Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2009"

The Abolition of Man

Abstract: Scepticism and fear about biotechnology is widespread. It takes two important literary forms, namely dystopias and jeremiads. Neither is compelling in itself, but together they provide a strong collection of arguments for great caution. The dystopias examined here range from Aldous Huxley′s Brave New World to o two recent novels by Margaret Atwood. The Jeremiads range from C. S. Lewis in 1942 to Habermas and Fukuyama.

The Science Fiction Handbook

Abstract: Part I: Introduction. Science Fiction in Western Culture. Part II: Brief Historical Surveys of Science Fiction Subgenres. The Time-Travel Invasion. The Alien Invasion Narrative. The Space Opera. Apocalyptic and Post-Disaster Narratives. Dystopian Science Fiction. Utopian Fiction. Feminism, Science Fiction, and Gender. Science Fiction and Satire. Cyberpunk and Posthuman Science Fiction. Multicultural Science Fiction. Part III: Representative Science Fiction Authors. Isaac Asimov (1920-1992). Margaret Atwood (1939-). Octavia Butler (1947-2006). Samuel R. Delany (1942-). Philip K. Dick (1928-1982). William Gibson (1948-). Nicola Griffith (1960-). Joe Haldeman (1943-). Robert A. Heinlein (1907-1988). Nalo Hopkinson (1960-). Ursula K. Le Guin (1929-). Ian McDonald (1960-). China Mieville (1972-). George Orwell (1903-1950). Marge Piercy (1936-). Frederik Pohl (1919-). Kim Stanley Robinson (1952-). Neal Stephenson (1959-). H. G. Wells (1866-1946). Part IV: Discussions of Individual Texts. H. G. Wells, The Time Machine (1895). H. G. Wells, The War of the Worlds (1898). George Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Isaac Asimov, I, Robot (1950). Frederik Pohl and C. M. Kormbluth, The Space Merchants (1952). Robert A. Heinlein, Starship Troopers (1959). Philip K. Dick, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? (1968). Ursula K. Le Guin, The Dispossessed (1974). Joe Haldeman, The Forever War (1974). Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1976). Samuel R. Delany, Trouble on Triton (1976). William Gibson, Neuromancer (1984). Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale (1985). Octavia Butler, "Xenogenesis" trilogy (1987-1989). Neal Stephenson, Snow Crash (1992). Nicola Griffith, Ammonite (1994). Kim Stanley Robinson, "Mars" trilogy (1992-1996). Nalo Hopkinson, Midnight Robber (2000). China Mieville, Perdido Street Station (2000). Ian McDonald, River of Gods (2005). Glossary. Selected Bibliography. Index.

Literature in Mind: H. G. Wells and the Evolution of the Mad Scientist

Abstract: In 1893, H. G. Wells's article "Man of the Year Million" dramatically predicted the distant evolutionary future of mankind:1The descendents of man will nourish themselves by immersion in nutritive fluid. They will have enormous brains, liquid, soulful eyes, and large hands, on which they will hop. No craggy nose will they have, no vestigial ears; their mouths will be a small, perfectly round aperture, unanimal, like the evening star. Their whole muscular system will be shriveled to nothing, a dangling pendant to their minds.2The editors at Punch evidently found this prediction hilarious, publishing a poem and accompanying sketch ridiculing Wells's lopsided future humans (Figure 1, p. 318). But not everyone was laughing.As ridiculous as Wells's bodiless, large-headed "human tadpoles" may seem, they were based on the most rigorous evolutionary science of their day. Wells, a lower-middle-class academic prodigy, received a prestigious government scholarship to attend the Normal School of Science in South Kensington (later absorbed into the University of London). Though Wells left South Kensington in 1887 without earning his degree, he was greatly inspired by his biology teacher, famed physiologist Thomas Huxley. Wells absorbed Huxley's pessimistic take on late-Victorian evolutionary theory, particularly his emphasis on the inherent brutality of natural selection.Huxley's pessimism surfaces in Wells's dystopian scientific romances, which imaginatively probe the consequences of evolutionary theory run amok.3 Beginning with the eponymous mad-scientist villain of The Island of Dr. Moreau (1896) and continuing with alien invasion narratives like The War of the Worlds (1897-98) and The First Men in the Moon (1901), Wells depicts brains becoming steadily larger and more powerful as bodies grow smaller and more useless, emotions increasingly muted, and conscience all but silenced. Wells's nightmarish vision of the massively overevolved brain unites these three works, as the ruthlessly intellectual biologist Moreau morphs into the amoral, top-heavy Martians and lunar inhabitants.Wells's malevolent mad scientists and extraterrestrials owe an intellectual debt not only to Huxley, but also to discussions of genius and insanity in late-Victorian issues of Mind (1876-present).4 The now-familiar trope of the mad scientist in fact traces its roots to the clinical association between genius and insanity that developed in the mid-nineteenth century. Authors like Scottish journalist and materialist philosopher John Ferguson Nisbet, English eugenicist Francis Galton, and Austrian Jewish physician Max Nordau - all of whose works were reviewed in Mind - argued that mankind had evolved larger brains at the expense of muscular strength, reproductive capacity, and moral sensibility.5 Wells drew upon these arguments in his fiction and even contributed his own article to Mind, a philosophical reflection on science entitled "Scepticism of the Instrument" (1904).In its unique role as "the first English journal devoted to Psychology and Philosophy." Mind was an ideal venue for an inherently interdisciplinary subject like the clinical study of genius.6 The journal's first editor, George Croom Robertson, was particularly concerned that articles in Mind rise "above the narrowing influences of modern specialism."7 This disciplinary breadth attracted contributors from all fields, including fiction writers and literary critics like George Henry Lewes, Grant Allen, Andrew Lang, and, of course, H.G. Wells. During the same period, literary works probed ideas discussed in Mind, such as the nature of the soul, the possibility of free will, and the ramifications of biological determinism. In the four decades following its auspicious start, Mind provided a venue where scientists, philosophers and literary authors could find intellectual common ground.In this essay, the early fiction of H.G. Wells will serve as a case study of cross-fertilization between literature and scientific ideas discussed in Mind. …

The Discourse of Corporate Cosmopolitanism

Abstract: This paper examines how the ideal of cosmopolitan identity is represented in selected popular global management texts. It is argued that the corporate cosmopolitan ideal of a flexible identity draws interdiscursively on two main discourses. First, there is the Enlightenment ideal of cosmopolitanism, expressed as a moral imperative towards detachment from existing cultural identities and loyalties in the name of the adoption of a universal perspective. This is reflected in the rhetoric of the necessity for managers and employees to ‘transform’ themselves from ‘locals’ into ‘cosmopolitans’. This uplifting rhetoric of ‘transformation’, however, is accompanied by the more prosaic discourse of cosmopolitanism as a competence in ‘managing culture’ which can be acquired by all. Second, ‘corporate cosmopolitanism’ draws on a ‘postmodern’ ideal of a flexible ‘pastiche’ identity, distanced through irony from all existing cultural and other ‘hot’ loyalties. This discourse is personified in the image of the ‘hybrid’ as the ideal corporate cosmopolitan. It is argued that corporate cosmopolitanism represents, not a utopia in which cultural difference and diversity is respected and celebrated, but a dystopia in which cultural difference is made superfluous by the establishment of a flexible transnational capitalist class with no attachment to or responsibility for place.

Changing the climate: The politics of dystopia

Abstract: This paper aims to test the adequacy of various theoretical approaches to utopian studies and science fiction studies – especially those drawn from the work of Darko Suvin, Raymond Williams and Fredric Jameson – to an understanding of the history of Australian science-fictional dystopias. It argues that science fiction (SF) cannot readily be assimilated into either high literature (as utopia) or popular fiction (as genre) and rejects the widespread prejudice against both SF and dystopia in much contemporary academic literary and cultural criticism. It concludes that SF, whether eutopian or dystopian, is as good a place as any for thought experiments about the politics of climate change, a case made with special reference to the late George Turner's 1987 novel The Sea and Summer.

Offred’s Complicity and the Dystopian Tradition in Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract: 2 Those who see Offred as a rebel, such as Michele Lacombe, Hilde Staels, and David S. Hogsette, cite her irony, her language play, her insistence on retaining personal memories, and even the fact that she \"wrote\" the Tale in the first place as subversive.1 For Coral Ann Howells and others such as Hilda Staels, storytelling is Offred’s means of survival and resistance, reinforcing her identity and challenging those who would silence her (93). The problem with this view is that she did not in fact \"write\" anything; as numerous critics have reminded us, the text we have is a much later reconstruction — by male scholars with not very feminist opinions — of audiotaped fragments. Offred commits nothing to paper because she cannot and she would be in serious trouble if she tried. Similarly, Jeanne Campbell Reesman argues that Offred’s \"voice offers a moving testament to the power of language to transform reality in order to overcome oppressive designs imposed on human beings\" (6). While it may be true that Offred transforms her own reality, Gilead remains as fictionally real as ever, and as the Historical Notes tell us it gets even worse after Offred’s account (e.g., 316). Carol L. Beran says that \"Offred’s power is in language\" (71), but we need to ask how much power that truly is. If this is resistance, as J. Brooks Bouson notes, it is a very silent and ineffectual kind (147).

Educated Fear and Educated Hope: Dystopia, Utopia and the Plasticity of Humanity

Abstract: Educated fear, i.e., a critical awareness of dystopian realities, and educated hope, i.e., a critical awareness of the possibility of human perfectibility cohabit a theoretical space that breaks with utopianist modern theoretical underpinnings and becomes historically and spatially more inclusive, while retaining the motivational and justifi catory force of ethical imagery. If education is not just an institution of unrefl ective socialization, if it is about futurity, it has to renegotiate utopian thought. As the interest in utopia is being renewed both in general philosophy and philosophy of education and as dystopia is still neglected, a book that re-defi nes utopianism and explores for the fi rst time the role of dystopia in radicalizing educational demands for systemic change is indispensable for Utopian Studies, Philosophy and Philosophy of Education academics and students alike.

New Literary History after the End of the New

Abstract: In what follows I want to say something about the cultural pro duction of the future, and any such speculations will inevitably imply something about the histories of that cultural production that we may expect to accompany it (or indeed to follow it and to sum it up). But that is necessarily an exercise in futurology, and so you will not be surprised to find me shifting into a science-fictional mode. For the mo ment, let's remain in a sociological one. Any talk about the future must first confront globalization as its abso lute horizon: the term can have any number of synonyms. Marx called it universalization, but also the world market, a term that certainly remains useful for us today. As a stage in capitalism, I call it late, while others call it flexible or informational. And as a cultural formation, I have analyzed it as postmodernity, a term not everyone accepts, and even those who do are not necessarily in agreement?tending to limit its meaning to philosophies of relativism (if you dislike it) or of antiessentialism and antifoundationalism (if you greet it with enthusiasm). I'll come back to the postmodern later on. Globalization can know its interpretive revisions as well: some call it, for example, Americanization, a characterization I understand but feel to be slightly misleading, as I'll try to show. Some think that it is noth ing new, going all the way back to the neolithic trade routes. That's true, too, but I feel that it is more useful to insist on the historic origi nality of this stage, in which international relations become dominant rather than secondary or incidental. In fact, what we confront today is an immense international division of labor, which has certainly been anticipated at certain moments of the past, but has now become both universal and irreversible, with consequences for culture fully as much as for economics. I've tried elsewhere to show that this new phenomenon must be grasped dialectically, or in other words as a union of opposites, as something that can be celebrated just as much as it can be greeted with dystopian fear and foreboding. Indeed, on the level of culture, globalization mostly has been greeted positively, as when we point to its immense new communi cational and informational possibilities, and rejoice in the democratiza New Literary History, 2008, 39: 375-387

The Ambiguous Necessity of Utopia: Post-Colonial Literatures and the Persistence of Hope

Abstract: This essay hinges on the paradox that becomes increasingly obvious in post-colonial literatures: while all achieved utopias are degenerate, without utopian thinking liberation is impossible. The discussion looks at the ambiguous philosophical relationship that has existed between utopias and dystopias since Thomas More's seminal classic, and the argument is advanced through the foundational Marxist utopian theory of Ernst Bloch. Paradoxically, only the thinnest of lines separates utopia from dystopia and the slippage from one to the other hinges on three kinds of ambiguity-three contradictions which demarcate the very thin line between them. Wherever utopias occur these contradictions emerge, in: the relation between utopia and utopianism; the relation between the future and memory and the relations between the individual and the collective. While these ambiguities are present in all utopian thinking, the particular ways in which post-colonial writers and thinkers negotiate them tell us a lot about their distinct form of cultural and political hope. The nagging question hovering around Thomas More's Utopia is: "What did he mean by it?" CS. Lewis regarded it as an elaborate joke and Stephen Greenblatt pointed out that every rule or amenity for the ideal life in the book turns out to be fatally flawed (1980, 40-1). Did More really mean it to be the picture of an ideal society? Is it a satire or a serious plan for social improvement? The debate over whether Utopia is a playful satire or a serious proposal for an ideal community persists to the present day, and is reflected in the perpetually ambiguous relationship between utopias and dystopias in literature.1 Thomas More unleashed an idea that has remained a critical focus of all visions of a better society. For most contemporary Utopian theory Utopia is no longer a place but the spirit of hope itself, the essence of desire for a better world (see for example, Jameson 1971). There are forms of ambiguity inherent in this Utopian idea that 'keeps alive the possibility of a world qualitatively distinct from this one and takes the form of a stubborn negation of all that is' (Jameson 1971, 110-11). Wherever utopias occur three key contradictions emerge: the relation between utopias and utopianism; the relation between the future and memory; and the relation between the individual and the collective. The dominant Utopian literary form from about the mid-twentieth century has been science fiction. Yet there is a quite distinct literary form that explores these ambiguities in different ways. The particular ways in which post-colonial writers and thinkers negotiate such ambiguities create a distinct form of cultural and political hope. The forms of utopianism emergent in post-colonial writing - a utopianism almost completely devoid of utopias- gesture toward a resolution of Utopian contradictions dialogically. Utopias and Utopianism Primarily, everybody lives in the future, because they strive ... Function and content of hope are experienced continuously, and in times of rising societies they have been continuously activated and extended (Bloch 1986, 4). To emphasise this Bloch explicitly separates utopianism, which he sees as a universal human characteristic, from Utopias, which, as playful abstractions, are pointless and misleading - a parody of hope. Limiting the Utopian to Thomas More's island: ... would be like trying to reduce electricity to the amber from which it gets its Greek name and in which it was first noticed. Indeed, the Utopian coincides so little with the novel of an ideal state that the whole totality of philosophy becomes necessary ... to do justice to the content of that designated by utopia (15). It is more than a little odd that Bloch spends almost no time on utopias themselves, and in fact disparages them in this way, since their one common feature - a characteristic of all modern utopias - is that their inhabitants hold all things in common. …

Human/nature: ecological philosophy in margaret atwood's oryx and crake

Abstract: Margaret Atwood's 2003 speculative novel, Oryx and Crake, incorporates into a futuristic tale disparate elements taken from current ecological concerns. Her clever intermingling of utopian science with its dystopian effects makes this novel a particularly rewarding text through which to engage with current ecological philosophies, particularly those developed by Val Plumwood and other thinkers interested in how ecological thinking can suggest an ethic of respect for the Other. This paper analyses how Atwood constantly shifts our perceptions between that which appears utopian and that which seems dystopian in the novel's setting. This allows for an examination of the fragile nature of an ecological ethic of care in the kind of post-modern world Atwood envisages. Furthermore, by calling into question the utopian dreams of the scientist Crake in the novel, Atwood engages with two significant areas in the ecocritical debate – instrumentalism and the opposition of ‘human culture’ with ‘nature’. This p...

The Sounds of the Dystopian Future: Music for Science Fiction Films of the New Hollywood Era, 1966-1976

Abstract: From 1966 to1976, science fiction films tended to depict civilizations of the future that had become intrinsically antagonistic to their inhabitants as a result of some internal or external cataclysm. This dystopian turn in science fiction films, following a similar move in science fiction literature, reflected concerns about social and ecological changes occurring during the late 1960s and early 1970s and their future implications. In these films, "dystopian" conditions are indicated as such by music incorporating distinctly modernist sounds and techniques reminiscent of twentieth-century concert works that abandon the common practice. In contrast, music associated with the protagonists is generally more accessible, often using common practice harmonies and traditional instrumentation. These films appeared during a period referred to as the "New Hollywood," which saw younger American filmmakers responding to developments in European cinema, notably the French New Wave. New Hollywood filmmakers treated their films as cinematic "statements" reflecting the filmmaker's artistic vision. Often, this encouraged an idiosyncratic use of music to enhance the perceived artistic nature of their films. This study examines the scores of ten science fiction films produced between 1966 and 1976: Fahrenheit 451, Planet of the Apes, 2001: A Space Odyssey, THX-1138, A Clockwork Orange, Silent Running, Soylent Green, Zardoz, Rollerball, and Logan's Run. Each is set in a dystopian environment of the future and each reflects the New Hollywood's aspirations to artistic seriousness and social relevance. The music accompanying these films connoted an image of technological and human progress at odds with the critical notions informing similar music for the concert hall. These film scores emphasized the extrapolated consequences of developments occurring during the 1950s and 1960s that social activists, science fiction writers, and even filmmakers regarded as worrisome trends. Filmmakers drew on the popular perceptions of these musical sounds to reinforce pessimistic visions of the future, thereby imbuing these sounds with new meanings for listeners of the contemporaneous present.

'I am Trying to Believe': Dystopia as Utopia in the Year Zero Alternate Reality Game

Abstract: A major symptom of postmodernity is the loss of utopian energy, of which the popularity of dystopian cultural production is evident. The dystopian genre, however, is cautionary, and thus utopian. Associated is the influence of technology on post-utopian culture—although it has been viewed pessimistically, technology allows for new ways of telling dystopian stories. One such mode of telling dystopian stories is the Alternate Reality Game (ARG), a narrative, multi-media game, using several different technologies that puts the player in a fictional reality. One ARG that exemplifies the idea of dystopia as having utopian energy is Nine Inch Nails’ Year Zero , which shows that technology can have utopian energy, offering new ways of telling dystopian stories such as via the ARG, thus locating some utopian energy in postmodern culture through the form’s culturally critical structure and interactive nature, which equals a call to action against the dystopian nature of contemporary society.

Archaeologies of the Future: Jameson’s Utopia or Orwell’s Dystopia?

Abstract: This paper begins with the proposition that Fredric Jameson's Archaeologies of the Future (2005) is the most important theoretical contribution to utopian and science-fiction studies since Darko Suvin's Metamorphoses of Science Fiction (1979). It argues that Jameson's derivation of 'anti-anti-Utopianism' from Sartrean anti-anti-communism will provide 'the party of Utopia' with as good a slogan as it is likely to find in the foreseeable future. It takes issue with Jameson over two key issues: his overwhelming concentration on American science-fiction, which seems strangely parochial in such a distinguished comparativist; and his understanding of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four as an 'anti-Utopia' rather than a dystopia. The paper argues that, for Nineteen Eighty-Four , as for any other science-fiction novel, the key question is that identified by Jameson: not 'did it get the future right?', but rather 'did it sufficiently shock its own present as to force a meditation on the impossible?'. It concludes that Jameson fails to understand how this process works for dystopia as well as utopia, for barbarism as well as socialism.

Ludic dystopias: power, politics and play

Abstract: This paper is a close reading of the first-person shooter video game Bioshock. I analyse Bioshock within a heritage of dystopian media forms. I explore the commonalities between this particular dystopic vision and those that have preceded it in book and film. Following the rich tradition of reading dystopias as reflecting the cultural zeitgeist and fears of the era they were created, I look at the political and social concerns Bioshock embodies such as the dehumanising effects of technology and the danger of corporate domination. I argue that it is in its ludic mechanisms that Bioshock reveals the most about our current anxieties. I demonstrate that this game deconstructs its own mediation to offer a broad political critique of contemporary society.

The War against the Moon: Andre Maurois' 1927 "Fantasy on the Coming Power of the Press"

Abstract: In 1927, French author Andre Maurois published The Next Chapter: The War against the Moon, a “fantasy on the coming power of the press.” Unlike seminal dystopian works such as We, Brave New World, and 1984 in which governments control the news media, War against the Moon presents a future in which news media control the world's governments. Unevaluated heretofore by journalism historians, War against the Moon reflects post-World War I concerns regarding propaganda, the malleability of public opinion, media consolidation, the power of press barons, and the drift of news toward sensationalism.

White-Washing Oppression in Atwood's the Handmaid's Tale

Abstract: White privilege is rarely manifested in intentional, positive acts. It is, in Peggy McIntosh's terms, "invisible," "unearned," and "cashed in each day" ("White Privilege and Male Privilege" in Critical White Studies: Looking Behind the Mirror [Philadelphia: Temple UP, 1997]: 291). To be White is to be the norm, universal. This norm functions automatically, and unless the universality of White experience is explicitly questioned or subverted, racial distortions may appear even against the conscious intent of an author. Such distortions appear throughout Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale (NY: Houghton-Mifflin, 1986). Atwood attempts to offer an archetypal account of female exploitation, but the stand-in for this universal experience is Offred, a White, college-educated American. Offred would seem an unlikely victim, but at no point in the text does Atwood acknowledge that sexism in America has, generally, been modulated by forms of race and class oppression, nor does she acknowledge the parallels between her own story and the experience of Black slavery. Because these historically-specific oppressions are removed from their broader context, the Tale drifts from speculative fiction, which is anchored in reality, into conceptually suspect and politically hazardous fantasy. Atwood's dystopia is set in the late 20th Century, when a cadre of fundamentalist Christians have overthrown the U.S. government and created the theocratic Republic of Gilead. Due to an unexplained fertility crisis, the government has impressed unmarried women of proven fertility into a state of sexual servitude. Many others work as domestic slaves in an autarkic, inefficient command economy. Women are forbidden to read or to meet without supervision. The novel thus places particular emphasis on the most persistent forms of female victimization: the sexual exploitation, isolation, and compelled ignorance that accompany severe economic and political powerlessness. These forms of victimization do not function in a vacuum, and in the United States they have been associated most strongly with the enslavement of African-Americans. Forced procreation arose from widespread slavery associated with plantation agriculture, particularly during in the 19th Century, when the Trans-Atlantic slave trade was on the wane and industrialization increased the demand for raw materials. This form of abuse followed a specific vector, from the White slaveholding man to the Black enslaved woman. In The Handmaid's Tale, victimization does appear to function in a historical and causal vacuum. The Republic of Gilead is an all-White enclave, and Blacks are erased from the novel in a single line, cloaked in Old Testament euphemism: "'Resettlement of the Children of Ham is continuing on schedule,' says the reassuring pink face, back on the screen. …

The Politics of the Handmaid's Tale

Abstract: In Canada, they said, 'Could it happen here?' In England, they said, 'jolly good yam.' In the United States, they said, 'How long have we got?'" Such were the reactions, according to an interview that Margaret Atwood gave to The New York Times, to her futuristic novel The Handmaid's Tale. The British response is the calmest, viewing the work, that is, purely as fantasy, like Alice in Wonderland or Lord of the Rings. Canadians feel, apparently, some modest degree of apprehension. But it is in America, where the tale is set, that reaction has been most intense, most alarmed. By now a canonical text (the self-important term that academics use for books that get taught a lot) in university courses, the source of a film and an opera, a work particularly revered by pessi-feminists, The Handmaid's Tale has been widely viewed as a serious commentary on the socio-political conditions of the day. I want to cast a critical eye on the putatively American way of responding to Atwood's tale. Read "seriously" (in contrast to pure fantasy), the book belongs to the genre called the dystopia, a genre that projects an imaginary society that differs from the author's own, first, by being significantly worse in important respects and, second, by being worse because it attempts to reify some utopian ideal. Science fiction works like Pohl and Kornbluth's The Space Merchants and John Brunner's The Sheep Look Up, while offering decidedly negative images of the future, are not truly dystopian because they lack an anti-utopian animus; Zamyatin's We and Huxley's Brave New World, by contrast, serve as paradigms of the genre precisely because their negative futures stem specifically from the implementation of a rational design for reorganizing society, a utopia. Since most, if not all, such designs for a dirigiste world belong to the political left--most, of course, are communal, collectivistic--their anti-type, the dystopia, usually is, or at least appears to be, conservative, counseling rather the bearing of those ills we have than flying to others that we know not of. Another tradition of utopias, however, depends on revelation rather than on reason, on some divine injunction or leading from above, in which case they are usually theocracies, regimes ruled by a priestly class whose authority rests in the will and word of God. Giliad--the futuristic society depicted in The Handmaid's Tale--is Atwood's dystopic projection of such a theocracy, a right-wing, fundamentalist Christian theocracy. Aldous Huxley has argued that "whatever its artistic or philosophic qualities, a book about the future can interest us only if its prophecies look as though they might conceivably come true." That is to say, the conviction or force that such projections convey depends on real-world conditions or, at least, on the perception of these conditions; consequently, as these conditions or perceptions change, so will the vatic force of the fictive projections. Powerful as Nineteen Eighty-Four remains in many ways, its potency as a possible and fearful future significantly declined with the decline of the old-fashioned jackboot-and-truncheon totalitarianism. With the collapse of the Evil Empires of Orwell's day, the specter of Ingsoc no longer haunts Europe or the world. As long ago as 1958, in Brave New World Revisited, Huxley noted that "recent developments in Russia . . . have robbed Orwell's book of some of its gruesome verisimilitude" and argued, correctly, that "the odds were more in favor of something like Brave New World than something like 1984" looming in our future. We have, in other words, little cause to fear a future that does not seem a plausible extrapolation of current conditions. An America, for example, whose super rich convert to Christianity, sell all they have to give to the poor, and thus create a crisis in capital accumulation and economic catastrophe is not a scenario that arouses much anxiety. The question, then, that I want to consider is the plausibility, in light of current conditions, of the future depicted in The Handmaid's Tale. …

Utopias of Thought, Dystopias of Space: Science Fiction in Contemporary Peninsular Narrative

Abstract: 7 SPACE AND THEORY: HISTORICAL AND NARRATOLOGICAL INTRODUCTIONS 8 ALEX DE LA IGLESIA’S ACCION MUTANTE AND THE LIMITS OF FASHION AND TECHNOLOGY 58 GABRIELA BUSTELO’S PLANETA HEMBRA OR HOW TO MIX AN ANNIHILATION COCKTAIL 110 RAFAEL REIG’S SANGRE A BORBOTONES: CITY PRESENT REINVENTED ..... 145 CONCLUSIONS 176 WORKS CITED 205

"Killing the King" in Public Administration: From Critical Epistemology to Fractured Ontology and Limited Agency. A Review Essay

Abstract: INTRODUCTION For Farmer (2005), "imagination", especially in the form of "open engagement", is the fundamental requirement for a critical reflexivity that allows each of us to become an "artist in the conduct of our life" (Farmer, 2005, p. xiv). Farmer illuminates a "moral reflection" by which materialist political economy is conjoined with post-structuralist (even post-modernist) linguistic/symbolic analysis in order to recover the arena of norms/values from the deadening embrace of technocratic praxis. Farmer (2005) presents an imaginative, critical Public Administration indicative of what Dahrendorf (1968, p. vii) refers to as "a social science of values." This involves the type of "big range", "morally-committed" theorizing that "weave[s] historical awareness into sociological [or public administration] generalizations" (Dahrendorf, 1968, p. vii). Farmer beckons academics and practitioners into an imaginative, critical public administration, akin to Habermas's expansive "critical sociology," which "keep[s] us aware of what we are doing [...] irrespective of whether we are doing it consciously or blindly and without reflection. A critical sociology in this sense should view its subject precisely from an imagined [...] a priori perspective, as a generalized subject of social action" (Habermas, 1963, p. 228, cited in Dahrendorf, 1968, p. vii). How public administrators and ideologically-reconstructed "New Public Managers" interrogate the social world and build their assumptive domains depends on epistemological predispositions (relating to propositions about what is knowable) and ontological predispositions (relating to propositions about the phenomena to which causal capacity may be ascribed) (Dixon, Dogan & Kouzmin, 2004, p. 29). The intellectual chimera pitting "structuralism" against "agency" conjures an ontological no(wo)man's land. Without some capacity, and scope, for critical thinking, the managerialist myopia/dystopia is not only blind, but dangerously so. The classic debate about critical thinking has been over whether it is a universal, generic skill or a discipline-specific one. Recent discussion embraces Barnett's (1997, p. 7) view that critical thinking should be replaced with the wider concept of "critical being". Barnett (1997, p. 7) presents criticality in two dimensions, ranging on one hand from skills to transformational critique; criticality also ranges across the domains of knowledge, self and the world. Barnett's (1997, p. 1) ideal of the "critical being" is the lone Chinese student protester taking on an array of military tanks in Tiananmen Square in 1989. This ideal of the "philosopher-manager" (Chia & Morgan, 1996) is certainly beyond most professional/academic public administrationists. Mingers (2000) argues that a "critical approach should be interdisciplinary, academically rigorous and participative" (Sankaran & Kouzmin, 2005, p. 85). Drawing on Habermas's (1979; 1984; 1992; 1993) work on communicative action, discourse ethics and the validity claims of speech acts, "Mingers (2000, pp. 225-226) describes this approach as being comprised of the critique of rhetoric, the critique of tradition, the critique of authority and the critique of objectivity" (Sankaran & Kouzmin, 2005, p. 85). However, "Gold, Holman and Thorpe (2001) found that managers fail even at the lowest level of critical thinking [...] managers [finding] it difficult to fully identify their arguments [.] not adept at providing evidence, or warrants, for the claims that were being made [...] and their superficial understanding of argument tended to limit any critique of their practice, values and motives" (Sankaran & Kouzmin, 2005, p. 86). As for higher levels of critique, managers account for their activities by resorting to a scientific/ technical discourse emphasizing "rationality" and "objectivity" rarely relating their experiences to the wider social/cultural context whilst, at the same time, suppressing otherwise lumpy emotional content (Sankaran & Kouzmin, 2005, p. …

The Psychoanalytic Theme in Margaret Atwood's Fiction: A Response to Burkhard Niederhoff*1

Abstract: IIn Margaret Atwood's 2003 dystopian novel, Oryx and Crake, the protagonist and narrator Jimmy - later known as Snowman - persistently presses the beautiful and enigmatic Oryx for details of her exotically traumatic past; "Tell me just one thing" (114), he pleads. Born into geographically un-located third world poverty and sold into child slavery - working first as a beggar, then filmed for paedophilic pornography - before entering North America as a state-sanctioned sex worker, Oryx's history is a litany of degradation and abuses. For Jimmy, this necessarily equates to trauma; Oryx has suffered, in Ian Hacking's term, a "spiritual lesion, a wound to the soul" (Hacking 4).2 Faced with her determined refusal to recover and examine further memories of her exploited childhood, Jimmy reads Oryx's reluctance as an admission of unacknowledged horror and shame; "He thought he understood her vagueness, her evasiveness. 'It's alright/ he told her, stroking her hair. 'None of it was your fault'"; but Oryx deflects his sympathy with the maddeningly ingenuous response: "None of what, Jimmy?" (114). Oryx refuses Jimmy's invitation to speak her trauma, to enact "a recovery of lost memories of pain" (Hacking 3), and thereby achieve self-knowledge and self-acceptance. Discussing the novel's interrogation of Crake's "purportedly therapeutic scientific project" (Dunning 87), Stephen Dunning suggests that, through her silence, Oryx "both secures herself against penetrating intellectual curiosity and becomes the site of perpetual mystery" (96). Despite her silent resistance, however, Jimmy simply amalgamates her reticence within a psychoanalytic narrative of repression and denial: "Where was her rage," he ponders; "how far down was it buried, what did he have to do to dig it up?" (142).In his insistence that Oryx should react 'appropriately' - with anger, hatred and distress - to her childhood trauma, and in his assumption that talking about the past will bring her greater clarity (and that such insight would be ipso facto beneficial), Jimmy casts himself in the role of psychoanalyst and saviour. He invites Oryx to enter into the "talking cure" (Freud, "Psychoanalysis" 184) - to undergo what Sigmund Freud once referred to as a "cleansing of the soul" ("Psychoanalysis" 184) - and be healed. In his pursuit of her unconscious self, vague recollections become dreamlike "memory symbols" ("Psychoanalysis" 187) with revelatory potential; chasing incidental details that resist signification, Jimmy fantasises about psychoanalytic breakthroughs: "there it would be, the red parrot, the code, the password, and then many things would become clear" (138). It is certainly a curative procedure that Jimmy himself would like to engage in. The last man standing in a post-apocalyptic world, Jimmy longs for a sympathetic ear into which he might unburden his heavy soul, and he cries out in his desolation: "Just someone, anyone, listen to me please!" (45). Atwood, however, proves sceptical of the psychoanalytic - specifically, Freudian - method. As auditor-analyst, Jimmy, who first encounters Oryx as "just another little girl on a porno site" (90), is inextricably entangled in a web of voyeurism, vicarious thrills, and pleasurable indignation. And as implied western readers of this exotically oriental misery memoir, we too are painfully, irresistibly, implicated in Jimmy's desire to plumb ever greater depths of poverty and sexual degradation. The truth, it seems, does not always set us free, and revelations of past traumas are not always productive and therapeutic. This anxiety around the efficacy of psychoanalytic practice - as Niederhoff valuably demonstrates in his article on Atwood - is a concern that the writer repeatedly returns to in her fiction.IIIn "The Return of the Dead," Niederhoff compares Atwood's 1972 novel Surfacing to the 1996 novel, Alias Grace. The former, which Niederhoff rightly notes has attained the status of a classic work of contemporary fiction, commences with its unnamed narrator heading up into northern Quebec in search of her missing father. …

Technology, Utopia and Scholarly Life: Ideals and Realities in the Work of Hermann Hesse:

Abstract: This article considers the relationship between technology, utopia and scholarly life in Hermann Hesse's novel, The Glass Bead Game. In the first part of Hesse's book, the Glass Bead Game and the society of which it is a part, Castalia, are portrayed in idealistic terms. The second part of the novel chronicles the educational life of Joseph Knecht, who progresses through Castalia's elite schooling system, learns to play the Glass Bead Game, and is eventually appointed to the supreme position of Magister Ludi (Master of the Game). Knecht's words, thoughts, relationships, and deeds pose a challenge to the narrator's idealistic portrait, with important implications for scholars and educationists. It is argued that The Glass Bead Game combines utopian and dystopian elements. The book shows why it is necessary to hold on to scholarly ideals while also recognising educational and social realities.

Nabokov's Dystopia: Bend Sinister , America and Mass Culture

Abstract: “I am as American as April in Arizona,” Nabokov claimed in a 1966 interview. Although he repeatedly emphasized his American citizenship and the affection he held for his adopted nation, my argument is that his 1947 novel, Bend Sinister, offers us an opportunity to interrogate the received narrative of Nabokov's unproblematic arrival and assimilation into the United States. In examining the engagement with mass culture in this dystopian novel, my intention is to restore some of the political valence denied the novel by both Nabokov and his readers, and to suggest how it functions as a critique of American culture which reveals the author's profound ambivalence about his adopted nation in the early to mid-1940s. Drawing on unpublished archive material, as well as theoretical work by Theodor Adorno, this paper opens up a new approach to Nabokov's American work and demands a reassessment of his avowed apoliticism.

Ekphrasis and Lamination in Byatt's Babel Tower

Abstract: A. S. Byatt scatters narrative episodes and meta-artistic themes across a wide canvas in Babel Tower (1996), inventing and framing texts while juxtaposing literary and pictorial language. Backed by the inset narrative of La Tour Bruyarde, Babel symbolizes a postmodern condition in which discursive systems and artistic media clash and compete. A dystopian narrative accompanies the theme of disjunction in language, society, and the arts. Byatt foresaw that the novel would be "about the cracking-up of language and the tearing-loose of language from the world... [and would] move much more into different areas of visual art as a kind of paradigm" (qtd. in Campbell 232). Within an intergeneric framework of texts and images, legal, social, and historical discourses mingle, while discordant voices and opinions disrupt any notion of unity. In this hybrid text, as in the life of its protagonist, Frederica Potter, everything remains in flux, including the volatile relations of writing and painting. To bring these issues into focus and clarify relations between language and art, I will compare the textual strategy of"Lamination," or layering of narrative and intertextual panels, with "overpainting," the erasure of brushstrokes with assimilation of traces. Simonides' famous dictum, "painting is mute poetry and poetry a speaking picture," implies that ekphrasis narrativizes or interprets silent art. Leonardo da Vinci gave primacy to painting because of its sensory immediacy and G. E. Lessing to literature because epic poetry dramatizes action, but for Walter Pater "[all] art constantly aspires towards the condition of music" (129). For Murray Krieger, modernism "[sees] the verbal arts ascend to the status of model--in the center and facing both ways, toward the plastic arts and toward music, and absorbing both ends into themselves" (206). W. J. T. Mitchell sees the arts as rivaling each other in a contest or paragone that asserts their distinct qualities (Iconology 4749). While words refer to objects through signs, visual arts present images to the senses. James A. W. Heffernan defines ekphrasis as "the verbal representation of visual representation," underlining its relation to artworks rather than natural objects (Museum 1, 3). John Hollander distinguishes actual ekphrasis from notional ekphrasis, "the verbal representation of a purely fictional work of art" (4). "Pictorialism" transposes pictorial styles into words, "generat[ing] in language effects similar to those created by pictures" (Heffernan 3, emphasis added). In the first four novels of the Potter series, Byatt engages language with art, giving actual ekphrases of numerous Van Gogh paintings in Still Life (1985) and notional descriptions of imaginary works in Babel Tower. Byatt said in an interview that "almost all writers who write about painting write about it as though it was narrative or at least poetry, yet what I like about it is that element in the visual which completely defeats language" (17). She cites Patrick Heron's claim that "[p]ainting ... is a materialist art, about the material world"--a claim that privileges sensation, whereas "[the] novel, however it aspires to the specificity of Zola's naturalism, works inside the head" (Tonkin 17). Aware of the radical otherness of optics, she points out that "[v]isual images are stronger than verbal half-images, and a good novel exploits the richness of the imprecision, of the hinted" (Portraits 93). Words are an abstract medium, and the sensory thickness of paint attracts the writer. But the aesthetic energy derived from painting must be diverted into verbal channels. Using color words substantively as well as adjectivally, juxtaposing them in series, and drawing a lexicon from the paint-box are among Byatt's means of achieving sensory density. She cites Joyce Cary's The Horse's Mouth as "full of colour-painterly descriptions of skies and flesh, brilliant writing about the act of painting, a wonderful bravura display of the perpetual recomposition of the visual world into artwork" (Portraits 70). …

A new map of hell: Satō Haruo's dystopian fiction

Abstract: In this paper, I examine two major aspects of Satō Haruo's dystopian imagination as articulated in his absurdist, futurological story of 1929 titled A Record of Nonchalant, referring to the eponymous city in which the story was set. First, I trace how Satō experiments with the construction of a science-fiction-type dystopian world before the concept and the terms to express it gained acceptance in modern Japanese literature. Second, I place his story in the narrative upheavals of his time, when proletarian literature, mass fiction and modernist expressions were jostling for a place in the 1920s and 1930s literary scene. Much of so-called modernist literature was influenced by a fascination for the erotic, grotesque and nonsensical, or ero guro nansensu, aspects of interwar culture. Capturing a time when narrative modes were undergoing dramatic transformation because of the changed relationship between the production, distribution and consumption of literature, Satō uses the modernist idiom to con...

Longing for a Life Less Ordinary: Reading the Banal as Dystopian in Sonya Hartnett's Butterfly

Abstract: Sonya Hartnett's work aligns with realist literature, however Hartnett's writing for young adults has been referred to as dystopian, with critics highlighting the gritty social settings and bleak outcomes of her novels. Dystopia is sometimes used as synonymous with a generally destructive or depressing environment, but is more often associated with the nightmarish projected future worlds of science fiction. This article will offer a reading of Butterfly's treatment of the future and dystopian motifs to demonstrate how such a 'realist' text can re-articulate some science fiction conventions. The social bleakness in Butterfly is located in the banality of life in the suburbs. In this way, it could be argued that Hartnett's readers are asked to view a banal future, rather than any far-fetched or fantastic future, as dystopian. Butterfly (2009) sees teen protagonist, Plum, endure the small horrors of embarrassment and disillusionment, rather than issues like suicide or incest, which drew attention to some of Hartnett's previous works.1 Plum believes that she has a 'grand destiny' (Hartnett 2009, 152), which may be typical of the teenage psyche, but might also be read in the context of a contemporary desire for fame (or notoriety) as preferable to a life that is merely 'average'. Butterfly features several characters desirous of change, which, as a literary device, invites the reader to imagine the future of this particular social world. Unfortunately, there are many indications that these players are unlikely to effect major change in their life patterns, thus suggesting they will live out the very run-of-the-mill future lives that they most fear. This article links several understandings of dystopia with a close reading of Butterfly to explore the ways in which the novel cuts across genres to illuminate a vision of ordinariness as dystopian. A dystopian narrative, put briefly, is 'the story of the "bad place'" (Kennon 2005, 40). For Sargent (1994, 9), a dystopia is a 'non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in a time and space that the author intended a contemporaneous reader to view as considerably worse than the society in which that reader lived.' This style of writing is most often associated with science fiction due to the nature of a wholly new, imagined world necessarily being in the future or outside the common earthly experience. Adesire for amelioration of the human race is a significant driving force in many dystopian narratives, with populations questionably 'improved' and often left homogenous, impassive or robotic. In this way, it is often the quest for a utopia that brings about a dystopia, and we see this clearly demonstrated in the desire for improvement expressed by Hartnett's protagonists in Butterfly, each of whom strives towards a future that is markedly better than their present. To call Sonya Hartnett's work dystopian seems like a stretch in the light of the aforementioned definitions, given that her work has simultaneously been linked with social realism, a genre of writing very much grounded in the 'now'. In truth, Hartnett's writing probably transcends many of the labels of literary marketing, but rising to mainstream popularity as she did in the early 1990s, her writing was caught up in the nexus of two important literary trends: the development of 'grunge' and a renewed fascination with Young Adult ('YA') fiction. Several of Hartnett's books, including Butterfly, are now marketed as crossover novels, in that they appeal to a variety of reading ages. Her strong reputation as a YA author, though, means that critical responses continue to examine her contentious themes in terms of their appeal and/or potential effect on young readers. The YA fiction genre was put under the microscope in Australia in the 1990s as several authors released hugely popular, nihilistic books for young readers. This resulted in much critical debate on issues of thematic appropriateness for readers in this cohort, which might loosely be viewed as fourteen to eighteen years old. …

Appetite for Destruction: On Naomi Klein's Neo-liberal Utopia-Dystopia

Abstract: I think that there have been three definitive texts on the social, political, and economic condition of globalisation written since the year 2000. In this paper I propose to critically review the latest of these texts, Naomi Klein’s Shock Doctrine (2007). But before I consider Klein’s book I want to situate it in relation to what I think are the other two essential works on the global condition in the 21st century. Let us start with what I believe to be the first of these epochal books, Hardt and Negri’s Empire (2000). Empire was published to massive critical and popular acclaim and quickly became a central text in the wider effort to conceptualise the new form of high speed globalised capitalism that others have more recently sought to understand through ideas such as neo-liberalism (Harvey, 2005) and totalitarian capitalism (Dufour, 2008). Otherwise, Empire was engaged in the exploration of the theoretical and practical possibilities embedded in the nascent form of post-modern anti-capitalism that had recently exploded onto the scene through the 1999 Seattle demonstrations. In the first instance, then, Empire seemed to capture the spirit of the times because of its effort to express first the rhizomatic nature of post-modern capitalism and second the ways in which popular movements set on the transformation of an enormously unequal world could make use of similar rhizomatic tendencies to change both their own local situations and the wider systemic structures of capitalism that always express themselves in some local context. In many respects Hardt and Negri’s key thinkers, Deleuze and Guattari, were already concerned with the rhizomatic nature of capitalism, the ways in which the macroscopic tendency towards deterritorialisation related to the microscopic dimension of subjectivity, and whether it would be possible for the new fragmented subject, the schizophrenic, to ever transgress the turbulent spaces of capitalism. However, what Hardt and Negri managed to achieve in their work was a re-articulation of these issues which were already apparent in the 1960s for the new millennium when it seemed that the old Marxist theory of state capitalisms was no longer relevant to the reality of post-modernity. But the cultural import of Empire extended further than its reflection on the relation between the empire of capitalism and the mass, or multitude, of producers who toil in order to maintain its structures. In the wake of the events of 9 / 11 the position of Hardt and Negri’s book shifted. It was now no longer simply a commentary on the struggles between trans-national capitalism and post-modern labour in global society, but rather an ultracontemporary meditation on the ways in which those struggles express themselves in social, political, and cultural positions that tend to evolve into paranoid fundamentalisms through their traumatic immersion in the apparent chaos of global space and then collide over how best to manage or resolve that turbulence. In the wake of 9 / 11 and the subsequent war on terror Hardt and Negri published another text, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (2004), that expanded upon their original text in order to take in the American-led invasions and occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. But the problem with this text was that it never really immersed itself in the material realities of the social, political, and cultural expressions of global turbulence in sufficient depth. Instead Hardt and Negri remained wedded to the abstract scale of global space and failed to understand that a proper analysis of the realities of the contemporary global condition requires a consideration of the various scalings of the global, the local, and the individual and an exploration of the ways that these diverse scalings interrelate and interact. Thus Appetite for Destruction: On Naomi Klein’s Neo-liberal Utopia-Dystopia

The Death and Life of a Chicago Edifice: Gwendolyn Brooks's "In the Mecca"

Abstract: Isolation, stratification, fixation, regimentation, standardization, militarization--one or more of these attributes enter into the conception of the utopian city, as expounded by the Greeks. And these same features remain, in open or disguised form, even in the supposedly more democratic utopias of the nineteenth century, such as Bellamy's Looking Backward. In the end, utopia merges into the dystopia of the twentieth century; and one suddenly realizes that the distance between the positive ideal and the negative one was never so great as the advocates or admirers of utopia had professed. --Lewis Mumford, "Utopia, the City and the Machine" Sit where the light corrupts your face. Mies Van der Rohe retires from grace. And the fair fables fall.--Gwendolyn Brooks, In the Mecca As Lewis Mumford explains, urban utopias of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries "merge" into the dystopia of the twentieth century because urban utopias rely on a specific way of ordering space, usually maintaining the established order by subtle and less subtle strategies of compulsion. In other words, to achieve an ideal urban society, urban utopias promote the sense that people are a chaotic mass that needs to be ordered through the control of space. In the twentieth century, the negative idealism of urban planning present in ancient urban utopias resurfaces as a response to the sense that the modern city is a dystopia that can only be redeemed by violent reshaping. One of the most extreme cases of reforming undesirable, unbeautiful, and poverty-stricken segments of urban space involves urban planners' response to the "urban decline" of American cities. In response to this decline, mid-twentieth-century planners proposed the "urban renewal" that erased entire neighborhoods and further deepened residential segregation, urban poverty, and racism. Douglas Massey and Nancy Denton, in their landmark study on residential segregation, American Apartheid: Segregation and the Making of the Underclass, explain the growing racist response to inner cities in the twentieth century by illuminating the facts of residential segregation. The authors unambiguously indict white public institutions for the construction of racially segregated areas within cities: "The evolution of segregated, all-black neighborhoods.., was not the result of impersonal market forces .... On the contrary, [they were] constructed through a series of well-defined institutional practices, private behaviors, and public policies by which whites sought to contain growing urban black populations" (Massey and Denton 10). In the 1950s in particular, housing segregation reached its peak deepening the decline of inner city neighborhoods. (1) As the above quotation shows, urban planners and ideologues reinforced the ancient idea of "regimentation" and "stratification" that Mumford mentions, but also translated it into a modern version of urban idealism called "residential segregation" to achieve and protect upper- and middle-class white urban utopias. The discourses with which the planners, designers, architects, and ideologues justified these racially exclusive modern urban utopias, however, did not always contain the word "segregation." These particular positions in urban discourse used terms such as "urban decline" and "urban renewal" instead to raze whole neighborhoods and erect housing projects in the same racially segregated areas. The discourse on "urban decline" and "urban renewal" therefore not only used the neglected areas of the cities as a metaphor for everything that was wrong with them. Furthermore, it effectively disguised housing segregarion and racial discrimination. Displaced residents of the declining urban areas, however, began challenging "urban decline" as an appropriate representation of their lives. As Robert Beauregard notes, the term "urban renewal" was parodied among blacks as "Negro removal" in the 1960s because the urban discourse that disguised acute racial discrimination culminated at this time (164-65). …