Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2007"

The Ends of America, the Ends of Postmodernism

Abstract: If Los Angeles is the city that taught us how to be postmodern, might it also be the place where we begin to imagine what comes after? For well over 30 years, the architecture, demographics, lifestyles, and indus tries of Southern California have inspired countless essays and books on the nature and significance of postmodernity. Hollywood, Disneyland, the elevators at the Westin Bonaventure Hotel, the futuristic cityscapes of Ridley Scott's Blade Runner, freeways, suburbs, shopping malls: these have become touchstones for some of the most influential reflections on the subject of American-and often global-postmodernism.1 Thomas Pynchon wrote of the alienating, dystopian elements of postmodern California in his 1966 The Crying of Lot 49, where he described the road as a "hypodermic needle, inserted somewhere ahead into the vein of the freeway, a vein nourishing the mainliner L.A., keeping it happy, coherent, protected from pain, or whatever passes, with a city, for pain" (15). In the paranoid imaginings of his protagonist Oedipa Maas, traffic is an endless automated flow; the freeway exists less to facilitate human movement than to feed a city that craves only numbing, drug-induced happiness. Oedipa is little more than a pawn in a system too vast to be fully perceived or understood. Fast forward 30 years to Tropic of Orange by Karen TeiYamashita, where the Los Angeles freeways are described by Manzanar, a man who gave up his home and his career as a surgeon to become a "conductor" of the vast symphony of urban life. As he stands on an overpass, "the great flow of humanity [runs] below and beyond his feet in every direction, pumping and pulsating, that blood connection, the great heartbeat of a great city" (35). Like Pynchon,Yamashita uses meta

Brazil on Screen: Cinema Novo, New Cinema, Utopia

Abstract: Two periods of Brazilian film history are particularly notable for their artistic momentum: the Cinema Novo movement of the 1960s and early '70s, and the film revival from the mid 1990s onwards What makes them especially strong, this book argues, is their utopian impulse By adopting Utopia as a theme, as well as a method of film analysis, Lucia Nagib unveils, organises and interprets a fascinating wealth of recurrent images, which are a bridge between a cinema strongly concerned with the national project and another informed by global culture Outstanding recent films, such as "Central Station", "Perfumed Ball", "Hans Staden", "Orfeu", "City of God" and "The Trespasser", are illuminated by Nagib's sharp analysis, which detects utopian, anti-utopian and even dystopian impulses in them They are at once representatives of a political arena in constant struggle against underdevelopment and legitimate (as well as critical) heirs of past cinematic traditions Throwing new light on a large selection of Cinema Novo and contemporary films, this book thus presents a national cinema that rejects the end of history and of film history, while benefiting from, and contributing to, a new transnational aesthetics

Technological World‐Pictures

Abstract: Martin Heidegger’s notion of things as gatherings that disclose a world conveys the “thickness” of everyday objects. This essay extends his discussion of things—part of a sustained criticism of modern technology—to technological objects as well. As a corrective to his totalizing, even totalitarian, generalizations about “enframing” and “the age of the world‐picture,” and to a more widespread tendency among critics of modernity to present technology in only the most dystopian, uniform, and claustrophobic terms, this essay explores two species of technical object: cosmic things and cosmograms. The first suggests how an ordinary object may contain an entire cosmos, the second how a cosmos may be treated as just another thing. These notions are proposed as a basis for comparison and connection between “the industrial world” and other modes of ordering the universe.

Scientific Contribution Brave New World versus Island - Utopian and Dystopian Views on Psychopharmacology

Abstract: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World is a famous dystopia, frequently called upon in public discussions about new biotechnology. It is less well known that 30 years later Huxley also wrote a utopian novel, called Island. This paper will discuss both novels focussing especially on the role of psychophar- macological substances. If we see fiction as a way of imagining what the world could look like, then what can we learn from Huxley's novels about psychopharmacology and how does that relate to the discussion in the ethical and philosophical literature on this subject? The paper argues that in the current ethical discussion the dystopian vision on psychopharmacology is dominant, but that a comparison between Brave New World and Island shows that a more utopian view is possible as well. This is illustrated by a discussion of the issue of psychopharmacology and authenticity. The second part of the paper draws some further conclusions for the ethical debate on psychopharmacology and human enhancement, by comparing the novels not only with each other, but also with our present reality. It is claimed that the debate should not get stuck in an opposition of dystopian and utopian views, but should address important issues that demand attention in our real world: those of evaluation and governance of enhancing psychopharmacological substances in democratic, pluralistic societies.

Brave New World versus Island--utopian and dystopian views on psychopharmacology.

Abstract: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World is a famous dystopia, frequently called upon in public discussions about new biotechnology. It is less well known that 30 years later Huxley also wrote a utopian novel, called Island. This paper will discuss both novels focussing especially on the role of psychopharmacological substances. If we see fiction as a way of imagining what the world could look like, then what can we learn from Huxley’s novels about psychopharmacology and how does that relate to the discussion in the ethical and philosophical literature on this subject? The paper argues that in the current ethical discussion the dystopian vision on psychopharmacology is dominant, but that a comparison between Brave New World and Island shows that a more utopian view is possible as well. This is illustrated by a discussion of the issue of psychopharmacology and authenticity. The second part of the paper draws some further conclusions for the ethical debate on psychopharmacology and human enhancement, by comparing the novels not only with each other, but also with our present reality. It is claimed that the debate should not get stuck in an opposition of dystopian and utopian views, but should address important issues that demand attention in our real world: those of evaluation and governance of enhancing psychopharmacological substances in democratic, pluralistic societies.

Dystopian Visions of Global Capitalism: Philip Reeve’s Mortal Engines and M.T Anderson’s Feed

Abstract: This article examines Philip Reeve’s novel for children, Mortal Engines, and M.T. Anderson’s young adult novel, Feed, by assessing these dystopias as prototypical texts of what Ulrich Beck calls risk society. Through their visions of a fictional future, the two narratives explore the hazards created by contemporary techno-economic progress, predatory global politics and capitalist excesses of consumption. They implicitly pose the question: “In the absence of a happy ending for western civilisation, what kind of children can survive in dystopia?”

Gender and Utopia in the Eighteenth Century : Essays in English and French Utopian Writing

Abstract: Contents: Introduction, Nicole Pohl and Brenda Tooley Utopian exchanges: negotiating difference in Utopia, Lee Cullen Khanna A fragile utopia of sensibility: David Simple, Joseph F. Bartolomeo Gothic utopia: heretical sanctuary in Ann Radcliffe's The Italian, Brenda Tooley Rewriting Rousseau: Isabelle de CharriAre's domestic dystopia, Caroline Weber Utopia in the seraglio: feminist hermeneutics and Montesquieu's Lettres Persanes, Mary McAlpin Transparency and the enlightenment body: utopian space in Sarah Scott's Millenium Hall and de Sade's The 120 Days of Sodom, Ana M. Acosta 'Emperess of the world': gender and the voyage utopia, Nicole Pohl 'A man might find every thing in your country': improvement, patriarchy and gender in Robert Paltock's The Life and Adventures of Peter Wilkins, Elizabeth Hagglund and Jonathan Laidlow Generating regenerated generations: race, kinship and sexuality in Henry Neville's Isle of Pines, (1668) Seth Denbo Thinking globally, acting locally: enlightenment utopianism for 21st-century feminists?, Alessa Johns Works cited Index.

Transgressive Utopian Dystopias: The Postmodern Reappearance of Utopia in the Disguise of Dystopia

Abstract: With utopia's heyday of the second half of the 19th century long gone with only a momentary flare up as feminist utopia in the 1970s, utopian literature seems to remain in limbo. Indeed, many critics have agreed upon a diminished belief in a potentially better world if not upon the disappearance of utopian literature and the impossibility of utopian thought altogether. Yet utopia is very much alive: it has reappeared in the disguise of novels, initially set as dystopias, predominantly in the contemporary feminist dystopias of the past twenty to thirty years. These 'transgressive utopian dystopias' resist neat categorizations of utopia/dystopia; rather, they present utopian strategies as integral part of the dystopian narrative. While the described dys- topian societies are riven by manifold dualisms, the suggested utopian impulses aim at their transgression. These utopian strategies can be single glimpses of hope, as Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake (2003) illustrates, or contain the very downfall or subversion of dystopia and the actual process of building utopia, as in Suzy McKee Charnas's Holdfast tetralogy (1974-1999).

Hobbes in the City: Urban Dystopias in American Movies

Abstract: The year is 2032. The state is your nanny. Anything that is not good for you is illegal: beef, drugs, alcohol, sex, cigarettes, fattening foods. You get fined for cursing. Though there is an underground underclass, most people are so mellow that there is virtually no crime, and the few criminals are never violent. This is the Southern California megalopolis of San Angeles in Demolition Man (1993). In 1996 renegade cop John Spartan captures psycho drug lord Simon Phoenix, but not before being held responsible for the deaths of twenty or so hostages. Both men are sentenced to cryonic imprisonment, where they are to be rehabilitated to mend their ways. During their frozen slumber, Los Angeles merges with San Diego and Santa Barbara after the "big one of 2010" to become San Angeles, a metropolis made blissful by the rule of a self-styled benevolent despot, one Dr. Cocteau. "The people," he says, "just wanted the madness over," and what he wants is "to create the perfect society-San Angeles will be a beacon of order." The doctor's only problem is an underground rebel, the libertarian leader of the Scraps, who from his lairs in fetid sewers and tunnels struggles to bring back the good old days of high fat, nicotine, and open pornography. When Phoenix escapes, kills seventeen San Angelenos, and allies himself with the Scrap leader, Spartan is defrosted to eradicate the menace. Lighthearted mayhem and murder ensue. Nearly everything about San Angeles is extreme. Its expanse is gigantic. Its rulers are oppressive. Its outlaws are evil. Its technology, above all, is stunning and omnipresent. It is what is extreme about San Angeles that draws us to it, much as we pay special attention to persons who are seven feet tall or have mauve hair. The city of extremes, the movie suggests, may be the city of the future ... and the extremes are all negative. In the movies, of course, the extreme is typical: actors are proverbially handsome and beautiful, explosions approximate the Big Bang, chases are heart pounding and ear splitting. In place of the ordinary, where we live our ordinary lives, movies present the extreme. It is no wonder, then, that cinematic cities of the future are extreme. Why, however, are the extremes almost never positive-that is, utopias? Utopias represent ideals, that is, endpoints, where nearly everything that ought to be done has been done. The problem with all utopias is stasis; the problem with all utopia movies is boredom. Movies need movement, change, and conflict, whether emotional or physical. Hence, the appeal of the standard dystopian scenario of a brave band of brothers (and sometimes sisters) in combat with their hellish world. The reel city of the future is Hobbesian. Its dystopias generally are of two kinds: one portrays cities as places of chaos and disorder, whose inhabitants live in a state of nature where none is safe from the depredations of their fellows. The other depicts cities as Leviathans, imposing order and stability in response to the ineradicable human drive for security. Utopias and America "In the beginning," declared John Locke, "all the world was America" (319), and in America, the future has nearly always looked good. America, a new country in the New World, often biblically described as a new Eden or a new Jerusalem (Pike) promised a new beginning for what de Crevecoeur famously called "this new man" (39). Hope, adventure, opportunity-everything pointed to the potential that lay somewhere over the rainbow. In the years before the Civil War, a few idealists, drawing on Christian or European socialism, sought to establish small scale communities that they fancied could serve as models of justice and harmony for the larger society. These included the well-known religious communities of Hopedale, Brook Farm, and Oneida, as well as Robert Owen's New Harmony and the Fourierist North American Phalanx. None of these Utopian experiments was attempted in cities. …

The Critical Role of Art: Adorno between Utopia and Dystopia

Abstract: In the drama of conscious existence, it is not theory and practice that encounter each other, but enigma and transparency, phenomenon and insight. If enlightenment does occur, it does so no through the establishment of a dictatorship of lucidity but as the dramatic self-illumination of existence. – Peter Sloterdijk

Reversing the Grand tour: Guest discourse in Indian travel narratives

Abstract: In this article, Julie F. Codell examines the rhetorical turns and themes of travel accounts written in the late nineteenth century by Indian travelers to Europe, demonstrating how their "guest" narratives structured comparisons between Britain and India in particular, comparisons that at once sublimated and remained invisible to imperial power relationships. The essay shows the way in which these travelers "wrote back" to the genre of travel accounts by appropriating, reversing, and ironizing its conventions-including its ethnographic posture, the aristocratic Grand Tour, and the celebration of hospitality-as well as its specific vocabulary. Seeing Britain as at once utopia and dystopia, these writers projected an empowering atopia, which allowed them to imagine the future of India.

The Post-Southern Sense of Place in "The Road"

Abstract: Cormac work contribution has McCarthy's always to his had most imaginative a complex recent relationship novel construction makes with another of the the foundational South. significant His contribution to his imaginative construction of the South. His work has lways h d a omplex relationship wi h h foundational myths of Southern literature, typified by his interest in history and community, and his attachment to (and depiction of) place, which is such a pronounced theme of the region's literature. Far from signaling an exhaustion of such characteristically Southern and, for that matter, American mythic and imaginative categories, I maintain that The Road succeeds in re-invigorating them, albeit in keeping with the dystopian ideological moment of the novel's composition and publication. The Road is a typically paradoxical McCarthy novel in that it both invites and frustrates interpretation, operating on various aesthetic, ideological, allegorical and stylistic levels. I must also address an irony which arises out of attempting to frame a post-apocalyptic, dystopian novel in such potentially mythic terms. The ideological determinants for such an imaginative vision are simply too vast to be addressed in this paper, but there are causes aplentythe dystopian sensibility which has informed the nation's imaginative consciousness in the aftermath of September 1 1th, the sorry mess of a war in Iraq which constitutes a grim episode in the history of American exceptionalism, the specter of global warming and ecological disaster, and the implications of economic globalization and trans-nationalism. And yet in The Road McCarthy reclaims a sense of mythic space for Southern and American literature, especially with regard to his inscription of the myth of the frontier. In order to establish the mythic concerns of The Road , I will focus on the work of Brian Jarvis who, in Postmodern Cartographies , explores the continued geocentric preoccupation of much American literature. I will also model my discussion of post-Southerness around the definition of the term provided by Martyn Bone in The Postsouthern Sense of Place in Contemporary Fiction. Far from suggesting an exhaustion with the fundamental mythic concerns of Southern literature, Bone reveals how many contemporary [post] Southern novelists are deeply concerned with them, and how they go on to offer complex meditations on such ideas. In order to further explicate such concepts, I'd like to offer a comparative analysis of a novel which conforms to the post-Southern paradigm which Bone offers, namely Richard Ford's The Lay of the Land , the final instalment of the Frank Bascombe trilogy. In his seminal study Postmodern Cartographies , Jarvis is essentially concerned with establishing whether the traditional geocentric concern of much American literature, film and cultural theory in the postmodern phase represents a decisive break with previous imaginative and critical offerings. Jarvis The Cormac McCarthy Journal 48

The new China: big brother, brave new world or harmonious society?

Abstract: In this paper I examine three textual mythologies regarding China's evolving present. These are an Orwellian world of covert and overt state control; a Brave New World dystopia where the spirit of the people is subsumed in hedonistic distractions; and finally I assess the progress towards the official vision of the current Beijing authorities: the ”harmonious society”. These three ”pulls” of the future are juxtaposed with certain key ”pushes” and ”weights”, and I explore their interplay within a ”futures triangle”. Finally, I suggest whether any of these mythologies is likely play a significant role in the possible futures of China.

Writing in an Age of Silence

Abstract: In this powerful book, Sara Paretsky explores the traditions of political and literary dissent that have informed her life and work, against the unparalleled repression of free speech and thought in the US today. In tracing the writer's difficult journey from silence to speech, she turns to her childhood and youth in rural Kansas, and brilliantly evokes Chicago - the city with which she has become indelibly associated - from her arrival during the Civil Rights struggle in the mid-1960s to her most extraordinary literary creation, the South Side detective V.I. Warshawski. Paretsky traces the emergence of V.I. Warshawski from the shadows of the loner detectives that stalk the mean streets of Dashiell Hammett's and Raymond Chandler's novels, and in the process explores American individualism, the failure of the American dream, and the resulting dystopia. Both memoir and meditation, "Writing in an Age of Silence" is a compelling exploration of the writer's art and daunting responsibility in the face of the assault on US civil liberties post-9/11.

"Whether Beast or Human": the Cultural Legacies of Dread, Locks, and Dystopia.

Abstract: Analyzing the ongoing problem of Caribbean racial exploitation, particularly fear signified through one of the most potent Caribbean symbols, dreadlocks, I argue that Medusa's alterity is altered by Rastafarians' snake-like hair, but the transformative power of Rasta dreadlocks is contested through certain cinematic depictions of dread.

The land of ‘gender paradox’? Getting past the commonsense of contemporary Kerala

Abstract: ‘Gender paradox’ in Kerala refers to the ‘contradiction’ whereby women’s high showing in socio‐demographic indicators of development exists simultaneously with their low public participation and the increasing incidence of violence upon them. Given that ‘gender paradox’ has become the overwhelming context for imagining women in Kerala today, this paper seeks to examine its anatomy. The paper argues that there are two divergent descriptions of contemporary Kerala which circulate with comparable energy – Kerala as utopia and as dystopia. Theorisations of paradox bring these two worlds together, but without having sufficiently reckoned with their internal dynamics. Consequently, the paper explores the interiors of these worlds. It examines utopia through two discrete, yet intersecting social discourses – (a) the Kerala model of development and (b) tourism. It then proceeds to examine dystopia through the discourses around AIDS and sexual violence, which tend to be configured in analogous ways. The p...

Tocqueville's Virus: Utopia and Dystopia in Western Social and Political Thought

Abstract: Introduction: Tocqueville's Virus Part I: Ancients and Moderns 1. Freedom and Tyranny in Socrates and Plato 2. Friends, Enemies, and the Cosmology of Power Politics 3. The Mechanisation of Society and the Pathologies of the Self Part II: The Madness of Modernity 4. Modernity and Schizophrenia 5. Autism, Paranoia, Critique Part III: Totalitarianism 6. Arendt's Theory of Totalitarianism 7. Arendt's Paranoia Critique of Modernity. Conclusion: America, Nation of the Edge. Bibliography

Dystopian wor(l)ds: language within and beyond experience

Abstract: This thesis examines language in a range of modern and contemporary dystopian literary fiction, and argues for a reinterpretation of Whorfian linguistics as a means of advancing understanding of the dystopian genre's acknowledged propensity to influence the habitual world-view of its readership. Using close stylistic analysis, and with an emphasis on textual patterning, it identifies and examines two distinct and characteristic `languages' of dystopia, and considers the ways in which these discourses contribute to linguistic relativity as a dynamic process in the reading of these fictions. Chapter one defines more precisely the literary genre of dystopia, particularly in relation to notions of space and time, and emphasises the genre's necessary participation in the socio-historical circumstances of its conception and production (the site of a discourse here termed reflective language). The (re)placement of these environments in a futuristic setting is also examined and is shown to be marked by a second discourse, termed speculative language. Chapter two outlines the theoretical foundations of the study and supports its positioning at the interface between the study of language and the study of literature by drawing on theories from both disciplines to orient its subsequent analyses. In this chapter, the concept of linguistic relativity, or Whorfianism, is re-figured as a process intrinsic to the reading of dystopian narratives, and is combined with the more literary critical theory of cognitive estrangement. In order to maintain focus on the reader-text relationship, and to locate the analyses from a readerly perspective, some common, or `folklinguistic', beliefs about translatability and the `inadequacy' of language are also invoked. Chapters three, four, and five are devoted to case studies: chapter three discusses the non-Newspeak speculative language in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and chapter four begins with an analysis of reflective language in the same novel before looking at three other twentieth-century dystopian texts (Katherine Burdekin's Swastika Night, L. P. Hartley's Facial Justice, and Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale). Chapter five brings together speculative and reflective language in its consideration of Atwood's Oryx and Crake, which also serves to bring this study into the twenty-first century. A summary and conclusions follow in chapter six.

Apocalypse and dystopia in contemporary Italian writing

Abstract: "To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road. Men’s curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension". (T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (212).) Eliot here embraces several common elements of what we might understand by ‘apocalypse’. The original Greek term is concerned with ‘revealing’, with searching “past and future”, the better to understand what has happened and will happen. Yet although St John’s book of Revelation is concerned primarily with explaining his eschatological vision of the ‘last things’, both to encourage the early Church (of final reward) and to act as a stern warning (against increasing corruption and apostasy), it is the powerful notion of the violent or cataclysmic end of all things that has persisted and most influenced our perception of ‘apocalypse’ through the ages, as represented in literature. Dystopia, a term of relatively recent coinage (although the concept itself is not new), is closely linked with apocalypse—as indeed with its opposite, or the imagined ideal, utopia—all terms featuring prominently in contemporary fiction and discourse: the last twenty years have seen a spate of books, plays and films with ‘apoca-lyptic’ themes and/or titles, as also of scholarly essays seeking to represent or explain some aspect of our world in terms of the biblical prophecy.

Utopia, Dystopia or Anti-utopia? Gulliver's Travels and the Utopian Mode of Discourse

Abstract: Should his tall tales of marvellous voyages, newly discovered peoples, and fantastic societies be insufficient to call Thomas Mores Utopia (1516), and Utopian writings in general, to his reader s mind, "Lemuel Gulliver" refers to Utopia direcdy in a letter to his cousin printed with the second edition (1735) of his Traveh into Several Remote Nations of the World (familiarly know as Gulliver's Travels)-.

The Visualisation of Utopia in Recent Science Fiction Film

Abstract: Utopia can be conceived as a possibility - a space within language, a set of principles, or the product of technological development - but it can-not be separated from questions of place, or more accurately, questions of "no place." In between the theoretically imaginable utopia and its realisation in a particular time and place, there is a space of critique, which is exploited in anti-Utopian and critical dystopian narratives. In Science Fiction narratives of this kind, technology is responsible for the transformation of the utopian impulse into a set of principles that are precisely stated and rigidly enforced. The critique focuses on the impossibility, due to the reductive force of instrumental reason, of any systematic realisation of a eutopia where the positive qualities of freedom, individualism and creativity are nurtured. The films Minority Report, directed by Steven Spielberg (Dreamworks, 2002), and Gattaca, written and directed by Andrew Niccol (Columbia, 1997), both examine utopian claims through speculation on the possible future use of current technologies, the tools of crime investigation and the genome project respectively. However, an examination of the plot cannot attend sufficiently to the particular properties of film and how it, as a medium, constructs utopia as a place. This article aims to address this issue by examining how technologically derived images of utopia are realised in the visual space of film, that is, on the level of the mise en scene. These images are often dystopian but the distinction between dystopia and eutopia is not crucial to the argument, because the aim is not to return utopianism to its place at the vanguard of progressive politics, nor to reject utopianism on the basis that it is unrealisable, but rather to examine how technology and utopianism can combine in the visual language of film. My concern here is to investigate how utopia is conceived according to the specific features of the medium rather than to present an overarching narrative judgement as to the value of utopian principles. In Gattaca, the utopianism of a genetically determined future is reproduced in the mise en scene as a set of aesthetic principles, whereas in Minority Report the utopian technology itself resembles the apparatus of film. This involves two quite different approaches to the visualisation of utopia: in Gattaca, utopia is embodied in a society in which there can be "no other place," realised through the subtraction or reduction of visual difference; in Minority Report, utopia is an expression of a panoptic regime that can incorporate all visual and cultural difference such that the visible is "every place."

A New Home in the World: Scottish Devolution, Nomadic Writing, and Supranational Citizenshipin Julie Bertagna's Exodus and Zenith

Abstract: In The Modern Scottish Novel Cairns Craig identifies narrative as a chief driving force in forging the historical trajectory of a nation's collective psyche. He says, "the imagination is the medium through which the nation's past is valued, and through which the nation's values are collected, recollected and projected into the future" (Craig 10). Craig comments not only on the mutual narrative imbrication of individual and communal lives, but also on the willingness of individuals to give the welfare of the nation priority over their own personal interests, to the extent of seeing their own life-story assimilated into the narrative of the nation: "People would act and would sacrifice themselves for the national good in ways that they would never act or sacrifice themselves for purely personal ends," Craig writes, "because the narrative of the nation and the narrative of their own existence are imaginatively intertwined" (10) He concludes by stressing the crucial necessity for any people or nation to be in possession of a historical narrative lest they risk losing themselves "in the expectation or the angst of knowing that the future will be necessarily different from the present" (11). In order to sustain a viable, identity-bearing present-past-future continuum a nation needs a communal story "by which a possible route towards that future can be charted without loss of continuity with a founding past" (Craig 11). Although Craig's comments were originally made with reference to adult fiction, his statements apply equally to contemporary writing for children, especially the young-adult fiction that engages more or less explicitly with post-devolution Scottish cultural politics and the impact devolution has inevitably had, and is continuing to have, on Scotland's project of forging a national identity. In this article I intend to demonstrate the ways Scottish children's author Julie Bertagna's novels Exodus (2002) and Zenith (2007) offer an exploration of post-devolution Scotland's through potential for devising a new kind of national self-determination through the medium of young-adult fiction. Dramatizing Craig's vision of individuals acting for a sense of "national good" (10), Bertagna's 15-year-old heroine Mara Bell's destiny becomes fused with her people's. Conceived as the two parts of an ecological dystopia, Bertagna's novels express a particularly urgent need for "continuity with a founding past" (11) to counteract the traumatic presence of a New World in which the past has undergone "a culture of erasure" (Craig 19). Put differently, Bertagna's characters are on a mission to discover a link between their people's past and their own present predicament in order to create Scotland's future story. They chart "a possible route towards that future" in order "to find a new home in the world," which exists beyond insulating borders as a hybrid supranational world (Exodus 14). Bertagna's characters exceed Craig's notion of people sacrificing themselves for the nation's well-being; indeed, they go beyond national frontiers to embrace what I will call suprantional citizenship in an attempt to discover and accept the diversity and commonality of all humanity. Bertagna's portrayal of her imaginary Caledonia's future citizens mirrors the preoccupations of politicians in the new Holyrood Parliament debating changes to post-devolution Scottish social and cultural policy. Michael O'Neill says in Devolution and British Politics, far removed from a regressively nationalist dynamic, devolution is now seen "as entirely consistent with a hybrid liberal-progressive variant of social democracy ... receptive to new postmodern concerns about identity politics and cultural pluralism" (O'Neill 80-81). In O'Neill's view, Scottish devolution has introduced "a more cosmopolitan of prismatic concept of citizenship indicat[ive of] a new political climate" (368). Exodus imagines the nation as a cosmopolitan community insofar as Mara's people must recognize and tolerate cultural diversity in order to build a home for themselves that exceeds narrowly nationalist forms of allegiance and instead participates in a wider pluralistically organized world. …

Mystery Science Theater 3000, Media Consciousness, and the Postmodern Allegory of the Captive Audience

Abstract: IN 1985, ONE YEAR after the projected time of George Orwell's dystopian vision of totalitarianism, communications theorist Neil Postman surveyed the effect of television on American culture and concluded, in his not-so-subtly titled study of popular media, that we were Amusing Ourselves to Death.1 Postman argued that in the twentieth century, American discourse had experienced a "great media-metaphor shift" (16) in which the epistemological metaphor of the book (as an image of how best to understand things) has yielded to the epistemological metaphor of television. Because television does not (and essentially, due to its discontinuous, visual form, cannot) emphasize depth of knowledge or sustained reasoning, Postman demonstrated that this superficial epistemology trivializes newsgathering, religion, statesmanship, and education across the entirety of American culture. By its ubiquity and influence, television "has made entertainment itself the natural format for the representation of all experience" (87). Such knowledge as television fosters-and more importantly, the model of knowing that television makes one accustomed to-is "dangerous and absurdist" (27), even if that model has become the status quo of American culture. When, in his conclusion, the time comes to recommend solutions to the problems outlined in Amusing Ourselves to Death, Postman is predictably pessimistic. One solution, which he regards as absurd, is that television could somehow instruct its viewers on how to watch television critically and reject the passivity fostered by its incessant flow of easy, context-free images. In short, he posits the immensely remote and ultimately futile possibility that a television program could actually promote "media consciousness" (161) enough to get people to (in former FCC Commissioner Nicholas Johnson's words) "begin talking back at their television sets" (160). This would seem to require television programmers and marketers to act against their professional interests, by breaking the three commandments of effortless (almost noncognitive) entertainment that Postman sanctimoniously outlines: "thou shalt have no prerequisites" (147), "thou shalt induce no perplexity" (147), and "thou shalt avoid exposition like the ten plagues visited upon Egypt" (148). By the mid-1980s, however, cable television had, according to television historian Erik Barnouw, "suddenly changed the shape of American television" (496). Viewers once accustomed to perhaps ten channels now experienced a superabundance of channels, a forty-channel universe that included MTV, Nickelodeon, ESPN, and eventually, Comedy Central (nee the Comedy Channel) and that undermined the monopoly the three major broadcast networks had exercised through most of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s. In those relatively early days of basic cable television, original programming for the fledgling channets was far less slick and mainstream than it is now. Currently, most basic cable channels flex corporate-strength muscle and are in fact overwhelmingly financially interdependent with the now five major networks, which, for their part, have copied the commercially viable elements pioneered by the cable channels, so that now basic cable and network television are often practically indistinguishable. In 1982, though, cable stations, needing to fill massive blocks of programming and struggling with heavy start-up and infrastructure debts, often relied on reruns of syndicated network programs and movies (Barnouw 513; Mullen 130); in one of her chapter titles in The Rise of Cable Programming in the United States, Megan Mullen calls cable "Broadcast Television's Resource-Starved Imitator." So long as original programming was cheap, cable networks could offer alternatives to network television, alternatives that even dared to break the commandments of entertainment. For several years, Mystery Science Theater 3000 (MST3K) was just such an iconoclastic alternative-one predicated to a surprisingly effective degree on Postman's hopeless hope of media consciousness. …

From Owenite Socialism to Blairite Social-ism: Utopia and Dystopia in Robert Owen and New Labour

Abstract: In this paper we explore some of the enduring themes that arguably characterise Owen and Blair and their respective followers. While Owen and Blair are separated by two centuries, there is a considerable degree of coincidence in their approaches and agendas. New Labour sees itself as constructing a new Britain, a new welfare system and a Third Way approach to politics and the state, which is constructed as new in that it purports to ‘go beyond’ both ‘Old’ Labour and the Conservatives. As with Blair and New Labour, for Owen constructing a particular vision of ‘new’ society was an important objective. This ‘newness’ is reflected in his most famous icon, New Lanark, as well as in his ideas for a ‘new Society’ and a ‘New Moral World’. For both Owen and the Owenites, and Blair and New Labour, there is a shared effort to distance themselves from ‘past failures’ while projecting an image of the future, an attempt to construct a model or vision of what a ‘good’ society should look like. Here ideas of utopia and d...

Politik und Konvergenztechnologien in den USA

Abstract: The article deals with the relation between human enhancement promoted by Converging Technologies and the emergent Technopolitics of the 21st Century as it can be observed in the US. The camp of the opponents of an Enhancement of human performance by technical means refers to Huxley’s Dystopia “Brave New World”, whereas the supporters of the vision of such a New Man derive their picture of the future society from Bacon’s “New Atlantis”. In his conclusion the author advocates the thesis, that the scientific technical progress must take place on condition that there is a balance between the biological and the socio-cultural nature of human beings.

"Get Your Map of America": Tempering Dystopia and Learning Topography in The Plot Against America

Abstract: Ever since Neil Klugman speculated in the opening pages of Goodbye, Columbus (1959) that the drive up to the hills of the Newark suburbs might bring one "closer to heaven," Philip Roth has made the frustration of longings for utopia one of his major themes. (1) Especially since his American trilogy, Roth's critics have been rightly preoccupied with his application of anti-utopian and anti-pastoral thinking to increasingly large swaths of American history, his critique of what Ross Posnock identifies as his characters' drive to "exist in a mythic yesteryear, creating a national fantasy." (2) The American trilogy critiques a postwar cast of, as Murray says in I Married a Communist (1998), "utopianists." These include believers in socialism like Murray's brother Ira, but also non-ideological dreamers like Ira's wife Eve, whose desire for the perfect home needs, according to Roth, "a dose of life's dung." (3) Swede Levov's hope for domestic stability in American Pastoral (1997) calls for a similar dose. Roth always insists on making messy experience overwhelm any attempt to retreat to an absolving locale: Faunia's dirty mop water and Les's violent mind give the lie to the "pure and peaceful" image, as The Human Stain (2000) ends, of a fisherman alone on a lake "constantly turning over its water atop an Arcadian mountain in America. " (4) But though (as Nathan Zuckerman emphatically concludes in Communist) "[t]here are no utopias" and (as his wife does in The Counterlife) "[t]he pastoral is not your genre," Roth has not developed in his work the seemingly most natural "counterlife" to utopia, a dystopian social order. His turn to the pogroms and pro-Nazi Lindbergh presidency of The Plot Against America (2004) does seem to signal such a deployment of the dystopian. (5) But it turns out that dystopia isn't Roth's genre either; some purity is mixed in with the dung. For all the "perpetual fear" it evinces, The Plot, in its concentration on familial strength and a resilient boyhood consciousness, depicts an unexpectedly limited and tempered dystopia, dwelling less on American Nazis and Jewish persecution than on the sentimental idealization of his childhood Newark as an "inviolate haven" that Roth confessed to in The Facts (1988). (6) I argue here that Roth's neutralizing refusal to grant either utopian or dystopian extreme full sway leads him to a newly enriched interest in the simply topographical. The Plot mediates its dark materials of global conspiratorial plotting and race hatred by illuminating a child's more mundane and localized acts of plotting--his participatory mapping of his surroundings and his out-of-school "education" in how to regard the vast nation of which he knows himself to be a part but which he cannot fully fathom (101). Following on Roth's well-established interest in illiterates learning to read, young Philip undergoes an initiation into cartographic literacy, a term I borrow from historian of geography David Matless, who links it to the modern subject's mature conception of citizenship. (7) Engaging a dramatic political extreme of the sort his work has so often scrupulously avoided in depicting the U.S., Roth re-investigates the discursive means by which home links to homeland in the American mind. Dystopian fiction tends to "demonstrate the push and pull between utopian and dystopian perspectives," according to Erika Gottlieb's comparison of dystopias from democracies and totalitarian states between 1920 and 1991. "[E]ach dystopian society contains within it seeds of a utopian dream." (8) Kristan Kumar writes in a similar vein that anti-utopia and dystopia are "one side of a dialogue of the self with individuals who have been indelibly stamped with the utopian temperament." (9) Roth, an inveterate idealizer of the meaning of America but also a dogged critic of such idealization, seems to fit this psychological type, Gottlieb's "push and pull" of opposites correlating loosely with the "anti-myth[s]" of counterlives so many of his characters construct. …