year 2003 marked the centenary of Eric Blair's birth and proved a productive year for Blair (and Orwell) enthusiasts After nearly three years of research, my journey through Orwell's words and world(s) has undergone significant re-evaluation, taking me far beyond such an appropriate commemoration In the tragic aftermath of 9/11 - through Afghanistan and Iraq, Bali, Madrid, and London - Orwell's grimly dystopian vision acquires renewed significance for a new generation Few writers (living or dead) are as enduringly newsworthy and malleable as George Orwell The scope and diversity of his work - the sheer volume of his letters, essays, and assorted journalism - elicits a response from academics, journalists, critics and readers My research, tempered by a 'War' on terror and a televisual Big Brother, shapes these responses at a time when 24-hour surveillance is viewed as the path to instant celebrity Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four provides unique insights into a highly pervasive and secretive regime, which in light of post 9/11 political trajectories is highly admonitory These pathways and connections are produced in my research I do not make easy links between past and present - Eric and Tony Blair - at the level of metaphor or simile Indeed, the pages that follow traverse the digital archives and probe the rationale for mobilising Orwell in this time and place I am focussed on writing a history and establishing a context calibrated to the fictional Oceania This doctorate commenced as an investigation of George Orwell's journalism and fiction one hundred years after his birth At the outset of the candidature, the Twin Towers fell and new implications and interpretations of Orwell arose My research demonstrates that the Oceania of Orwell's imagining presents an evocative insight into the contemporary alliance forged by the Bush, Blair, and Howard triumvirate in its quest for world peace Using Orwell as a guide, I move through theories of writing and politics, in the process uncovering capitalism's inherently hostile and negligent attitude towards those who are materially less fortunate I began my work convinced of Orwell's relevance to cultural studies, particularly in understanding popular cultural writing and the need for social intervention I concluded this process even more persuaded of my original intent, but shaped, sharpened and compensated by new events, insights, tragedies and Big Brothers It is imperative for the future directives of cultural studies that critical, political, pedagogic and intellectual links with Orwell are (re-)formed, (re-)established and maintained My text works in the spaces between cultural studies and cultural journalism, pondering the role and significance of the critical - and dissenting - intellectual Memory, History, and Identity all circulate in Orwell's prose These concerns and questions have provided impetus and direction for this thesis They have also shaped the research Few expect Orwell's totalitarian dystopia to materialise unchallenged from the pages of a book The wielders of power are more capable and more subtle Yet it is impossible to deny that the litany of lies and contempt central to Big Brother's Oceania is reproducible by any administration assisted by a complicit media and a malleable citizenry The emergence of such a phenomenon has been well documented in the post 9/11 United States This thesis has arisen out of the miasma of hubris, lies and contempt framing and surrounding Mr Bush's war on terror My purpose - not unlike Orwell's in Nineteen Eighty-Four - is to warn, not judge or berate Orwell understood political rhetoric He was not a prophet but a journalist who interpreted the nuances and temptations of excessive power He had witnessed the extraordinary 'death' of history in Spain, and thereafter he raised his pen to combat intellectual hypocrisy and dishonesty wherever he found it Under Orwell's tutelage, plain words pierce, probe and unsettle They are sharp cutting instruments, fully capable of transcending time How else are we to explain his enduring popularity as a writer? This thesis offers a critical and interpretative homage to George Orwell, a man who recognised the beauty of well chosen words, who loved and appreciated their enduring complexity and power A framing structure has been chosen that places Orwell in close relation to poverty, class and politics, war and journalism Individual chapter headings (and their contents) exploit Orwell's unique response to the significant talking points of his era After resolving to write professionally, Orwell starved and struggled in Paris, and frequented 'doss houses' in and around London I track these wanderings in chapter one He studied the effects of the Depression and unemployment in Yorkshire and Lancashire (chapter two), and fought and was wounded in Spain (chapter three) Thereafter he turned to political writing and journalism (chapter four) What he failed to anticipate was a post war Britain overwhelmed by despondency and dissolved by internal devolution (chapter five) His concluding apocalyptic discharge, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was directed at the higher echelons of institutional power and corporate corruption in Britain, America, and Europe, which I explore in chapter six The world has changed significantly since Orwell (and J B Priestley) went in search of England's faltering 'pulse' in the 1930s Englishness and traditional working class values have distorted and shifted in unexpected ways These transformations are partly the result of war and the loss of empire They are also a response to American cultural and economic hegemony, the privatisation of industry, offshore investments, the emergence of the European Economic Community, and the burgeoning global economy George Orwell matters, even after this scale of change because he faced his own prejudices on the page and developed a writing style that enabled him to challenge the accepted orthodoxies and hypocrisies of his era This is evident when returning to his essays and journalism, fifty-five years after his death He possessed the ability to make readers feel uncomfortable, raising topics and concerns that we would rather not discuss Denounced as a traitor by the pre-1956 unreconstructed left and feted as a hero by the self-congratulatory right, Orwell resists labelling and easy categorization We owe him a considerable debt for exposing the likely directions of unchecked political ambition, and this insight should not be treated lightly As I read him, Orwell was the last man in Europe, 'the canary in the mine' He is a literary world heritage site of considerable iconic appeal and international significance He is an outsider's 'outsider' perpetually facing inwards, and we need him now

Worlds Apart?: Dualism and Transgression in Contemporary Female Dystopias

Abstract: Literary critics and scholars have written extensively on the demise of the ?utopian spirit? in the modern novel. What has often been overlooked is the emergence of a new hybrid subgenre, particularly in science fiction and fantasy, which incorporates utopian strategies within the dystopian narrative, particularly in the feminist dystopias of the 1980s and 1990s. The author names this new subgenre ?transgressive utopian dystopias.? Suzette Haden Elgin's "Native Tongue" trilogy, Suzy McKee Charna's "Holdfast" series, and Margaret Atwood's "The Handmaid's Tale" are thoroughly analyzed within the context of this this new subgenre of ?transgressive utopian dystopias.? Analysis focuses particularly on how these works cover the interrelated categories of gender, race and class, along with their relationship to classic literary dualism and the dystopian narrative. Without completely dissolving the dualistic order, the feminist dystopias studied here contest the notions of unambiguity and authenticity that are generally part of the canon.

Thinking utopia : steps into other worlds

Abstract: List of Illustrations Preface and Acknowledgements Jorn Rusen, Michael Fehr and Thomas W. Rieger Chapter 1. The Necessity of Utopian Thinking: A Cross-National Perspective Lyman Tower Sargent PART I: POLITICS, CONSTRUCTION AND FUNCTIONS OF UTOPIAN THINKING Chapter 2. Aspects of the Western Utopian Tradition Krishan Kumar Chapter 3. Visions of the Future Michael Thompson Chapter 4. Utopia, Contractualism, Human Rights Richard Saage Chapter 5. On the Construction of Worlds: Technology and Economy in European Utopias Wolfgang Pircher PART II: ARTIFICIAL WORLDS AND THE 'NEW MAN' Chapter 6. Bodies in Utopia and Utopian Bodies in Imperial China Dorothy Ko Chapter 7. Science, Technology and Utopia: Perspectives of a Computer-Assisted Evolution of Humankind Klaus Mainzer Chapter 8. 'Thinking about the Unthinkable': The Virtual as a Place of Utopia Claus Pias Chapter 9. Natural Utopianism in Everyday Life Practice - An Elementary Theoretical Model Ulrich Oevermann PART III: MUSEUM AS UTOPIAN LABORATORY Chapter 10. Haunted by Things: Utopias and Their Consequences Donald Preziosi Chapter 11. Art - Museum - Utopia: Five Themes on an Epistemological Construction Site Michael Fehr Chapter 12. Art, Science, Utopia in the Early Modern Period Wolfgang Braungart Chapter 13. Utopiary Rachel Weiss PART IV: UTOPIA AS A MEDIUM OF CULTURAL COMMUNICATION Chapter 14. The Utopian Vision, East and West Zhang Longxi Chapter 15. Trauma: A Dystopia of the Spirit Michael S. Roth Chapter 16. From Revolutionary to Catastrophic Utopia Slavoj Zizek Chapter 17. The Narrative Staging of Image and Counter-Image: On the Poetics of Literary Utopias Wilhelm Vosskamp Chapter 18. Rethinking Utopia: A Plea for a Culture of Inspiration Jorn Rusen Notes on Contributors Index

Dead Channel Surfing: the commonalities between cyberpunk literature and industrial music

Abstract: This paper explores the similarities between industrial music and ‘cyberpunk’ science fiction literature. Besides the obvious instances where there are direct references to each other, there are further connections between music and literature that are explored here. Situating the two forms within the tradition of twentieth-century Western dystopias, the focus of the paper is on the similarity of themes (relationship to technology, control by a totalitarian elite, apocalyptic worlds, resistance groups), techniques (in language or structure), moods (the tones and attitudes), and imagery (through language or music) used to illustrate and enhance these themes.

Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema

Abstract: Beyond the Pink: (Post) Youth Iconography in Cinema is a project in cultural time travel. It cuts up linear cinematic narratives to develop a hop-scotched history of youth, Generation X and (post) youth culture. I focus upon the pleasures, pedagogies and (un)popular politics of a filmic genre that continues to be dismissed as unworthy of intellectual debate. Accelerated culture and the discourse of celebrity have blurred the crisp divisions between fine art and crude commodity, the meaningful and meaningless, and real and fictive, unsettling the binary logic that assigns importance to certain texts and not others. This research project prises open that awkward space between representation and experience. Analysts require methods and structures through which to manage historical change and textual movement. Through cinema, macro-politics of identity emerge from the micro-politics of the narrative. Prom politics and mallrat musings become imbued with social significance that speak in the literacies available to youth. It grants the ephemerality and liminality of an experience a tactile trace. I select moments of experience for Generation X youth and specific icons - Happy Harry Hardon, Molly Ringwald, the Spice Girls, the Bitch, the invisible raver, teen time travellers Marty McFly and Donnie Darko, and the slacker - to reveal the archetypes and ideologies that punctuate the cinematic landscape. The tracked figures do not configure a smooth historical arc. It is in the rifts and conflicts of diverse narratives and subjectivities where attention is focused. This research imperative necessitates the presentation of a series of essays arranged in a tripartite framework. The first section proposes theoretical paradigms for a tethered analysis of filmic texts and Generation X. The second segment explores sites of struggle in public spaces and time. The final section leaves the landscape of post-Generation X to forge the relationship between history, power and youth identity. I particularly focus on the iconography, ideologies and imaginings of young women to lead the discussion of the shifts in the experience and representations of youth. By reinserting women into studies of film, it is imperative to stress that this is not a dissertation in, and of, women's cinema. Rather, it serves as an historical corrective to the filmic database. The existing literature on youth cinema is disappointing and narrow in its trajectories. Timothy Shary's Generation Multiplex: The Image of Youth in Contemporary American Cinema and Jon Lewis' The Road to Romance and Ruin: Teen Films and Youth Culture exemplify the difficulties of capturing the complexities of individual films when they are collated in artificial and stifling categories. At one end of the analytical spectrum is the critique that comes with the caveat of 'it's just another teen movie'. Jonathon Bernstein's monograph Pretty in Pink: The Golden Age of Teenage Movies is one such example which derails into acerbic diatribes and intellectual dismissal. The Cinema of Generation X: A Critical Study by Peter Hanson is a more successful project that is interested in the influences that inform a community of filmmakers than arriving at a catalogue of generic themes and narratives. There is an emphasis on the synergy between text, producer and readership. I continue this relationship explored by Hanson, but further accent the politics of film. The original contribution to knowledge offered by this doctoral thesis is a detailed study of (post) youth popular culture, building into a model for Generation X cinema, activating the interdisciplinary perspectives from film and cultural studies. With its adaptability into diverse media forms, cultural studies paradigms allow navigation through the expansive landscape of popular culture. It traverses beyond simple textual analyses to consider a text's cultural currency. As an important carrier of meaning and sensory memories, cinema allows for alternative accounts that are denied in authorised history. As a unique form with its own visual literacy, screen theory is needed to refine observations. This unique melding of screen and cultural studies underscores the convergent relationship between text, readership, production and politics. This doctoral thesis activates concepts and methods of generationalism, nationalism, social history and cultural practice. There is a dialogue between the chapters that crosses over text and time. The 1980s of Molly Ringwald shadows the dystopia of Donnie Darko. The celebrity status of the Spice Girls clashes with the frustrated invisibility of the female raver. Douglas Coupland's vision of Generation X in 1991 has evolved into Richard Linklater's documentation of post-youth in the new millenium. Leaping between decades through time travel in cinema, I argue that the nostalgic past and projections for the future evoke the preoccupations and anxieties of the present.

Utopia, Dystopia, and Sublime Apocalypse in Montana's Church Universal and Triumphant

Abstract: The human experience constitutes a search for secular and spiritual salvation--for the direct path to a life enlightened by beauty, order, reward, and purpose. Places are humanized landscapes, an ultimate artifact of cultural aspiration, and the transformation of space into place is a compelling vernacular record of an ongoing quest for order and community (Tuan 1975, 2002). Greed and ugliness define many a human construction, but deliberate changes are often made with an eye toward betterment that embodies a creative geography. As J. B. Jackson, Donald Meinig, Dolores Hayden, David Harvey, and Yi-Fu Tuan remind us, the recasting of land into graceful life is a long-standing geographical goal, if not always reliably achieved (Casey 1996, 1997). An imaginative striving after geographical perfection heavily marbles human history. Although the "everyday" involves its share of woodwork crude with splinters and rough edges, the shape of utopia is more than an abstract intellectual exercise; it looms as a real-time goal (Hine [1953] 1983; Elliott 1970; Harvey 2000). Too often, when the abstract is crafted into an actual experiment, noble intention is derailed by a potent cocktail of paranoia, madness, and violent death: People's Temple, the Branch Davidians, the Temple Solaire, Aum Shinrikyo, Heaven's Gate, and, early in this new millennium, the Movement for the Restoration of the Ten Commandments of God are but a handful of recent examples in which perfectibility turned pogrom (Singer 1996; Economist 1997; Foote 1997; Niebuhr 1997; Carey 1999; Heard 1999; Lifton 1999; Fisher 2000). Concepts of utopia and dystopia sort into five general, if disparate, classes: religious, political-economic, psychosocial, military, and apocalyptic. With forms both concrete and contemporary, the search for utopia manifests an unmistakable geography, as we argue in our brief examination of the Church Universal and Triumphant (CUT), an entity watched with trepidation through the 1990s in Montana. Its utopian initiative once had high potential, but even in its gloaming days the CUT bristles with an uncertain if looming likelihood for tragedy. Perhaps that will end with personal frailty winning out over apocalypse. In the specific case of the CUT, long-witnessed or at least much-suspected mental pathologies of cult leaders are in evidence, and within that is made clear a telling tale of charismatic decline. A general potential for the distortion of religious utopias into violence is identified in ten key dystopian traits, attributes that are in their own way notably geographical. UTOPIA AND DYSTOPIA The rhetoric of paradise is as old as language. Eden, Zion, and the Elysian Fields are more than metaphors for the ideal; they are templates for changing the face of the earth (Levin 1972; Todd and Wheeler 1978; Levitas 1990). Test cases for an idyllic Earth often start as fictional sketches. If a degree of vagueness is tolerated in the background of oil portraits or landscapes, in a utopian literary vision realistic geographical details are crucial compositional elements in a view of the perfectible. In rare cases the blueprints of literary paradises graduate to actual experiments. And precisely there, between the written and the real, is an abiding tension that constitutes the utopian crumple zone. In the "Epic of Gilgamesh," 3,000 years old, the legendary King of Uruk made a dangerous journey to Dilmun, the Sumerian land of eternal life. After surviving trials by darkness, mountain firmament, and the visitation of sundry wild beasts, Gilgamesh ascended to leisure, health, contemplation, and eternal youth (Kumar 1991; Huddleston 2003). This ancient story reveals geographical and architectonic components at the heart of a desire to commingle Heaven and Earth. From similar cloth the early English cut an imaginary Land of Cockaygne, a place rumored to be so perfect that cooked birds flew into your mouth, rivers ran with wine, sleep produced wealth, sex was abundant, and no one ever died (Elliott 1970). …

Utopian Yearnings, Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism

Abstract: In a 1999 interview, French novelist Michel Houellebecq outlines a decidedly teleological view of history: ". . . deep down, I am with the Utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in an absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me" (Bourriaud et al. 1999, 244; my emphasis). In The Elementary Particles (1998), his controversial, award-winning novel, Houellebecq advances a bitter critique of liberalism and liberal democracy and, in particular, of their economic and cultural forms, capitalism and advanced consumerism, before offering at novel's end a conjectured antidote to the "progressive decline and disintegration" that have marked Western civilization for a very long time (2000, 259).] A powerful roman a these, Houellebecq's work mounts what is, finally, an ineffectual challenge to the defining and ennobling tenets of liberalism: free will, self-determination, property rights, the separation of the public and private spheres, tolerance, and laissez-faire morality. While his reading of contemporary social and political mores is not without isolated insight, its communitarian foundations warrant rebuttal and, I will argue, his "utopian" proposals ultimate rejection.The Elementary Particles presents a social history of France and, by extension, of the West that runs from the conclusion of World War Two through to the year 2079, at which point in time the human race has achieved a utopian resolution to its purported centuries-long slide into anomie, misery, and despair. The novel's co-protagonists are Michel Dzerjinski, a research scientist, and Bruno Clement, an apparatchik in the French education bureaucracy. These two half-brothers have led uniformly miserable lives for the most part, and now find themselves emotionally and morally expended in middle age, each playing out the endgame of his lonely existence. At the heart of their existential quandary, argues Houellebecq, lies social "atomization" which, notionally, is endemic in contemporary Western society.As we learn, the novel's title carries a double significance, the one diagnostic, the other millenarian. In the first instance, it suggests a highly fragmented society in which, in Houellebecq's saturnine view, individuals are inconsequential, dysfunctional particularities of a dysfunctional whole, and therein are living illustrations of the "atomization of society" (2000, 129). However, by novel's end, in the late twenty-first century, the ability of scientists to manipulate sub-atomic genetic matter, i.e., "elementary particles," results in a permanent elimination of human suffering and discontent. Social atomization has been cured through the miracle of eugenics. Time and contingency have been eliminated. Liberalism has joined other defunct political models in the ideological dustbin. With the ensconcement of scientific communitarianism as global political system, "History" has, in effect, come to an end, its place taken by a timeless HISTORY, the eternal goal of all Utopian thinkers, whatever their stripe. But what apparently dire circumstances would propel science in this direction? What would lead people to accept genetic engineering as a final solution to human woe? What has been gained and what compromised in the process? The Elementary Particles is a series of provocative, though, frankly, chilling responses to these questions.1Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. (Houellebecq 1999, 99)From the perspective of a thoroughly eugeneticized late twenty-first century, the prologue of The Elementary Particles offers a gloomy post-mortem analysis of the life and times of Michel Djerzinski:[Djerzinski] lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. …

Entering Dystopia, Entering Erewhon

Abstract: Abandon hope all ye who enter here: a society cannot be truly dystopian if travellers can come and go freely. Anti-utopias and 'satirical utopias' - that is, societies considered perfect by their advocates but not by the implied reader - must be well-regulated enough to prevent the possible disruption caused by a visitor. There is no exit at all from the classic twentieth-century dystopias, which end either in an actual death, like that of the Savage in Huxley's Brave New World (1932), or in a spiritual death like Winston Smith's in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Any glimmers of hope that the protagonist may have felt are quickly destroyed.

Contemporary Ghost Stories: Cyberspace in Fiction for Children and Young Adults.

Abstract: This essay identifies a genre of popular fiction for children and young adults, prevalent in the 1990s and continuing into the early twenty-first century, that incorporates computers and the internet, e-mails and chat rooms, into its plots. However, along with a focus on technology, this fiction frequently features the supernatural. So, too, ghosts have been recurring images in popular culture surrounding past emergent communications technologies. I argue that the figure of the ghost in these novels about cyberspace dramatizes the tension between the liberating possibilities of disembodiment and the desire for embodied relationships. Despite the presence of dystopian elements, this fiction remains optimistic overall about the potential of technology to connect individuals in positive ways and to create communities modeled on tolerance and inclusion.

Stepping Razor in Orbit: Postmodern Identity and Political Alternatives in William Gibson's Neuromancer

Abstract: uch has been written about how cyberspace in William Gibson’s Neuromancer allows new forms of identity. Within that cyberspace, the self can be called into question, decentered, split apart, and rendered unknowable. Brian McHale, Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., Veronica Hollinger, Scott Bukatman, and John Christie, to name a few critics, have all argued that in some fashion Gibson’s cyberspace represents identity as postmodern.1 In Neuromancer, the new forms of identity point not so much to where we are headed in the future as to where we are in our present condition. The novel is social commentary for contemporary Western society, extrapolating the trajectory of our social practices in the latter years of the twentieth century. The novel illustrates how technology and global capitalism influence our ontology by generating a world of images that have no original referent: meaning is cut loose from our surroundings, so that the self and the world we knew are in question.2 This questioning of ontology in Neuromancer, the representative text for the cyberpunk genre, has caused concern because of its political ramifications. Istvan Csicsery-Ronay, Jr. finds cyberpunk to be the apotheosis of postmodernism as selfconscious bad faith: he argues that cyberpunk concerns itself not with hopes and solutions but with the difficulties of representation in a hyperreal setting (“Cyberpunk” 193). Along with Csicsery-Ronay, Jr., many have criticized cyberpunk or Neuromancer for a lack of positive alternatives to an impending, dystopic future.3 What has generally been overlooked in Neuromancer is an enclave of political resistance found in the Zion cluster, the home of the Rastas Aerol and Maelcum. Tom Moylan has pointed out its role as a seemingly utopian alternative that might shift the novel’s focus from a dystopian pessimism to a utopian M

Virtual Reality's Differential Perception: On the Significance of Deleuze (and Lacan) For the Future of Visual Art Education in a Machinic Age

Abstract: In this paper I argue that, generally speaking, the field of art education and artsbased research has misunderstood and misinterpreted virtual reality (VR), applying it to the field of representation through the usual venues of cyberspace narratives, plots, objects, and characters, where meaning making and the usual framing through interpretive (hermeneutic) criticism sutures the viewer into the ideology of a fantasy space. Drawing on the theories of Giles Deleuze and Jacques Lacan, the radical critique is made that VR, as a machinic assemblage that disrupts representation, opens up a self-reflexive abyss as already explored by video artists in the 1970s. With VR, modulation and serialization of the object become new problems, as do movement and vibration. However, the greatest challenge for art education is to come to terms with VR's fourth dimension?the nonlinearity of time, its paradox of interpassivity, and, lastly, its critical potential for identity as doubled-reflection. Misrecognitions of VR Like a sleeping giant who wakes up to find that someone or something has stuck a sharp implement into one of its vital or gans?an eye would be the most appro priate one here?it screams in pain, blinded, trying to find a way to ease the sting and remove the irritant. Currently, art education is in a state something like that. In some sectors the awareness of such a penetration hasn't even begun to register. But it will. In others, the irritant has already been removed and ignored. In yet others, a film has formed over the implement to make it part of the eye itself. Throughout its history in North America, the field of art education has been slow to recognize the changes to perception that young people are already experiencing. Just when the field thought it had late modernity right, with its centering DBAE (Discipline-based Art Education) initiatives, along came the un folding predicaments of postmodernity, and it was once again plummeted into disar ray. Disarray, decenter ment, dis-solution, and deconstruction have become perma nent signposts of visual art, which always sits uncomfortably in the conservative re cesses of public schooling where stability, tradition, and daily repetitiveness are wel comed values. One of the problems with visual art edu cation is that it has not caught up to the changes of perception enabled by the new technologies; nor has its established main stream journals remotely begun to explore the theoretical ground so as to understand the virtual world that is unfolding. This sounds like a harsh claim. After all, haven't there been obvious inroads in the past 10 years into the computerization of visual art? Haven't art educators become more and more computer literate? Aren't there many research studies to show just how children are technologically savvy? Buckingham and Stefton-Green (2003) have a long list of articles and books to show that this is the case (Buckingham, Graham, & Sefton Green, 1999; Sefton-Green & Buckingham, 1996)?to "prove" that kids are interactive and creative with the media. There are also research studies that show just how el ementary children are able to create their own Web pages, and the gender biases of VISUAL ARTS RESEARCH ? 2005 by the Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois 129 This content downloaded from 157.55.39.102 on Thu, 23 Jun 2016 05:58:33 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms creating their own cyber-narratives in hypertexts, and so on (Kafai, 1996,1999). But, I would maintain, art education (and by implication media education) has yet to come to terms with the changes in percep tion that have been enabled by the advent of virtual reality (VR).1 The majority of this research is caught up in the available vi sual technologies (computers, digital camcorders, laser discs, and computer software)?so-called apparatus theory as initially theorized by Jean-Louis Baudry (1970,1976), and sidetracked by questions of cognition?as if VR databases provide us with superior epistemologies. As is cus tomary with every new technological inno vation, dystopias of VR are presented, fore most by proponents like Jean Baudrillard (1996) and Paul Virillio (1994) who dwell on the anxieties of technological surveil lance and manipulation.2 At the same time, these new technologies are praised for their Utopian breakthroughs by proponents like Howard Rheingold (1991) and Stelarc (1997) . Here the "techies" have a field day claiming why a huge portion of the school budget should be directed toward buying the latest software upgrades and computer hardware. As a field, art education has a similar bifurcation. What is missing from this picture are the shifting changes in con cepts, affect and precepts that have re sulted in a specific complexity brought on by the virtual age. It seems that the les sons from the failure of both the Italian Futurists and Russian Constructivists to construct a new social order?one capital ist, the other communist?through a nar rative mystique of technological efficiency have not been learned (see Foster, 1990). Art (and media) education today appears to be repeating their symptoms. The philosophers of the virtual were the late Giles Deleuze and his theoretical part ner Felix Guattari?two names that seldom, if ever, find their way into mainstream art education journals. Their writings are diffi cult and this is perhaps one of the main reasons that they, like many French phi losophers who have plenty to say concern ing the postmodern condition, often sim ply receive cursory symbolic mention. Hopefully, Deleuze and Lacan's importance for art education will be demonstrated in this article. Visual art education has been fixated on representation?both on its cri tique (as first begun by members of the Social Theory Caucus in 1980), and on its aestheticization. Aesthetics receives high praise in art education circles. No matter which theory of aesthetics is drawn upon, aesthetics remains a high priority. In con trast to this modernist orientation, I would argue that VR has nothing to do with rep resentation as it is envisioned in the cur rent paradigm of art education?in all its facets. Aesthetics, likewise, receives a drastic reconceptualization by Deleuze.3 Visual art education has yet to come to terms with two aspects of the visual world that VR forces it to recognize: movement and time?as both a "movement image" and "time image."These two aspects of the visual world destroy the traditional modern ist notion of framed perception that tends to still dominate art education, introducing what I shall call the phenomenon of interpassivity?after Pfaller (2000)?which presents us with the "other side" of intersubjectivity that VR environments solicit. VR forces art educators to rethink perception as a dialectical process of ar tistic reception and creation between intersubjectivity and interpassivity; as an interactive reality between the self and an animate world that "gazes back" (see Elkins, 1997), a concept already developed in its nascent form by Lacan (1979, pp. 67 78), who drew on photographic theory for his formulations. The day-glo fluorescent colors at the height of modernism are slowly being replaced by the inner glow of pixel-screen colors of televised computer screens?the flat screen becoming sym bolic of a floating portal to another fictional world of cyberspace. If the electric age at the fin de si?cle produced the "shock of the new," in Robert Hughes's (1980) terms, when the grand magasin ottered the vitrine to lure consumer desire, the virtual elec tronic age au d?but de millennium has in troduced what might be called "the shock

Undoing and Redoing the Western

Abstract: Writing about Percival Everett's fiction, the achievement of just over two decades, is both necessary and daunting, necessary because it is so good it demands attention, daunting because Everett has parodied so many modes of recent criticism that it is scary to adopt one, knowing that he has already demolished it—or soon will. One wants, nevertheless, to write about him, for his fictions are not only immensely engaging but also deeply provocative—altogether, an accomplished body of impor- tant work. Many of the most significant character types and recurrent motifs in Everett's extensive canon appear in his very first novel, the zany, disturbing, and finally uplifting Suder. There we find the slightly out-of-whack narrator, in this case the slumping baseball player Craig Suder, an anticipation of such later skewed characters as the racially off-base Curt Marder of God's Country, the confused Robert Hawks of Watershed, the metamorphosing Alice Achitophel of Zulus, the shape-shifting Velepo of Frenzy, and the conflicted Thelonious "Monk" Ellison of Erasure, to cite just a few. There we find the innocent female in need of rescue, in this instance, the teenaged Jincy; later versions run from the very young, Jake in God's Country, for instance, to the elderly, Butch in Walk Me to the Distance. And there, we find the ever-present complication of race, a key aspect in most, though by no means all, of Everett's novels. The appearance of such recurrent elements at the very beginning of his career marks some of his personal obsessions and culturally important concerns, but the astonish- ing thing is how varied their subsequent realizations are. Surely no other contempo- rary writer has created, as Everett has, a parody of a Western, a realistic novel (several in fact), a futuristic dystopian fantasy, a moving Greek myth, and a kunstlerroman, not to mention a novel (I'm at a loss for genre description) narrated by a baby. When Everett said casually in a recent interview, "I don't care much to write the same thing," he was surely engaged in understatement (Interview 4). His originality is as stunning as his versatility. Running through all his works, however, are the hallmarks of his style: sparse and pellucid prose, sharp dialogue, humor—both outrageous and subtle—a pervading edginess, sudden drama, deep feeling, and always a firmly controlling, sly and ironic intelligence. The exuberant end of Suder foreshadows some of his future fictions. It creates a paradigmatic situation that loomed so strongly in Everett's imagination that he returned to its tensions in two later novels. The foreshadowing drama assumes this oddball shape: having taken a forced break from baseball (he is put on the Disabled List), developed an obsession with the rendition of "Ornithology" by The Bird,

Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature

Abstract: Because advances made by science and technology far outstripped improvements in human nature, utopian dreams of perfect societies in the twentieth century quickly metamorphosed into dystopian nightmares, which undermined individual identity and threatened the integrity of the family. Armed with technological and scientific tools, totalizing social systems found in literature abolish the distinction between public and private life and thus penetrate and corrupt the very core of all utopian blueprints and visions: the education of future generations. At the heart of the family, mothers as parents transmit their diverse cultural traditions while socializing their children and thus compete with ideologically driven systems that usurp their role as educators. Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature focuses, therefore, on the thematic importance of this and other maternal roles for generic metamorphosis: the shift to dystopia invariably is signaled by the inversion of traditional maternal roles. The longevity of the utopian-dystopian literary tradition and persistence of the maternal model of human relationships serve as points of reference in this post-modern age of relative cultural values. Meta-utopian exploration of this thematic tension between utopia and dystopia reminds us that no place may not be home, but we need to keep going there.

The future is Gothic: elements of Gothic in dystopian novels

Abstract: This thesis explores the relationship between the Gothic tradition and Dystopian novels in order to illuminate new perspective on the body in Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s Herland (1915), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange (1962), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Michel Houellebecq’s Atomised (1999). The key concerns are those of the Labyrinth, Dark Places, Connectedness and the Loss of the Individual, Live Burials, Monsters and Fragmented Flesh. A thematic approach allows for the novels to be brought together under common Gothic themes in order to show not only that they have such tendencies, but that they share common ground as Gothic Dystopias. While the focus is on bodily concerns in these novels, it is also pertinent to offer a discussion of past critical perspectives on the Dystopia and this is undertaken in Chapter One. Chapter Two looks at the narrative structure of the novels and finds similarities in presentation to Gothic novels, which leads to exploration of the position of the body in such a narrative of the unseen. The third chapter looks to the spaces inhabited by characters in the novels to examine their impact on the threat faced by these individuals. The Gothic convention of doubling is the focus of Chapter Four, which finds not only doubling operating in Dystopian novels, but the more complex relationship of triangles of doubling holding characters, fixing them in relation to those around at the expense of selfhood. Chapter Five takes Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s musings on the Gothic as its point of departure and finds that Dystopian bodies occupy a very similarly trapped position. Chapter Six identifies two types of monsters that inhabit the Gothic Dystopian space: those people who transform between the human and the monstrous, and those individuals who form a larger monster based on power that lives parasitically on transgressive bodies. The final chapter displays the impact of the Gothic Dystopia on individual bodies: ‘Fragmented Flesh’. The destruction of a coherent whole, a body with defined and sustainable boundaries, is the outcome of the novels where fear, repression, and the hidden combine to leave little space for cohesion and identification in the Gothic Dystopia.

"Felt, Not Seen Not Heard:" Quentin Compson, Modernist Suicide and Southern History

Abstract: Death and suicide preoccupied the Modernists--here meaning, roughly, those writers working in Europe between 1918 and 1939. Death without religious value was a concern of philosophers, novelists, and poets after the unprecedented scale of man-made destruction in Europe during World War I. Traditional metaphysical and religious discourse failed to socially explainations of death failed on this occasion, and its apparent meaninglessness of death was explored self-consciously in literary fiction, as Alan Friedman has shown in Fictional Death and the Modernist Enterprise. Suicide serves in several novels of this time as a tool for social criticism, as when Septimus Smith suffers at the hands of an overbearing medical institution (as Woolf did) in Mrs Dalloway (1925). Moreover, fictional suicide serves as a locus for masculine concerns about gender roles--not surprisingly, given the interest of the period's writers in masculinity and femininity, in Lawrence, Joyce, and Forster especially. John the Savage in Brave New World(1932) fails with Lenina, Septimus Smith is lost to Lucrezia, and Orwell's Flory proves unable to deal with Elizabeth in Burmese Days (1934). The characters mentioned here are all alienated men who are unable to maintain desired relationships with women. These relationships are all somehow sexual, and so too, oddly, is that of Faulkner's Quentin Compson, in which he fails to come to terms with his rebellious sister Caddy. Quentin is very concerned about Southern honor, something naturally absent from British and Irish novels of the period. Faulkner participates in this Modernist concern with death, yet uses Quentin's suicide as a literary device for unique purposes. His suicide is thus not so much an emulation of European historical concerns, manifested in novelistic content, as a structuring device evolved from those historical concerns, formally detached, and re-appropriated in a different historical discourse. The manifestation of the symptom (suicide) in this American text is identical to the European examples, but the underlying pathology is quite distinct. While the fantasy of suicide serves to formally unify a male subjectivity at the gap where a coherent and honorable masculine gender role breaks down, such a role is for Quentin thoroughly historical. His section consists of a series of desperate attempts to enact both his and Caddy's honorable but artificial gender roles, and behind these attempts lies not a Modernist desire for an escape from (the Eurocentric, war-addled, dystopian narrative of) history, but the impossible desire to close the gap between the individual and his historical role, to reunite with history. There is some intercourse between The Sound and the Fury and a Modernist, European context for the topics of death and history. It is a novel that is Modernist (stylistic concerns aside) in the sense that traditionally accepted masculine characterizations become contingent and unstable, and in the manner in which death itself emerges above other social events as a structuring principle within the text. How does one remain individually authentic, as a male or female, in the face of incessant cultural strain and flux? Daniel J. Singal states that "the only lasting closure, in Modernist terms, comes with death" (11). Thus we see in this period that the crux of Heidegger's arguments in Being and Time rests upon the possibility of an "authentic" being-toward-death. Freud was attempting to tack a death-drive onto his theory of mind, and in literature, Joyce returned to a traditional Catholic death scene for the aesthetically cutting-edge, linguistic freak-show Finnegans Wake. Though we find authors at this time experimenting with form in several directions, it seems that many European intellectuals felt compelled to (re)explore the subject of death's modern significance. As the social significance bestowed upon it changed after the First World War, death consequently emerges as a structuring device in fiction from the period. …

Alphaville : Jean-Luc Godard, 1965

Abstract: A striking black-and-white hybrid of film noir and science fiction, "Alphaville" (1965) is now one of the most enduringly popular of Jean-Luc Godard 's films of the 1960s. Working without sets, special effects, or even a script, Godard created a dystopian vision of a technocratic city of the future, which resonates with filmmakers today. "Alphaville" pits secret agent Lemmy Caution (Eddie Constantine) against Alpha 60, the super-computer that presides over a city where weeping is outlawed, poetry goes unrecognised and the words 'conscience' and 'love' have ceased to exist. Lemmy's mission is to capture the renegade scientist Professor von Braun (Howard Vernon) but is complicated when he falls in love with the Professor's ravishing daughter, Natasha (Anna Karina). In this first ever exploration of Godard's masterpiece, published on the fortieth anniversary of its release, Chris Darke uncovers the film's unique combination of genres and styles and draws on new interviews with the director's collaborators to chronicle the film's production. Analysing "Alphaville" in its historical context, he also examines how the film in fluenced Godard's later work, as well as exploring Alphaville's 'afterlife' in the work of other filmmakers and artists.

Morphology of Manifest Destiny: The Justified Violence of John O'Sullivan, Hank Morgan, and George W. Bush

Abstract: The gravest danger our Nation faces lies at the crossroads of radicalism and technology ~~~George W Bush It has been noted that Twain's A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court "portrays [two] supposed Utopias~~~the idyllic Camelot and the modern industrialized vision of the Yankee~~~as undesireable, unpleasant, and indeed truly dystopian" (Shanley and Stillman 274) The novel is, in fact, a narrative account of the violence that ensues when two absolutist world views come into conflict The two absolute worlds in the book~~~represented by Camelot, on the one hand, and by Hank Morgan, on the other~~~form the basis for Twain's critique of self-assured sociopolitical visions in general and of the apparently inevitable violence perpetrated in the interest of that which is "natural" and that which is "good" The tension between the Catholic monarchy of Camelot and Hank Morgan's Protestant, New England progressivism adds an interesting dimen- sion to the Manichean structure identifiable in Twain's fiction

New social orders: reconceptualising family and community in utopian fiction

Abstract: A study focusing on family and community as they are represented in seven utopian/dystopian fictions written for children and young adults by Australian, American, Canadian, and British writers is illustrated. These novels depict reflections of how various notions of new social orders have impacted on children's literature and how this affects the utopian/dystopian strain, present in children's literature.

White Noise and Everyday Technologies

Abstract: Debates about technology in the popular media often revolve around developments that seem to promise (or threaten) sweeping change, both material and symbolic: this is technology as "something new," the gadget on the horizon, the technology that performs a new function, or the technique that enables unpredictable applications. These focal technologies require highly visible cultural work in the public arena to incorporate them into existing structures of meaning, to assess their impact on social relations and definitions of the human, and to assert governmental controls where economic, ethical, or political issues are raised. Oversight committees are formed, regulatory laws are sometimes proposed, and various narratives, both Utopian and dystopian, normalizing and cautionary, circulate in both the scientific and popular press. When we think about what it means to live in a high-tech age, we often think of the singular moments, the advent of technologies as cultural events. But high tech also informs everyday life in America in much more mundane ways. Living with high tech does entail engaging with discourses of space travel, robots, cloning, nuclear devastation, and a variety of ecological threats, but most of us don't have humanoid robots doing our housework, we don't travel in space, and perhaps our automobiles have new capabilities, but they aren't hovercrafts (yet). We are aware of biohazards, pollution, and nuclear weaponry, to be sure, but we live and move through a world of technology that is often

What Do You Desire? What Do You Fear? Theorize it! Teaching Political Theory through Utopian Writing

Abstract: Undergraduate students should not just study political theory. They should theorize. Writing-intensive political theory courses can help them do so sooner. By preparing an original political vision, a utopia or a dystopia, throughout the course of the semester, students read and compare the texts of the course against their own emerging texts and move into more critical and systematic political analysis. As a political theorist, my focus is not so much on utopias or dystopias as a subject of study per se , but on tapping into the creative freedom, critical distance, and hard-hitting insights of these traditions while teaching writing. I take seriously Berlin's above-stated concern for the “place and mode of operation” conveyed to the student through the process of learning to write. Visionary writing accelerates students' appreciation of the complexity of another's theory, but also of their own standpoint and capacity for agency and judgment. Khristina Haddad is assistant professor, department of political science, Moravian College. She teaches a writing-intensive course on visionary political writing and is affiliated with German Studies and Women's Studies. Her research interests include politics of time and temporality, Hannah Arendt, political action, fear, feminist theory, women's studies, and, in particular, the politics of women's health. I am greatly indebted to friends and colleagues who helped me along at various stages including (in alphabetical order) Robert Humanick, Eleanor Linn, Bob Mayer, Karla Morales, Laurie Naranch, Gary Olson, Miguelina Ortiz, Martha Reid, Joanna Vecchiarelli Scott, Lyman Tower Sargent, Joel Wingard, and Elizabeth Wingrove. Thanks go also to all those whose dedicated work inspires student writers and teachers of writing at the Gayle Morris Sweetland Writing Center at the University of Michigan, to helpful commentators at the Society for Utopian Studies' Annual Meeting in Toronto, to two anonymous reviewers at PS , and to three groups of students who shared their visions with me.

Living Under the Bell Jar: Surveillance and Resistance in Yevgeny Zamyatin's We

Abstract: Observation plays an increasingly significant role in twentiethcentury society as a means of regulation. In this regulatory function, observation manifests itself in the ubiquitous CCTV, traffic cameras and other surveillance techniques used to monitor and record the activities of ordinary citizens. One of the more alarming recent manifestations of the potential for all-pervasive surveillance is the announcement of the development of an urban surveillance system by the United States military, which 'would use computers and thousands of cameras to track, record and analyze the movement of every vehicle in a foreign city,' and which could potentially be used by governments on their own citizens.1 The dramatic increase of surveillance in the twentieth-century has also been matched by an increase of voyeuristic entertainment, exemplified by the Orwellian titled television game show Big Brother. The entertainment value of voyeuristic surveillance has arguably rendered individuals more accepting of regulatory surveillance in their personal lives. This trend towards increasing surveillance coupled with a citizenry inured to a constant invasion of its privacy has formed the basis for a number of twentieth-century dystopian novels and films, such as George Orwell's 1984 (1949), George Lucas's THX-1138 (1971), Stephen King's The Running Man (1982), Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998), Kurt Wimmer 's Equilibrium (2002) and the Warchowski brothers' Matrix trilogy (1999-2003). The widely acknowledged forerunner of these works, however, was a novel, We, written in 1921 by the Russian author, Yevgeny Zamyatin.2 Zamyatin's concerns about the power of vision in regulating society and individuals have been shared by twentieth-century cultural theorists such as Michel Foucault and Laura Mulvey. Paradoxically, while Zamyatin's novel suggests that surveillance in the hands of the state is a mechanism for regulating, and perhaps even for destroying © CS 2005

The dangers of fighting terrorism with technocommunitarianism: constitutional protections of free expression, exploration, and unmonitored activity in urban spaces

Abstract: The narrower the circle to which we commit ourselves, the less freedom of individuality we possess.... In a narrow circle, one can preserve one's individuality, as a rule, in only two ways. Either one leads the circle (it is for this reason that strong personalities like to be "number one in the village"), or one exists in it. only externally, being independent of it in all essential matters. --Georg Simmel, Group Expansion and the Development of Individuality (1) INTRODUCTION The cult television series "The Prisoner" tells the story of a man who, after losing and then regaining consciousness, opens the blinds of his London flat to find that the world outside has undergone a Kafkaesque transformation: the skyscrapers and city streets visible from his window have been replaced with a small and serene village. (2) Accompanying this stark change in his external environment is a sharp decrease in his freedom. Whereas his life in London was his own, he discovers upon venturing out into the village (3) that his decisions and actions are now community property. He is watched everywhere he goes both by neighbors and hidden cameras. (4) He is expected to be an enthusiastic participant in all communal events, and is ostracized as "unmutual" when he instead seeks out privacy and seclusion. (5) The town's authorities are intent on ensuring that residents cannot opt out of village life: quaint taxis transport people within the village, but never outside of it; phone service is strictly local; maps at the village store show nothing beyond the community's boundaries. (6) Each showing of independence or defiance by the protagonist brings strong pressure from the authorities to fully account for (and recant) his actions. (7) In short, his familiar urban life is replaced with a communitarian dystopia, hostile to privacy and deeply suspicious of every act of individuality. (8) The story of environmental shock depicted in this television series has also made an appearance in sociological observation. Decades ago, one of the founders of sociology, Georg Simmel, imagined what it would be like for an inhabitant of a modern metropolis to be suddenly lifted out of his urban existence and dropped into the smaller and more confining world of an ancient or medieval village. The modern city dweller, said Simmel, "could not even breathe under such conditions." (9) He could not tolerate the "limits upon [his] movements" or the restrictions on "his relationships with the outside world." (10) Nor could he suffer the loss of the "inner independence and differentiation" that would accompany such a shift from the city to a close knit, loyalty-demanding community. (11) While such an environment may have seemed tolerable to individuals born and bred within its confines, it would be insufferable, said Simmel, to anyone who long enjoyed the individual freedom made possible by the anonymity and incomparable diversity of modern city life. This modern urban environment, he stressed, provides individuals with a "type and degree of personal freedom to which there is no analogy in other circumstances." (12) In the limited space of a small village, one can express individuality only when acting as a leader, as the "number one" figure "in the village," or when "exist[ing] in it only externally [as an outcast]." (13) By contrast, in city life, the multitude of options and the indifference of neighbors provide people with plenty of room to follow their own unique paths while still being part and parcel of the larger urban community. As E.B White has written in his celebration of New York, city life can thus blend "the gift of privacy with the excitement of participation." (14) But if the unparalleled individual freedom one gains in urban anonymity is deeply valued, is it also constitutionally protected? If municipal or state governments decide, for example, that the extensive freedom and anonymity provided by modern city life not only provides valuable room for individuality, but also worrisome hiding space for terrorists or criminals, can they take measures to "roll back" some of this unmonitored space? …

"Read Your Fall": The Signs of Plague in "The Last Man"

Abstract: How are we then to understand the message on each leaf, the doubly inscribed leaf that forces us from the botanical realm of organic continuity to that of the written text: how are we to read this volume of scattered pages? --Carol Jacobs on Percy Shelley's Prometheus Unbound (1) MARY SHELLEY'S THE LAST MAN, BEGUN IN 1824 AND PUBLISHED IN 1826, embraces a confluence of narratives that resists an interpretative closure or categorization: combining tales of multiple love-triangles, political debates, psychological struggles, historical vignettes, records of war, bits of travelogues, the text is cast as a dystopian vision invoking a classical myth. In addition, the novel enfolds the author's psychological state into the fabric of the narrative: the "Sibyline" prophecy of the war-torn, plague-ridden, desolate earth prophesied in the text reflects Mary Shelley's emotional inscape as she mourned Percy's death, a loss which threatened her sense of human agency. The novel's formal hybridity also calls into question various thematic or conceptual boundaries and fixed identities, including those of self, gender, class, race, religion, and nationality. The phantasmatic coalescing of personal tragedy with the apocalyptic extinction of humanity destabilizes hierarchical power dynamics and nullifies any illusory hope for humanistic redemption. In light of such a textual explosion, it may be helpful to attempt to examine the rhetorical devices and ideological impulses that underpin the web of reality and fantasy, history and vision, destabilizing drives and (un-)conscious elisions. With the premise of apocalypse, the text relentlessly insists on radical freedom through the "decomposing figure" of the plague, "the vast annihilation that has swallowed all things--the voiceless solitude of the once busy earth" (193). (2) Despite the text's almost transcendental leap beyond fixed identities, however, the political unconscious of racialized British-Eurocentrism persists. This paper investigates the conjuncture, equivocation, and explosion of these two aspects. On the one hand, the textual deconstruction of human agency (the autonomy of the consciousness-of-the-self) in general and the British nationalist subject in particular propel the narrative towards the apocalyptic fall of the human race. On the other hand, the remnants of British white subjectivity manifest in racialized configurations of color. In other words, The Last Man's textual insights into the limits of (British, Eurocentric, Western, white) consciousness through the dystopian prophecy of the borderless society coexist with its blindness to a racial ideology that appropriates different races to maintain a wholesome oneness. Examining an array of textual figuration and disfiguration, this paper locates historically-specific, ideological moments couched in the futurist narrative of the post-human perspective and the textual rhetoricity of its delimitation. Crossing Boundaries, Annihilating Identities The text is not a co-existence of meanings but a passage, an overcrossing: thus it answers not to an interpretation, even a liberal one, but an explosion, a dissemination. --Roland Barthes, "From Work to Text" In The Last Man, plague is set up as the "other" to the logic and concomitant social relations that exist in the late 21st century, when the story begins, and it unleashes numerous literal and figurative boundary-crossings. The boundaries crossed have been essential to maintaining Eurocentric domination and conquest. When the plague breaks out, characters repeatedly assert that a breach has been made and that the Rubicon has been crossed (188). The plague rapidly breaks loose various fixed identities or dynamics, unsettling, dislocating, and displacing the existing chain of identities and events. (3) With the plague, England's historical antagonism against Ireland and ambivalence towards America are displaced by awareness of humanity's common bond. …

Fantastic Visions: On the Necessity of Feminist Utopian Narrative

Abstract: ii

"Great Reformation in the Manners of Mankind": Utopian Thought in the Scottish Reformation and Enlightenment *

Abstract: allegedly "unfashionable" nature of Utopian thought. Davis has commented that in the second half of the twentieth century Utopias, and thoughts about ideal societies in general, passed out of intellectual fashion (L. Davis 56?57). On the face of things this appears to be an assertion with much to support it. From George Orwell's dystopia of Nineteen Eighty-Four to the liberal critiques of utopianism provided by Berlin, Hayek, Popper and others, the focus in the recent past has been on criticism of the notion of Utopia and the project of Utopia formation. The main reason that Utopian thought went out of fashion was the link drawn between utopianism and the totalitarian regimes that blighted the twentieth century. Berlin and Popper argued that Utopian thought necessarily opened the door to totalitarianism because the very act of imagining an ideal society created the temptation to reach it at any cost (Berlin 15; Popper 357). It is not the aim of this article to take issue with this view, or plunge into the debate surrounding it. Rather what it will attempt to do is to show that this passing from fashion is not without precedent. Indeed the reason why Utopias passed out of favour in the twentieth century, namely their being tainted by association with a totalitarian desire to implement plans for an ideal society, is paralleled by a previous passing from fashion of Utopian thought which occurred in Scodand in the century between 1640 and 1740. As a result it is possible to draw a parallel between the criticism of Utopia by a twentieth-century figure such as Popper and that of an eighteenth-century figure such as Hume.