Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2010"

The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature

Abstract: Preface Gregory Claeys Brief chronology of key works of utopian literature and thought Part I. History: 1. The concept of utopia Fatima Vieira 2. Thomas More's Utopia: sources, legacy and interpretation J. C. Davis 3. Utopianism after More: the Renaissance and Enlightenment Nicole Pohl 4. Varieties of nineteenth-century utopias Kenneth M. Roemer 5. The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell Gregory Claeys Part II. Literature: 6. Utopia, dystopia and science fiction Peter Fitting 7. Utopia and Romance Patrick Parrinder 8. Feminism and utopianism Alessa Johns 9. Colonial and post-colonial utopias Lyman Tower Sargent 10. 'Non-western' utopian traditions Jacqueline Dutton 11. Ecology and utopia Brian Stableford Further reading.

Utopia, dystopia and science fiction

Abstract: “The once and often suggestive field of utopian fantasy has been exploited, perhaps under the comic-book definition, into a bastard literary device known as 'science fiction.' This product bears about the same resemblance to utopian speculation that the tales of Horatio Alger bore to the economic theories of Adam Smith. / [Literary] forms are the common property . . . of writers and audiences or readers, before any communicative composition can occur.” / Despite some dismissals of science fiction's significance for utopian writing, it is impossible to study the utopias and dystopias of the past fifty years or more without acknowledging the central role of science fiction. Darko Suvin and Lyman Tower Sargent (among others) have reviewed and clarified the existing definitions of utopia and - unlike science fiction - there is little disagreement today about the boundaries and characteristics of the genre. Sargent writes that utopia is 'a non-existent society described in considerable detail and normally located in time and space'. This definition includes the positive utopia (eutopia) as well as its negative manifestations - the dystopia and the anti-utopia. Suvin, on the other hand, restricts his definition to the positive utopia: 'the verbal construction of a particular quasi human community where sociopolitical institutions, norms, and individual relationships are organized according to a more perfect principle than in the author's community . . .'.

The origins of dystopia: Wells, Huxley and Orwell

Abstract: Where did it all go wrong? When did the vision of heaven on earth become an anticipation of hell? In many accounts we emerge from the hopeful, dream-like state of Victorian optimism to pass through what H. G. Wells called the age of confusion into a nightmarish twentieth century, soon powerfully symbolized by the grotesque slaughter of the First World War. Enlightenment optimism respecting the progress of reason and science was now displaced by a sense of the incapacity of humanity to restrain its newly created destructive powers. From that time ideal societies have accordingly been more commonly portrayed negatively in dystopian rather than utopian form. Like most other parts of terra utopus , however, the concept of dystopia has been much contested, many eutopias or ideal societies having dystopic elements and vice versa. Dystopias are often described as 'conservative', though they may in fact be sharply critical of the societies they reflect, as we will see. 'Dystopia' is often used interchangeably with 'anti-utopia' or 'negative utopia', by contrast to utopia or 'eutopia' (good place), to describe a fictional portrayal of a society in which evil, or negative social and political developments, have the upper hand, or as a satire of utopian aspirations which attempts to show up their fallacies, or which demonstrate, in B. F. Skinner's words, 'ways of life we must be sure to avoid' - in the unlikely event that we can agree on particulars. Yet as we will see, the most famous exemplar of the genre, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four , was not intended to be anti-utopian as such.

Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility

Abstract: Introduction: Utopia and Dystopia beyond Space and Time 1 PART ONE: ANIMA CHAPTER 1: Fredric Jameson Utopia as Method, or the Uses of the Future 21 CHAPTER 2: Jennifer Wenzel Literacy and Futurity: Millennial Dreaming on the Nineteenth- Century Southern African Frontier 45 CHAPTER 3: Dipesh Chakrabarty Bourgeois Categories Made Global: The Utopian and Actual Lives of Historical Documents in India 73 CHAPTER 4: Luise White The Utopia of Working Phones: Rhodesian Independence and the Place of Race in Decolonization 94 CHAPTER 5: Timothy Mitchell Hydrocarbon Utopia 117 PART TWO: ARTIFICE CHAPTER 6: John Krige Techno- Utopian Dreams, Techno- Political Realities: The Education of Desire for the Peaceful Atom 151 CHAPTER 7: Marci Shore On Cosmopolitanism, the Avant- Garde, and a Lost Innocence of Central Europe 176 CHAPTER 8: David Pinder The Breath of the Possible: Everyday Utopianism and the Street in Modernist Urbanism 203 CHAPTER 9: Igal Halfin Stalinist Confessions in an Age of Terror: Messianic Times at the Leningrad Communist Universities 231 CHAPTER 10: Aditya Nigam The Heterotopias of Dalit Politics: Becoming- Subject and the Consumption Utopia 250 List of Contributors 277 Index 281

The morbid age : Britain and the crisis of civilization

Abstract: Richard Overy's "The Morbid Age" opens a window onto the creative but anxious period between the First and Second World Wars. British intellectual life between the wars stood at the heart of modernity; it was the golden age of the public intellectual and scientist: Arnold Toynbee, Aldous and Julian Huxley, H. G. Wells, Marie Stopes and a host of others. Yet, as Richard Overy argues, a striking characteristic of so many of the ideas that emerged from this new age - from eugenics to the Freudian unconscious, to modern ideas of pacifism and world government - was the fear that the West was faced a dystopian future of war, economic collapse and racial degeneration. Brilliantly evoking a Britain of BBC radio lectures, public debates, peace demonstrations, pamphleteers, psychoanalysts, anti-fascist volunteers, sex education manuals and science fiction, "The Morbid Age" reveals a time at once different from, and yet surprisingly similar to, our own. "History at its best". ("Economist"). "The carefree image of life in Britain between the wars is overturned in this magnificent account". (Peter Preston, "Observer"). "It is hard to imagine anyone recording these times more exactly and more intelligently, or with greater insight and scholarship, than Overy has". (Simon Heffer, "Daily Telegraph"). "With learning, lucidity and wit, "The Morbid Age" ...brilliantly describes the sense of an inevitably approaching catastrophe". (Eric Hobsbawm, "London Review of Books"). Richard Overy is Professor of History at the University of Exeter. His books include "Why the Allies Won", "Russia's War", "The Battle of Britain" and "The Dictators", which won the Wolfson and the Hessell Tiltman Prizes for history in 2005.

Noir Urbanisms: Dystopic Images of the Modern City

Abstract: Introduction: Imaging the Modern City, Darkly by Gyan Prakash 1 MODERNISM AND URBAN DYSTOPIA Chapter 1: The Phantasm of the Apocalypse: Metropolis and Weimar Modernity by Anton Kaes 17 Chapter 2: Sounds Like Hell: Beyond Dystopian Noise by James Donald 31 Chapter 3: Tlatelolco: Mexico City's Urban Dystopia by Ruben Gallo 53 THE AESTHETICS OF THE DARK CITY Chapter 4: A Regional Geography of Film Noir:Urban Dystopias On- and Offscreen by Mark Shiel 75 Chapter 5: Oh No, There Goes Tokyo: Recreational Apocalypse and the City in Postwar Japanese Popular Culture by William M. Tsutsui 104 Chapter 6: Postsocialist Urban Dystopia? by Li Zhang 127 Chapter 7: Friction, Collision, and the Grotesque: The Dystopic Fragments of Bombay Cinema by Ranjani Mazumdar 150 IMAGING URBAN CRISIS Chapter 8: Topographies of Distress: Tokyo, c. 1930 by David R. Ambaras 187 Chapter 9: Living in Dystopia: Past, Present, and Future in Contemporary African Cities by Jennifer Robinson 218 Chapter 10: Imaging Urban Breakdown: Delhi in the 1990s Ravi Sundaram by 241 Contributors 261 Index 265

Being Marshallese and Christian: A case of multiple identities and contradictory beliefs

Abstract: Using ethnographic data from the Marshall Islands, I argue that clashing identities may give rise to paradoxical belief systems. Marshall Islanders consider themselves both authentically Marshallese and devoutly Christian, causing a schism of belief and identity that is most starkly visible in historical narratives. When asked generally about the past, locals describe a utopia of traditional peace; but when asked specifically about life before Christian missionaries arrived, locals describe a dystopia of heathen barbarism. Interviewees are usually unable to reconcile these two accounts, showing that they are as paradoxical to locals as they are to outsiders. Researchers who are desirous of tidy analyses or wary of implying that their informants are irrational may downplay such dilemmas in the societies they study. Yet, far from demonstrating the futility of analysis, admitting the existence of contradiction in social life allows for a richer and more insightful view of culture, religion, belief and identity.

Shooting for Fame: Spectacular Youth, Web 2.0 Dystopia, and the Celebrity Anarchy of Generation Mash-Up

Abstract: In this essay, I argue that the stories from Columbine and Virginia Tech in the U.S. and Jokela High School in Finland betray a disconcerting dystopia of user-generated content gone wrong at a moment of much Web 2.0 hype. I use their actions and the subsequent reaction as case-study portals into an era of celebrity anarchy and narcissistic youth. I then contextualize these youth shooters within a generational context of purported narcissism—suggesting that their attacks are both premeditated as well as premediated. I conclude by pondering the challenges journalists face in complying with youth shooters' demand for celebrity and the possibility that, in the self-broadcasting world of Web 2.0, their role as gatekeepers may be more confounded than ever.

Ecology and dystopia

Abstract: The terms 'ecology' and 'dystopia' were first improvised from their Greek roots in the mid-nineteenth century. The former was used by Henry David Thoreau in 1858 before being formally defined as a branch of biology seven years later by Ernst Haeckel, while the latter was by employed by John Stuart Mill in 1868. A basic awareness of ecological relationships had been a necessary concomitant of agricultural endeavour since the first crops were sown and the first animals domesticated; farming is, in essence, a matter of creating, sustaining and improving artificial ecosystems. The application of the scientific method to agricultural practice had made considerable impacts long before Haeckel identified a science of ecology, but Thoreau's usage was more closely connected to an increasing sensitivity to the complexity of natural processes, which changed the significance of the word 'nature' in philosophical discourse and popular parlance, where it was often rendered, with a degree of personification impregnated with mystical homage, as 'Nature'. Thoreau was continuing a tradition summarized in Ralph Waldo Emerson's Nature (1836), which owed a good deal to the Romantic movements of Europe; Romantic poets often elaborated their responses to Nature and celebrated supposed communions therewith.

Slouching towards dystopia: the new military futurism

Abstract: In recent years, the military establishments of the US and the UK have produced a series of reports that attempt to 'think the unthinkable' in imagining future threats to the security of the West. A new genre of military futurology has emerged which owes as much to apocalyptic Hollywood movies as it does to the cold war tradition of 'scenario planning'. Often outlandish and bizarre in its prophecies, and always dystopian, this new military futurism sees threats to the western way of life emanating not only from rogue states, weapons of mass destruction and terrorism but also from resurgent nationalism, conflicts over dwindling resources, migration, disease, organized crime, abrupt climate change and the emergence of 'failed cities' where social disorder is rife. This article provides a survey of the genre, showing how the grim predictions of the military futurists provide a justification for endless global war against enemies that may never exist.

Modeling Citizenship: Jewish and Asian American Writing

Abstract: CONTENTS List of Illustrations List of Music Examples Preface Acknowledgements Preface MODELING CITIZENSHIP AND MODELED SELFHOOD Introduction PERPETUAL FOREIGNERS AND MODEL MINORITIES: NATURALIZING JEWISH AMERICANS AND ASIAN AMERICANS Chapter One "WHO MAY BE CITIZENS OF THE UNITED STATES": CITIZENSHIP MODELS IN EDITH MAUDE EATON AND ABRAHAM CAHAN Chapter Two INTERRUPTED ALLEGIANCES: INDIVISIBILITY AND TRANSNATIONAL PLEDGES Chapter Three UTOPIAN AND DYSTOPIAN CITIZENSHIPS: VISIONS AND REVISIONS OF THE 'PROMISED LAND' Chapter Four READING AND WRITING AMERICA: BHARATI MUKHERJEE'S JASMINE AND EVA HOFFMAN'S LOST IN TRANSLATION Chapter Five DEMARCATING THE NATION: NATURALIZING COLD WAR LEGACIES AND WAR ON TERROR POLICIES Epilogue "A SENSE OF LOSS AND ANOMIE": MODEL MINORITIES AND TWENTY-FIRST CENTURY CITIZENSHIP Endnotes

Prague Palimpsest: Writing, Memory, and the City

Abstract: A city of immense literary mystique, Prague has inspired writers across the centuries with its beauty, cosmopolitanism, and tragic history. Envisioning the ancient city in central Europe as a multilayered text, or palimpsest, that has been constantly revised and rewritten - from the medieval and Renaissance chroniclers who legitimized the city's foundational origins to the modernists of the early twentieth century who established its reputation as the new capital of the avant-garde - Alfred Thomas argues that Prague has become a paradoxical site of inscription and effacement, of memory and forgetting, a utopian link to the prewar and pre-Holocaust European past and a dystopia of totalitarian amnesia. Considering a wide range of writers, including the city's most famous son, Franz Kafka, Prague Palimpsest reassesses the work of poets and novelists such as Bohumil Hrabal, Milan Kundera, Gustav Meyrink, Jan Neruda, Vitezslav Nezval, and Rainer Maria Rilke and engages with other famous authors who 'wrote' Prague, including Guillaume Apollinaire, Ingeborg Bachmann, Albert Camus, Paul Celan, and W. G. Sebald. The result is a comparative, interdisciplinary study that helps to explain why Prague - more than any other major European city - has haunted the cultural and political imagination of the West.

Paradise transformed: varieties of nineteenth-century utopias

Abstract: If the nineteenth century was not the Golden Age of utopianism, it was certainly a golden age. All three major 'faces of utopia', to borrow Lyman Tower Sargent's phrase, flourished: literary utopias, non-fictional utopian social theory, and intentional communities. This Cambridge Companion highlights one of the 'three faces' - the literary utopia. My working definition of a literary utopia is a fairly detailed narrative description of an imaginary culture - a fiction that invites readers to experience vicariously an alternative reality that critiques theirs by opening intellectual and emotional spaces that encourage readers to perceive the realities and potentialities of their cultures in new ways. If the author and/or readers perceive the imaginary culture as being significantly better than their 'present' reality, then the work is a literary eutopia (or more commonly, a utopia); if significantly worse, it is a dystopia. Within this definitional framework, an overview of the nineteenth century could have an especially narrow chronological focus, since there is a general consensus that for most of the century utopian social theory and communal experiments thrived, but only in the final years of the century did literary utopias flourish. There is ample evidence to support this claim from North America to Great Britain, Europe, Australia, New Zealand and Asia.

Teaching Dystopian Literature to a Consumer Class.

Abstract: students are struggling with more depression and anxiety than ever before. These are characteristic dangers of the "consumer class" 1.7 billion people worldwide who are "characterized by diets of highly processed food, desire for bigger houses, more and bigger cars, higher levels of debt, and lifestyles devoted to the accumulation of non-essential goods" (Mayell). Mindless consumerism threatens physical, social, and psychological health; total abstinence, on the other hand, means starvation. How do we guide students to navigate such treacherous, shifting seas? I teach dystopian literature, which exaggerates our modern context so that we can challenge it. Providing for its readers a glimpse into a horrifying but fully possible future, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and M. T. Anderson's Feed show how unrestrained industry often relies on manipulation and herd mentality, an unspeakably grim encroachment on the individual. When the important thing is selling and buying, the individual becomes nothing more than consumer or worker. This is where it gets tricky: Young people love advertising, consuming, entertainment, and technology. If we attack these trappings of modern life, we risk nurturing defensiveness. The challenge is to focus on the dangers, demands, and opportunities common to the "consumer class" without alarmism difficult terrain to navigate. It's a matter of human nature, not stuff: "man in using his reason to create the ultimate life of pleasure has ceased to be human" (Greenblatt 97). Dystopian literature such as Feed and Brave New World is to consuming as Frankenstein is to cloning theoretical exploration and warning. Four important traits of modern consumerism that these two novels address are powerful advertising and industry, mindless consumption based on instant gratification, reliance on technology, and the resulting atrophy of language. English teachers can explore these important concepts with their students, as I explain below. Using these texts, we can meaningfully discuss what it means to be responsible, aware, knowledgeable, and moral consumers.

Future threat: pre-crime, state terror, and dystopia in the 21st century

Abstract: It will end the check and balance system. Pre-crime will no longer be an independent agency. The Senate will control the police, and after that … They'll absorb the Army too. (P K Dick, 1956, Minor...

Projecting Early American Literary Studies

Abstract: Many of Toni Morrison’s novels explore the roots of contemporary social conflicts in historical settings that range from the years immediately surrounding the Civil War (Beloved [1987]) through the 1970s and beyond (Paradise [1998]), but her newest work chronicles the disordered world created by European colonization. In A Mercy (2008), Morrison retells the story of the peopling of British North America in a dystopian register. Her portrait of the British colonies in the 1680s seems designed to correct the powerfully idealizing image of colonial encounter of an earlier generation, reflected so famously in Nick Carroway’s colonial fantasy of “aesthetic contemplation” and his sense of the “wonder” arising in the minds of Dutch sailors as they encountered “the fresh, green breast of the new world” in the concluding paragraphs of The Great Gatsby (1925). Carroway goes on to relate this green breast of seemingly untouched nature to the green light at the end of Daisy’s dock and the greenbacks that seem to promise Jay Gatsby so much more than they can deliver. Early in A Mercy, Morrison similarly identifies the natural world with money when she introduces the Anglo-Dutch trader Jacob Vaark making his way from a sloop to the Virginia shore through a dense fog, one distinguished from other fogs by its color: “thick, hot gold,” a “blinding gold” that Jacob experiences as dreamlike, and that he soon misses as he passes through it and regains a measure of control over himself and his surroundings. This blinding, golden Virginia fog will govern Vaark’s actions as the novel progresses, descending upon him in the form of an urge to build a manor house unseemly in its grandiosity, superfluous for a man without heirs, and fatal to its builder, as he dies trying to complete it. Long before Thomas Sutpen arrives in Yoknapatawpha County, a similar compulsion possesses Jacob Vaark to establish a legacy for himself at the house he names Milton in the unspecified northerly region where he dwells. The central trope of the novel involves the

A body of work: building self and society at stalin's white sea-baltic canal

Abstract: The dissertation concerns the construction of Stalin's White Sea-Baltic Canal (Belomorsko-Baltiskii Kanal imeni Stalina), one of the most significant and infamous forced-labor projects of Soviet Russia. In just twenty months from 1931-1933, political and criminal prisoners built a 227-kilometer-long canal in extreme environmental conditions, without the help of any modern equipment. This early Gulag project differed greatly from others in its broad use of art and creativity as a motivational and propagandistic tool. Prisoners performed in agitbrigady (agitational brigades), participated in camp-wide competitions of poetry and prose, worked as journalists at the camp newspaper Perekovka, and attended theatrical performances completely produced by fellow prisoners. Art, in turn, not only served as entertainment but also had the capacity to transform human beings through the ideological process of perekvovka (re-forging), which supposedly re-fashioned wayward criminals into productive members of Soviet society. Through extensive use of archival documents, the dissertation aims to highlight the experience of criminal prisoners in the Gulag, a long understudied demographic of the Soviet prison camp system. Self and society were both re-created at the Belomorkanal with the help of aesthetic products, and what was begun as a laboratory for Soviet culture becomes a utopian vision. This dystopian utopia was riddled by the paradoxes surrounding it—in an environment of supposed re-birth and creation there was ubiquitous death and destruction. This explains the important roles that collage, montage, and assemblage play as artistic styles and metaphorical concepts. Collage exemplifies the shredding of the world in order to create a new, unified whole; montage in film and photography promises the creation of non-existent—and idealized—worlds; assemblage, in its three-dimensionality, is used in contemporary artworks about the Canal and can be understood metaphorically, with the Canal's various bits of lock, dam, and dike pieced together and subsequently stitched with other waterways. From the outset, the significance of the Belomorkanal was seen within the larger industrial context of Stalin's first Five-Year Plan, and the project has important cultural significance not only for the history of the Gulag but also for the study of Stalinism and the Soviet Union as a whole.

Perimeters of Democracy: Inverse Utopias and the Wartime Social Landscape in the American West

Abstract: List of Illustrations Introduction: Discovering the Inverse-Utopian West 1. Beware of Crafty Bandits: Enmification in the Empire for Liberty 2. The Great Citizenship Pantomime: Politics and Power in a Barbed-Wire Democracy 3. Cultivating Dependency: Economics and Education in America's Inverse Utopias 4. Tragic Ironies: Everyday Life in an Inverse Utopia 5. From Barbed Wire to Bootstraps: Freedom and Community in Cold War America 6. Termination of the Klamath Reservation: From Inverse Utopia to Indian Dystopia 7. No Camps for Commies: The Dual Legacies of Dissonance and Dissidents Notes Bibliography Index

Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch

Abstract: From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

In Marx's Shadow: Knowledge, Power, and Intellectuals in Eastern Europe and Russia

Abstract: Chapter 1 Introduction Part 2 I. The Sickle, the Hammer and the Typewriter Chapter 3 1) Ideas against Ideocracy: The Platonic Drama of Russian Thought Chapter 4 2) Asking for More: Finding Utopia in the Critical Sociology of the Budapest School and the Praxis Movement Chapter 5 3) Aesthetics: a Modus Vivendi in East Central Europe? Chapter 6 4) Changing Perceptions of Pavel Florensky in Russian and Soviet Scholarship Part 7 II. Heretics Chapter 8 5) The Totalitarian Languages of Utopia and Dystopia: Fidelius and Havel Chapter 9 6) Martyrdom and Philosophy. The Case of Jan Patocka Chapter 10 7) Anti-Communist Orientalism: Shifting Boundaries of Europe in Dissident Writing Part 11 III. In Search of a (New) Mission Chapter 12 8) Vitality Rediscovered: Theorizing Post-Soviet Ethnicity in Russia Chapter 13 9) Balkanism and postcolonilaism or on the Beauty of the Airplane View Chapter 14 10) Anxious Intellectuals: Framing the Nation as a class in Belarus Part 15 IV. Reinventing Hope Chapter 16 11) The Demise of Leninism and the Future of Liberal Values Chapter 17 12) "Politics of Authenticity" and/or Civil Society Chapter 18 13) Mihai Sora: A Philosopher of Dialogue and Hope

“Nothing Like Pretend”: Difference, Disorder, and Dystopia in The Multiple World Spaces of Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials

Abstract: This article examines the multiple worlds in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy in light Pierre Bourdieu’s “space of possibles” and the combination of chance and choice that impact Lyra and Will’s decisions. Rather than viewing chance or destiny as disempowering, this article considers how the protagonists’ choices also encourage readers to confront their own notions of space in the world outside the narrative. As Lyra and Will work to escape and restore the dystopic multiverses through which they travel, Pullman’s text challenges readers to recognize and repair the dystopias in their own worlds and to accept the Keatsian “negative capabilities” of ambiguity and mystery in place of facile escape. Given this pedagogical imperative, Pullman’s enclosure of Lyra and Will in their separate worlds lies at the heart of his resistance to escapist tendencies of fairy-tale endings. Fantasy must be grounded in reality because Pullman’s readers must also continue the struggle for wisdom in their own worlds no less than Lyra and Will.

Tenses of imagination : Raymond Williams on science fiction, utopia and dystopia

Abstract: Contents: Space Anthropology, Utopia, and Putropia. Left Culturalism: Science Fiction (1956) - William Morris (1958) - George Orwell (1958) - The Future Story as Social Formula Novel (1961) - Terror (1971) - Texts in their Contexts. Cultural Materialism: Nineteen Eighty-Four (1971) - The City and the Future (1973) - On Orwell: An Interview (1977) - On Morris: An Interview (1977) - Learning from Le Guin. (Anti-) Postmodernism: Utopia and Science Fiction (1978) - The Tenses of Imagination (1978) - Beyond Actually Existing Socialism (1980) - Resources for a Journey of Hope (1983) - Nineteen Eighty-Four in 1984 (1984) - The Future Novels: From The Volunteers (1978) - From The Fight for Manod (1979).

(un)natural Bodies, Endangered Species, And Embodied Others In Margaret Atwood's Oryx And Crake

Abstract: The developing knowledge of life sciences is at the crux of Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake as she examines human promise gone awry in a near-future dystopia. This thesis examines aspects of posthumanism, ecocriticism, and feminism in the novel's scientific, cultural, and environmental projections. Through the trope of extinction, Atwood's text foregrounds the effects of human exceptionalism and instrumentalism in relation to the natural world, and engenders an analysis of human identity through its biological and cultural aspects. Extinction thus serves as a metaphor for both human development and human excesses, redefining the idea of human within the context of vulnerable species. Oryx and Crake reveals humanity's organic connections with non-human others through interspecies gene-splicing and the ensuing hybridity. In this perspective, Atwood's text provides a dialogue on humankind's alienation from the natural world and synchronic connections to the animal other, and poses timely questions for twenty-first century consumerism, globalism, and humanist approaches to nature. The loss of balance provoked by the apocalyptic situation in Oryx and Crake challenges commonplace attitudes toward beneficial progress. This imbalance signals the need for a new narrative: A consilient reimagining of humanity's role on earth as an integrated organism rather than an intellectual singularity.

Between Utopia and Dystopia: Erasmus, Thomas More, and the Humanist Republic of Letters

Abstract: Introduction Part I. The Erasmian Republic of Letters Chapter 1. Humanism as Form Chapter 2. The Construction of the Erasmian Republic of Letters Chapter 3. Erasmian Humanism: The Reform Program of the Universal Intellectual Part II. The Erasmian Republic and Its Discontents Chapter 4. The Politics of a Disembodied Humanist Chapter 5. More's Richard III: The Fragility of Humanist Discourse Chapter 6. Utopia and the No-place of the Erasmian Republic Conclusion

Visions of nightmare, dreams of freedom : ecofeminism in two feminist dystopias

Abstract: The primary purpose of this thesis is the exploration of ecofeminist aspects of women’s utopian and dystopian literature. Through close readings of two contemporary novels, Daughters of the North by Sarah Hall and The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, I have explored ecofeminist elements in two significant contributions to the feminist dystopian class of fiction. There are two important aspects of ecofeminist theory which are relevant for application to a literary work: the deconstruction of the metaphorical phenomenon of aligning woman with nature, and the provision of criticism of the overarching phallocentrism which permeates such a metaphorical dialectic. In my thesis, I argue that the two novels in question explore these tendencies on several levels, and discuss how this deconstruction of metaphor manifests itself. I also discuss whether these novels, as far as they can be considered ecofeminist, are technophobic, and what are the implications of this in relation to the narratives’ use of metaphor.