Showing papers on "Dystopia published in 2011"

Michael Young's The Rise of the Meritocracy: A Philosophical Critique

Abstract: This paper examines Michael Young's 1958 dystopia, The Rise of the Meritocracy. In this book, the word ‘meritocracy’ was coined and used in a pejorative sense. Today, however, meritocracy represents a positive ideal against which we measure the justice of our institutions. This paper argues that, when read in the twenty-first century, Young's dystopia does little to dislodge the implicit appeal of a meritocratic society. It examines the principles of education and administrative justice upon which meritocracy is based, suggesting that since 1958 those principles have changed. Young's warning no longer has any effect on us because the meritocratic system it warns us against has been transformed.

Science Fiction: A Very Short Introduction

Abstract: Introduction 1. Voyages into space 2. Alien encounters 3. Science fiction and technology 4. Utopias and dystopias 5. Fictions of time 6. The field of science fiction

Introduction: Open Questions in Roboethics

Abstract: 1 The Rise of the RobotethicistRoboethics is the recent offshoot of computer ethics that pays special attention to thealterationsthatneedtobemadetocomputerethicswhenwegivethecomputermobilityand a means to interact directly in the human environment. The closely related field ofmachinemoralityexploreshowethicalsystemsandbehaviorsmaybeprogrammedintosocial robotics applications. As robots move from the factory floor into our homes andworklives,theystandtochangekeyaspectsofthewayourlivesarelived.Inordertobesuccessful, these machines must be programmed with the ability to navigate the humanlifeworldwithoutcommittingethicalfauxpasormoraloutrage.Thus,theroboethicististasked not only with critiquing the attempts of robots engineers to achieve theintegration of these machines into our life world, but also, and more importantly, withsuggesting means of achieving better results than what is presently on offer.The undeniable roots of roboethics begin in the world of science fiction. The verycoining of the word “robot” in Karel Capek’s 1936 play, RUR, is loaded with ethicalimport. The Czech word “Robota” refers to labor or servitude, which gives us theuncomfortable inference that roboethics refers to a kind of slave ethics. I reject thisconnotation and it is just an unfortunate byproduct from the literary trope of therobot rebellion that Capek began with his play and Fritz Lang masterfully solidifiedin the human psyche with his film Metropolis, something which Hollywood has beenreiterating ever since. There is no need to reenact this unfortunate future in reality.As the great science fiction writer Philip K. Dick once observed, the duty of sciencefiction is to imagine dystopian futures so that we don’t actually have to live them.With this in mind, we can then see that the job of the roboethicist is not simplyscience fiction, it is instead to help avoid the imagined robo-apocalypse and helpbuild an alternative future where robots are not resentful slaves or out of controlkilling machines, but instead more like pets and perhaps someday even friends orpossibly, in the very far future, even colleagues. In the near future, the job of the

Hooked on an Affect: Detroit Techno and Dystopian Digital Culture

Abstract: Detroit techno is typically historicized as having grown out of the late 1970s and early 1980s middle-class, consumerist, and aspirational high school social party scene, giving the impression that Detroit techno artists created forward-thinking music as a means to acquire subcultural capital and (re)produce their identities. In this essay, this position is nuanced for a more complex understanding of techno’s relation to the quotidian phenomenological encounter with the dystopian setting of Detroit. Concomitantly, predominant theorizations of affect within the humanities, which emphasize the utopian, hopeful dimensions of affect’s inherent productivity, are supplemented for an understanding of productive energy revolving around affects of dystopia and on a certain hopelessness which scholars, in the years ahead, will increasingly have to negotiate. Keywords : techno, Detroit, dystopia, affect, aesthetic, desire, subculture

"Time to go": The Post-apocalyptic and The Post-traumatic in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Abstract: Any fictional text, however realistic, portrays a world that is not real. But speculative fiction--as Margaret Atwood designates her futurist, dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009)--offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers' sense of the temporal distance separating the fictional mise-en-scene from the contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions. In Atwood's words, speculative fictions explore "the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational," which is something that "'novels' as usually defined cannot do" (In Other Worlds 62). Yet the imaginative effects of dystopian literary speculations depend precisely on their readers' recognition of a potential social realism in the fictional worlds portrayed therein. These cautionary tales of the future work by evoking an uncanny sense of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these brave new worlds. The future as imagined in dystopian speculative fiction must be simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, both like and not-like the present (see Suvin 71; see also Appleton, Howells, and Mohr). In order to grasp the caution offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize the difference between now and the future-as-imagined. Thus, the reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world portrayed and to its potential as our own world's future. In Atwood's Oryx and Crake, for example, we find a near-future world that both approximates and projects forward from the political, socio-economical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment. In the near future as imagined by Atwood, elites work and play in manicured gated communities, while everyone else is relegated to dangerous urban jungles known as pleeblands; biotech corporations command their own secret police forces such as the CorpSeCorps (short for Corporation Security Corps, but also, more grimly, Corpse Corps); genetically engineered life forms are trademarked and marketed for medical purposes and lifestyle enhancement; and the dire effects of rising sea levels and droughts associated with global warming are accepted by a younger generation that mocks the nostalgic longings of their parents and grandparents for a long ago golden age. The futurist setting of the novel suggests that we are at risk of coming to such a pass, though some readers may feel that this is already substantially, if not literally, the way we live now. Readers of Oryx and Crake are not alone in their temporally uncertain, or doubled, relation to the novel's dystopian mise-en-scene. For Atwood's protagonist--born "Jimmy" but introduced to the reader as "Snowman"--the futurist dystopia sketched above is already a memory. Oryx and Crake opens with Snowman awakening to a bleak, post-apocalyptic world that makes the socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in which he was still "Jimmy" and a past that stands as the reader's possibly inevitable future, look rosy by comparison. We don't immediately understand what has happened to Snowman's world, or when, but as we continue to read, we apprehend that Snowman believes himself to be the sole survivor of a global pandemic that has extinguished the rest of humanity. Gradually, we learn of Snowman's largely unwitting, yet also willfully unknowing, complicity in a scheme by which a bioengineered super virus was disseminated across the globe. The same mad scientist (Jimmy's best friend Crake) who masterminded the pandemic also bio-engineered a small tribe of genetically "improved" trans-humans, primitive but gentle replacements for humanity, who have been left under Snowman's care to inherit the earth. …

Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century

Abstract: In 1941, media mogul Henry R Luce exulted, “American jazz, Hollywood movies, American slang, American machines and patented products are in fact the only things that every community in the world, from Zanzibar to Hamburg, recognizes in common” It is as true today as it was then From the early days of Hollywood, an insatiable demand for US cultural products—in advertising, fashion, film, popular music, television, and much else—has had a profound and continuing impact across the globe Media, Popular Culture, and the American Century explores a diverse range of Americana, where the borders between the real and the imaginary, dream and dystopia, America and the world, blur and disappear Essays move from configurations of US culture in the early 1900s to the age of Google and digital music

The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend

Abstract: n 12 September 2009 more than sixty thousand supporters of the 9/12 Project and TEA Baggers (Taxed Enough Already) marched on Washington. Although participants in the Taxpayers March decried Barack Obama’s health-care reform, “big government” spending, and corporate bailouts, their placards sent a more alarming message. Bobbing among the crowd of mostly white faces were separate images of Obama with a Hitler moustache and “joker” makeup (made famous by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) as well as allusions to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the implied “horrors” of socialism. These symbols evoke a lexicon of fear that frames the current cultural politics of race and countenance of the nation as an omen of “immanent totalitarianism” (Goldberg 1). Swirling suspicions of Obama’s U.S. citizenship, religious affiliation, and middle name (Hussein), for example, work to preemptively discredit his leadership in hopes of exposing the “Obama nation” as an “Obamanation.” Following the September rally, Republican congressman Trent Franks called Obama “an enemy of humanity,” while a writer for Newsmax.com suggested a military coup was needed to deal with “the Obama problem.” While the rallies and rhetoric are inflamed by an unresolved economic morass, they have assumed an increasingly racialized tone in their failure to build multicultural alliances and jaundiced position on immigration reform. The eruption of such hostility and discontent so shortly after the election of a black president marks an open renewal of white male backlash, “Dixiecrat,” racism and anti-multiculturalism, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and economic nightmare. Despite the apparent spike in popularity of right-wing media pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, figureheads of a revamped white identity politics, there is O The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend sean braytOn

A Man Chooses, A Slave Obeys: BioShock and the Dystopian Logic of Convergence:

Abstract: For all the critical attention paid to dystopian landscapes in recent literature and film, a similar dystopian turn within gamespace has been largely overlooked. The authors contend that post-apoca...

Criticism, Crisis, and Contemporary Narrative: Textual Horizons in an Age of Global Risk

Abstract: Introduction Paul Crosthwaite I. Critical Thought/Critical Times 1. No Apocalypse, Not Yet: Literary Criticism in an Age of Global Risk Molly Wallace 2. Beyond the Ghost Dance: Democracy and Emergency Nick Mansfield 3. The Incredible Shrinking Human Charlie Gere 4. The Risks of Sustainability Karen Pinkus II. Critical Perspectives on Crisis Narratives 5. The Rise of the Edge: Catastrophic Seascape and the Ecological Uncanny in Cormac McCarthy's The Road Rebecca Giggs 6. Narrating the Coming Pandemic: Avian Influenza, Anticipatory Anxiety, and Neurotic Citizenship Penelope Ironstone Catterall 7. Grey Goo and You: The Ecophagy of Global Capital Robin Stoate 8. Risk and Morality in Ian McEwan's Saturday Lidia De Michelis 9. After Globalization: Narratives of Post-American Hegemony Imre Szeman 10. "The Corporation of Terror": Financial Fictions/Fictions of Finance Nicky Marsh 11. Casino Royale, Financial Aesthetics, and National Narrative Form Alissa G. Karl 12. Phantasmagoric Finance: Risk and the Supernatural in Contemporary Finance Culture Paul Crosthwaite 13. Global Capitalism and a Dystopian South Africa: Trencherman by Eben Venter and Moxyland by Lauren Beukes Andries Visagie

"Community, Identity, Stability": The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Abstract: Michel went over to the bookshelf and took down What Dare I Think? and handed it to Bruno. "It was written by Julian Huxley, Aldous's older brother, and published in 1931, a year before Brave New World. All of the ideas his brother used in the novel--genetic manipulation and improving the species, including the human species--are suggested here. All of them are presented as unequivocally desirable goals that society should strive for." Michel Houellebecq I take as my epigraph, and as the starting point of this paper, a passage from Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel The Elementary Particles. When Bruno visits his brother Michel, he excitedly contends that "everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's just hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against aging, the leisure society" (132). Michel, a molecular biologist, agrees, arguing that both Huxleys (1) believed totally in the kind of society depicted in Brave New World (1932) and that it was only after the Nazi experiment "poisoned the well" of the eugenics argument, and after Julian became the director-general of unesco, that Aldous rewrote his own literary past, claiming that his novel had been a dystopia all along. It is not difficult to counter Houellebecq's argument. A close reading of Brave New World reveals too many sites of satire simply to claim that Aldous was endorsing the specific scientific society he depicted. However, Houellebecq's argument correctly implies that reading the novel in the context of the scientific discourse that surrounded its publication problematizes the standard reading, which has led Brave New World to be recognized as "a kind of byword for a society in which the values (or nonvalues) of scientific technology are dominant, and which therefore reduced man to a species of machine" (Firchow, "Science and Conscience" 301). Several scholars have complicated a simplistic dystopian reading of the novel by analyzing it alongside Aldous's positive view of eugenics and scientific planning, which he elaborated in nonfiction essays and letters around the time of Brave New Worlds publication. Robert S. Baker, David Bradshaw, and Joanne Woiak, (2) for instance, have argued that analyzing Brave New World in the light of Aldous's interest in eugenics and scientific planning reveals a highly ambivalent novel, one which cannot be simply read "as a cautionary tale about the dehumanizing effects of technology" (Woiak 107-08). Instead, Aldous's novel can be seen as an imaginative engagement with the contemporary scientific debate surrounding the role of eugenics and scientific planning in the future of society. Woiak's conclusion is that Brave New World "offers a sophisticated critique of how scientific knowledge emerges from and in turn serves the social, political, and economic agendas of those in power" (Woiak 124). Woiak concludes that the target of the novel's satire is not advanced science but the ideologies of societies which may use it; however, a more specific conclusion can be developed by reading Brave New World alongside What Dare I Think? by Julian Huxley. Following Woiak's suggestion to study "the influence of relevant scientific ideas and sources" (110) in the creation of Aldous's novel, my reading complements these studies by examining the ways in which the novel can be seen as a text that reflects Aldous's positive views of eugenics. More importantly, it also goes beyond these studies, by identifying the distinct areas of overlap shared with What Dare I Think?; in particular, Brave New World seems to be responding to Julian's call for a "world controlled by man" (42), his belief that such a world will require preservations for "strange human beings" (24), and the potential for the use of advanced pharmacological substances (66-69). Of greatest interest is the way in which Brave New World responds to Julian's belief in a biological "religious emotion" (195). …

Remarks on Utopia in the Age of Climate Change

Abstract: I came to utopia by accident, having painted myself into a corner with an idea for a trilogy: three science fiction novels consisting of an after-the-fall novel, a dystopia and a utopia, all set in the same place, and about the same distance into the future. The idea came to me in 1972, and I didn't know how to write a novel then, so the plan needed brooding on. Some sixteen years later, the time came for the utopia. I had written the after-the-fall novel, The Wild Shore, and the dystopia, The Gold Coast. The utopia was the only one left.

Escaping the Panopticon: Utopia, Hegemony, and Performance in Peter Weir's The Truman Show

Abstract: Peter Weir's The Truman Show (1998) has been studied as an example of Debord's theory of the spectacle; as such, many theorists have shown how Truman is a com- modifi ed object constructed for "entertainment" for the masses, also noting how we ourselves are complicit in the consumption of media that dehumanize. In this essay, the author argues that, while a decided exemplar of postmodernism's "society of the spectacle," the fi lm is also a corporealization of poststructuralist Michel Foucault's ( Discipline ) concept of the panopticon , illustrating how a consideration of social spaces (mental, medical, penal, laboral, educational) yields a fuller understanding of Truman's predicament as (un)knowing prisoner/performer. Through an analysis of power, ideology, hegemony, and whiteness as they are re-presented in The Truman Show , we can more thoroughly articulate Truman's condition as a panoptic object who is regulated and hegemonized under the watchful eyes of a Master—himself synecdochic of Authority, Reason, and Truth—and those of a voracious public. The result is an indeterminate, postmodern, dystopian vision of mediated masses and the power apparatuses they/we wield through the act of watching .

Cinema of the Not-Yet: The Utopian Promise of Film as Heterotopia

Abstract: Drawing on Ernst Bloch’s writings on utopia, Michel Foucault’s notion of heterotopia, and the ‘affective turn’ in social theory, I argue that cinema is by its nature heterotopic: it creates worlds that are other than the ‘real world’ but that relate to that world in multiple and contradictory ways. The landscapes and people portrayed in film are affectively charged in ways that alter viewers’ relationship to the real objects denoted or signified by them. But it is the larger context of social and cultural movements that mobilizes or fails to mobilize this affective charge to draw out its critical utopian potentials. I examine four films from the 1970s—Deliverance, The Wicker Man, Jonah Who Will Be 25 in the Year 2000, and Stalker—as examples of richly heterotopic films that elicited utopian as well as dystopian affects in their audiences, and I discuss some ways in which American environmentalists, British Pagans, Europe’s ‘generation of ’68’, and Soviet citizens worked with these affects to imagine change in their respective societies.

Maternal back/grounds in Children of Men: Notes toward an Arendtian biopolitics

Abstract: This article intervenes in readings of Cuaron's Children of Men that privilege the psychic and political trajectory of the film's anti-hero, Theo Faron. Inspired by comments about the importance of the cinematic background and the biopolitical order it represents, I engage the material, corporeal dimensions of in/fertility in the film and take the 'race/reproduction bind' (Weinbaum) as central to biopolitical analysis. I interpret the miraculously pregnant illegal immigrant, Kee, in relation to two intersecting strands of fiction and theory: a lineage of dystopian speculative fiction on the one hand, and transatlantic studies on the other. Through a sustained consideration of 'grounds' and 'backgrounds' as they appear in both strands of work, I generate a more elastic conception of 'background'. Such an analysis opens up new angles of approach for biopolitical theorising by foregrounding two figures - the reproductive female and the child - that embody generativity in excess of the now familiar biopolitical category of Homo sacer, or bare life (Agamben). I conclude by showing how the film resonates with Hannah Arendt's enigmatic principle of natality as a possible point of departure for biopolitical analysis. I sink down into my body as into a swamp, fenland, where only I know the footing. Treacherous ground, my own territory. I become the earth I set my ear against, for rumours of the future. - M argaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale , 84 In this sense, in its need for beginners that it may be begun anew, the world is always a desert. - H annah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, 203 In his response to the film adaptation of P.D. James's story of a childless and dystopian Britain, Slavoj Žižek observes that Children of Men (Cuaron US/UK 2006) is a film in which 'the background persists' ('Clash'). Zahid Chaudhary, too, argues that the film's 'structure of visibility (is one) in which the back- ground of the frame, rather than the putative object of cinematic focus, carries the weight of signification' (80). Both thinkers are interested in how the film's background coheres into a violent, uncannily familiar biopolitical order - one in which camps and cages are symptoms of national lockdown and the words 'homeland security' justify the forcible confinement of refugees. My aim here is to extend critical discussion of Children's cinematic background by focusing on

Democratic Prudence and the Youth Suffrage Debate

Abstract: The 1968 film Wild in the Streets depicted a dystopian future in which youth were extended the right to vote at age fourteen. With their newfound political power (and a little LSD hidden in Washington, D.C.'s drinking supply), they forced through a constitutional amendment lowering the age required for holding elected office. Soon thereafter they promoted a rock star and megalomaniac to the White House, established compulsory retirement at age thirty, and confined all U.S. citizens to concentration camps at age thirty-five. The film, which became something of a minor cult classic, appears to contemporary viewers as more comedy than drama. Nevertheless, as outlandish as the script was, argumentation scholars should not discount its message. It spoke potently, albeit hyperbolically, to fears that have animated U.S. politics since the birth of the nation. Robert Ivie (2005) has referred to these fears as "demophobia" (p. 191). They are based on a caricature of the people as an irrational mob or disease threatening to undermine the stability of the nation's republican institutions, and they are stymied only to the extent that the qualities of irrationality and depravity are localized in the persona of a scapegoat. Wild in the Streets worked this way, by replacing generalized fears of "democratic distemper" (Ivie, 2005, p. 46) with a localized threat that could be more easily contained, if not purged. And at least one critic took the film seriously. Renata Adler (1968a) of the New York Times described it as an "instant classic" (p. 21) that sees with gay clarity ... the absolute tyranny at the hands of the young to which adults in this country seem determined, for fairly odd reasons, to subject themselves. What it knows is what every Brownie troop leader and new kid on the block used to know--that there is no more violent, demagogic, elitist, vicious and totalitarian society than a group of children. (Adler, 1968b, p. D1) Adler's tone was atypically vitriolic, perhaps, but there is little doubt that hers was a fear widely shared in her time. The relationship of U.S. democracy to youth is far more ambivalent than Wild in the Streets would suggest, however. In point of contrast, TIME magazine declared youth--the generation twenty-five and under--"Man of the Year" in 1966. This generation, TIME predicted, would "land on the moon, cure cancer and the common cold, lay out blight-proof, smog-free cities, enrich the underdeveloped world and, no doubt, write finis to poverty and war" (para. 8). Although the sentence's coda suggested a degree of irony, the article offered, on the whole, an incredibly flattering portrayal of the young generation. Describing youth at various points as diverse, idealistic, skeptical, committed, alienated, and shrewd, the article had little to hold it together except for a profound sense of optimism in its subject. In reality, of course, youth are neither devils nor prophets; rather, they are (among other things) a screen upon which U.S. citizens project their hopes and fears for the future of democracy. And if Jeremy Engels (2011) is correct that U.S. democracy exists in a tension between demophobia and demophilia--between fears of democratic volatility and hopes that democratic deliberation can transform that volatility into consensus--then the way that the U.S. public culture talks about youth could say far more about democracy than it does about youth. Consequently, debates concerning the role of youth in the public culture offer an extremely productive site for diagnosing the health of American democracy, and for understanding the processes by which it balances hopefulness and fears of unrest. The congressional debate over the voting age, which occurred between 1942 and 1971, is ideal for these purposes, not only because it came to fruition at the height of the generation wars, but more importantly, because it was concerned less with the substantive qualities of youth than it was with the formal qualities of deliberation and judgment in a democracy. …

A Marxist Interpretation of the Dystopian Society in the African Novel

Abstract: This essay attempts an evaluation of the African novel with the postulates of Marxism. With this interest, we probe into the worlds of two less canonized novelists within the aesthetic canon of African fiction, Nigeria's Biyi Bandele-Thomas and Lekan Oyegoke. Both writers have in their respective works exhibited artistic fervour for showing the dystopian Africa as it is. Their fictional exemplars capture the despicable Nigerian societies either under a military regime or in the hands of corrupt politicians. As both authors want us to believe, the eras of money-seeking leaders in Nigeria have been incontrovertible factors further relegating the country to the political and socio-economic background in world politics. The essay thus makes clear the Marxist initiative of the alienation between the haves and the have nots of African societies.

'The twilight of utopia': British dystopian fiction and the Cold War

Abstract: This essay analyses British dystopian fiction in the cultural and political context of the Cold War. Although the conflict dominated international history during the latter half of the twentieth century, its impact on literary production has rarely been explored in British scholarship. The genre of dystopianism is used to demonstrate the significance of East-West hostilities to modern fiction. Ranging from George Orwell to Ian McEwan, J.G. Ballard and Martin Amis, and including reference to a number of rarely studied texts, the essay examines such key themes as authoritarianism, propaganda, technology, decolonisation, nuclear anxiety, anti-Americanisnm and anti-communism.

Six Worlds of Tomorrow: Representing the Future to Popular Culture

Abstract: Images of the future are presented to popular culture not as academic studies, but as stories in various literary and cinematic forms. Six generic narrative visions of the future are identified: progress and utopia, anti-utopia, dystopia, conflict and revolution, collapse, and apocalypse. These narrative accounts have the power to inspire and excite action through psychological processes described here. Given this potential, it is important to be able to critique the simplistic thinking about the future that such visions represent. One generic criticism reviewed here is historicism; beyond that, each paradigmatic vision is critiqued specifically on its own terms. The potential biasing effects of these paradigms on future studies is considered.

Artistic practices & democratic politics: towards the markers of uncertainty: from counter-hegemonic positions to plural hegemonies

Abstract: Can artistic and cultural practices play a critical role in societies in which criticisms are reflexively absorbed and immobilised by the prevailing hegemony? And, if yes, what kind of political order can they aspire to, given the ‘post-utopian’ nature of the human condition? How do we approach the tortuous question of the destiny of both the project of modern democracy and that of aesthetic modernity? There is no agreement on this issue. We are told that there is no alternative to the existing liberal democracy and capitalist pluralism without risking yet another dystopia – the dilemma that in the artistic realm is sometimes articulated as the opposition between modernism and postmodernism. What might progressive art look like in such times when the ideas of progress and modernity are viewed with great suspicion? The most popular positions concerning artistic and cultural practices’ critical dimension revolve around the idea that with the post-Fordist transformation and the bankruptcy of the Left, the paradigm of power has really changed. This is reflected in the radical character of contemporary artistic practices, which desperately struggle to constitute subject at the expense of themselves. However, the question is: can these practices be both radical and democratic? This depends on our understanding of emancipatory politics, the nature of aesthetics and post-Fordist transformation. We will examine the different approaches to these subjects influenced by the Frankfurt school and post-Operaist theories to argue that neither Theodor Adorno’s and Max Horkeimer’s analyses based on the Fordist model, nor Antonio Negri’s and Paolo Virno’s post-Fordist appropriation of the significance of art in the new forms of production provide a useful framework with which to grasp the nature of the changes and challenges that face our society. Such novel ideas as ‘immaterial labour’ and ‘spontaneous communism’ or exodus and ‘communism of capital’, despite their new vocabulary, are a dangerous inversion of the Frankfurt school’s idealism and inability to grasp that social reality is hegemonically constructed through the practices of articulation that temporarily and incompletely ‘fix’ the meaning of social institutions. Neither politics nor post-Fordism should be considered through the matrix of culture, but in terms of hegemony. What is at issue is to grasp the nature of the democratic and aesthetical paradoxes and envisage how the two could be applied to contribute to progressive changes in power relations. Judgements must be made – we have to be able to distinguish between who belongs to demos and who does not; however, how we judge, which is the subject of aesthetic critique, is at the core of democratic artistic-political practice. One way in which artistic practices can be critical is a counter-hegemonic intervention that acts against the position of supremacy of any hegemonic order and shows that any fullness exists because there are gaps, but judges this lack in a way that resists the totalisation of the sensible. However, perhaps the way to weaken the centre is not just to expose its flaws, but to pluralise hegemonies. In this way, the idea to pluralise modernism in the era of globalisation could help us to redefine modern democracy in the post-political era and outline the positive vision of the ‘hegemonic trap’. Could the evolution of artistic-political practice be envisaged as the radicalisation of ‘oppositional identities’, which undermine the hegemonic forms of subject articulation into compository or shimmering identities, making such supremacy impossible? Can art become a symbol of emptying ‘democracy’ and thus construct many ‘democracies’, answering our tortuous question by producing plural answers?

Tapping into the Appeal of Cult Fiction

Abstract: Readers' advisors are well aware of the growing trend in publishing toward cross-genre writing. Whether it is a mystery with a vampire detective, a futuristic romance, or inspirational thriller, readers are enjoying books that defy standard genre classification. As Kelly Fann discusses in her article, cult fiction is a classic genre bender, though one that is frequently overlooked by readers' advisors. Here, Fann explores what makes a title a cult favorite, how readers respond to these titles, and what librarians can do to better serve the reading interests of this part of their reading community. Kelly Fann is director of the Tonganoxie (Kans.) Public Library and adjunct faculty for Emporia State University in Emporia, Kansas. She is a regular RA presenter across Kansas and Missouri and reviews books for MonsterLibrarian.com.--Editor The tattered paperback book sat crammed between two now-forgotten titles on my grandmother's bookshelf for several years before I picked it up in a fit of boredom. It probably hadn't been looked at or even fingered in five times as many years as I passed it over. The pages were yellowed and they smelled something terrible, but I read it anyway, and I read it in one sitting. I can tell you how old I was, the season, what the weather outside was like, what time I started the book, when I finished it, how often I got yelled at and told to get out of that chair and do something constructive, and how I would not shut up about it for many weeks thereafter. Brave New World by Aldous Huxley was my first foray into cult fiction and it will forever be emblazoned as my "life changing" text of choice. This is what cult fiction books do to their faithful followers: they inspire, amuse, and amaze their readers, they stir the emotions and mesmerize, they evoke passion, and they etch themselves into their reader's memory. It is for these reasons and many more that cult fiction titles are a powerful resource for librarians to tap into when helping their patrons find their next greatest read. CULT FICTION AND ITS APPEAL Before we begin, it is important not to confuse cult fiction with the horror genre's "occult," or with fiction written about the idea of a "cult" from a religious or sociological definition. Cult fiction more closely aligns with the concept of "cult classic" in that it has achieved rogue literary phenomenon status; however, defining what constitutes cult fiction can be a daunting task, as there are many determining factors. For an added bit of complexity, not all of these parameters must be met to achieve cult fiction status. Cult fiction tends to be groundbreaking literature, either through its prose style or through the subject matter the author has chosen to discuss. Subjects often cover lurid topics such as sex and drugs, or will include criticism of the establishment through exploration of the human condition or creation of dystopian societies. Many cult fiction titles incorporate spur-of-the-moment adventurous travel, as it is the path traversed that aids in scrutiny of the subject matter. At the time of their publication, titles destined to join the cult fiction canon burst onto the scene, are quickly deemed as being filled with explicit or controversial content, and thus garner greater attention. The icons of the cult fiction canon, Brave New World, Catcher in the Rye, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? along with others, often were banned or contested quickly after publication, intensifying their seduction. Once a title finds its way to the banned bookshelf, reader intrigue skyrockets as readers seek to discover and experience the book's mystique for themselves. In my opinion, Jane Sullivan posits the most concise definition of cult fiction: "whatever it is, cult fiction makes the heart beat faster ... it speaks to you in a way nothing else does, and you're convinced you're the only person who gets it." (1) As more and more readers react to a book in this same manner, feeling as though they are the only people who understand what the author really means, the cult status of the title begins to develop. …

Major Themes in Renaissance Utopias

Abstract: Utopian themes reflect the spirit of the age which produces them, and echo its problems, ailments and concerns. Ages of helplessness and despair produce myths of wishful thinking and escape, such as, the myths of the Golden Age and the Earthly Paradise. An age of social instability and widespread discontent and frustration begets literary social utopias of social stability and universal contentment, such as, More's Utopia and other Renaissance utopias. An age of steady progress and prosperity inspires utopias of ambitious hopes of perfection as H.G. Well's Men like Gods and William Morris' News from Nowhere. The twentieth century in which change has madly pace and the necessary adjustments have a frustrating slow pace has created either utopias of men like gods or dystopia of men like beasts, such as, Zamyatin's We, and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty Four. This paper intends to deal with the major themes of the Renaissance utopias which are often called social utopias, such as Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Francois Rabelais' Abbev of Theleme (1534), Thomas Campanella's The City of the Sum (1613-14), Valentine Andrea's Christianopolis (1619), and Francis Bacon's New Atlantis (1623).

The Ecotechnic Future

Abstract: There is something amazing about books. Seemingly alone, you can conjure up the dead and indulge in the adventures of beings from the other side of the universe. You can transcend the daily grind of life, immersed in the battle to survive the orcish onslaught, or captured by beautiful, gripping, dystopian visions. Books have inspired me in ways that Twitter messages, smartphones or Newsnight never could. That’s why this article begins with a book review.

Against the Fake Empire: Utopia, Dystopia, Apocalypticism in Baudrillard's Late Works

Abstract: In this review essay I explore three of Baudrillard’s late works, Why Hasn’t everything Already disappeared?, The Agony of Power , and Carnival and Cannibal , and explain how they represent his final word on the notion of integral reality and the intelligence of evil. Expanding upon the theory developed in The Intelligence of Evil or the Lucidity Pact , I begin with Why Hasn’t Everything Already Disappeared? and show how Baudrillard explains the emergence of globalized integral reality in the disappearance of the world in a blizzard of signification and simulation. But Baudrillard’s thesis is that this process of disappearance is never complete and that power can never completely abolish reality. This is the core thesis of The Agony of Power , which explains that global power is fatally compromised by the essential duality or reversibility of the real, and that the hell of integral reality is ironically represented by the very moment of its apparent completion. It is this paradox, the paradox at the heart of power, which ensures that integral reality, a world of satisfaction and self-identity, is never a utopia where we want for nothing, but rather a dystopia of despair, obsolescence, and nothingness. In the final text under consideration in this review, Carnival and Cannibal , Baudrillard extends this analysis of the dual form of globalization through a discussion of the process of cannibalization and the carnivalesque that informs the fatal struggle between integral reality and the evil of the event. Given the fatality of the bind between the carnival and cannibal, which means that integral reality is always likely to remain in power, I conclude by reflecting upon Baudrillard’s apocalypticism that promises an end to the fake empire of simulation and the return of the real.

Rorty's Liberal Utopia and Huxley's Island

Abstract: Richard Rorty controversially suggests that literature is more important for political progress in liberal society than political philosophy. Indeed, eschewing conventional choices, like Plato's Republic or Machiavelli's Prince , Rorty argues that the best introduction to political thought is Aldous Huxley's celebrated dystopian novel, Brave New World . Rorty, however, neglects Huxley's positive utopian work, Island . This is unfortunate because Island depicts a pragmatic liberal society that embodies many of Rorty's political ideals. This article demonstrates that Island represents an exercise of liberal political imagination that complements Rorty's widely discussed vision of a pragmatic liberal utopia.

Reimagining Hank Morgan and Billy Pilgrim as American Anti-Heroes : The Dystopian Satire of Mark Twain's A Connecticit Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five

Abstract: Many critics have noticed the ties linking the satirical novels of Mark Twain and Kurt Vonnegut. This is not surprising as Twain's influence on Vonnegut's work is virtually inescapable. However thus far critics have not conducted any rigorous sustained attempts to analyze the works of both authors together. Comparisons of the authors have thus far been casual insubstantial references made in passing. This thesis will attempt to link the authors as American satirists and explore where the satire of Twain and Vonnegut overlaps and where it diverges. This discussion of the satirical voice of Twain and Vonnegut leads into a discussion of their protagonists Hank Morgan and Billy Pilgrim. There have been a wide range of interpretations of both authors ranging from analyses describing the protagonists as heroes while others assume that they were created to ridicule societal problems. This thesis will attempt to shed light on this debate by placing A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur's Court and Slaughterhouse-Five within the tradition of dystopian literature thereby changing the parameters of the debate and creating a new reading of both novels.

Alien/ating lesbianism: Ugly sex and postpunk feminist dystopia in Liquid Sky

Abstract: This article uses Liquid Sky to consider the possibilities of feminist reorientations outside of formal and political orthodoxies and suggests that such disengagements from the dominant are alienated from the utopian rather than re-imagined as transgressive modes of utopian resistance. These disengagements are theorized as a postpunk feminist dystopia: that is, a de-emancipatory system of gendered and aesthetic practices that spatio-sonically shapes queer female sexuality as extrinsic to social and sexual ideals. This dystopia specifically frames the lesbian subject as a bodily terrain of self-estrangement, and names the film's network of alienated corporeal, subcultural, and sonic space. Feminist dystopia ultimately describes female empowerment's precarious position in a sexual and sonic landscape of non-normativity and offers a way to visualize oppositional practices that do not readily correspond to liberation.

Gary, the Most American of All American Cities

Abstract: Contents Introduction: "Built as It Is on Shifting Sand" Part 1. Gary, the Magic City: Creation Myths 1. "An Industrial Utopia": The Search for Industrial Order 2. "Making a City to Order": U.S. Steel and the Building of an Industrial Center Part 2. A City Built on Sand: Paradox and Meaning 3. "The Youngest City in the World": The Early Years of an Industrial Frontier 4. "The Gibraltar of the Steel Corporation": Narrative Meaning in a Steel Strike 5. "You're a Damned Liar--It's Utopia": Imagining Industrialism between the Wars Part 3. The Very Model of Modern Urban Decay: Decline and Fall 6. "Gary Is a Steel City, Young, Lusty, Brawling": Declension Narratives about Gary 7. "Epitaph for a Model City": Race, Deindustrialization, and Dystopia Conclusion: "In Search of America" Notes Selected Bibliography Index

“Into the Memory Hole”: Totalitarianism and Mal d’Archive in Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid’s Tale

Abstract: Drawing on Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive engagement with the concept of the archive, this essay offers a comparative reading of George Orwell’s Nineteen EightyFour (1948) and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985). Focusing on their depictions of the dystopian manipulation of history and memory, it argues that Orwell and Atwood both equate totalitarianism with the domination of the individual subject via the insidious control of the documentary record. Totalitarianism is thus exemplary of what Derrida would call “mal d’archive,” a “fever” in the archives that also amounts to an archival violence or “archive evil.” But “mal d’archive” can also be translated as a legitimate “passion” for the archive, and each novel features a resistant protagonist who attempts to create an archive of documents for a future history beyond the reach of the dystopian regime’s purview. This essay concludes, however, by casting doubt on such a utopian linking of the archive with the possibility of ideological critique. Specifically, metafictional framing devices are included at the conclusions of both novels to suggest that the seemingly liberatory scholarly discourse of “archival recovery” has the potential to produce its own troubling effects of totalitarian domination. This content downloaded from 157.55.39.177 on Fri, 18 Nov 2016 04:16:47 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms

A dystopian society or the moral decay of humanity

Abstract: The present paper analyses an anti-utopic society, emphasizing the importance of individual liberty over doing the right thing as described and satirized by British writer Anthony Burgess in the book entitled A Clockwork Orange. This matter of choice and free will is characteristic to dystopian societies which represent a futuristic universe in which the oppressive control of the state changes people’s lives. It depicts in a shocking manner the effects a dystopian society has over the individual. Dystopian characters make use of human weaknesses in order to set forth and to prove the destructive power of authoritarian rule. Dystopian societies demoralize people, deprive them of the ability of taking decisions while their personal desires either good or evil, are taken over by the state.