Dystopia

About: Dystopia is a research topic. Over the lifetime, 2146 publications have been published within this topic receiving 15163 citations. The topic is also known as: cacotopia.

E. M. Forster's `The Machine Stops': humans, technology and dialogue

Abstract: The article explores E.M. Forster's story The Machine Stops (1909) as an example of dystopian literature and its possible associations with the use of technology and with today's cyber culture. Dystopian societies are often characterized by dehumanization and Forster's novel raises questions about how we live in time and space; and how we establish relationships with the Other and with the world through technology. We suggest that the fear of technology depicted in dystopian literature indicates a fear that machines are mimicking the roles that humans already play in relational encounters. Our relationship with machines frequently suggests a classical "I-it" situation. However, a genuine dialogue is where there is no master and where communication and understanding are achieved through the encounter and through openness to difference and to change. The article examines the ways machines and automata are imagined and become part of lived human existence, in the light of Martin Buber's philosophy of dialogue and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of perception and otherness. The problem seems to be how everyday technological interfaces can change the way we first perceive the world and the possibility that with certain types of mediation there is a loss of connection with the Other. It is argued that understanding dialogical conditions could help turn the relationship with technology into something more humane. Literature such as Forster's is considered as an example of such a dialogical condition, suggesting ways of dealing with human dilemmas by exploring the field of possibilities.

Paradise Dislocated: Morris, Politics, Art

Abstract: "Paradise Dislocated" offers a re-reading of William Morris's neglected poem, "The Earthly Paradise". While most critics have seen this work as the antithesis of the radical socialist politics that Morris embraced later in his career or, at best, as an awkward prelude to that later development, Jeffrey Skoblow proposes that "The Earthly Paradise" is, in fact, central to Morris's political vision - indeed the most radical manifestation of that vision. Skoblow argues that the poem constitutes a far-reaching critique not only of the capitalist order of late 19th-century England but of the fundamental suppositions of Romanticism, suppositions that are intricately linked to the psychosocial dynamics of capitalist culture. Morris's work, as Skoblow presents it, is at once rooted in the late Romantic traditions and a subversion of that tradition in favour of an alternative idea of the imagination - a materialist imagination that is itself both akin to the historical materialism of Marxist theory and a transformative challenge to that theory. Morris emerges as a critical revisionist of both Romantic and Marxist doctrine. "Paradise Dislocated" explores the problematic relations between critical thought, art, utopian aspirations and dystopian realities. It proposes a revaluation of Morris's poem and of his career as a whole.

Inconsumable realities: Documenting warfare, Britain 1914--1920

Abstract: The concept of mimetic realism—how it functions in literature and its representational value—comes into sharp relief during the period when the First World War ensues This dissertation proposes that the magnitude of atrocities caused by the First World War presents a crisis of representation such that the classic theory of realist representation comes into question In response to the ultimate dystopia created by trench warfare, a variety of writers attempt to produce realistic portraits of the war while photography is widely used to show readers the allegedly most authentic version of the war front In the study of those writing practices by journalists, novelists, and soldiers and of visual media by photojournalists, some key questions arise about the authorial discourse of war: who constructs it, how is it constructed, and by which means do these discourses secure the survival and longevity of one version of a war’s history and not another? I concentrate on texts produced by journalists, British literary writers—exemplified primarily by Virginia Woolf—and soldiers, who were prolific in their correspondence with family members on the home front, the chronicling of their experiences in diaries, and in reflections recorded in postwar memoirs In all cases, I provide close-readings of texts to discern the ways each player is documenting the experience of war and in which ways each negotiates his or her writing practices within the lens of classic literary realism I find that discursive practices become distinct according to a writer’s geographical proximity to the war front and are distinguished from the classic style of realism I observe that journalism produces objective realism, the modern novelist produces mytho-synaesthetic realism, and soldiers produce synaesthetic realism An examination of photography’s ocular realism in the context of war introduces the concept of the documentary record A documentary photograph stretches the concept of realism as a literary style such that the commensurability of the real and its representational media comes to depend upon acknowledging the ability and willingness of a public to read the inconsumable, such as the horrific and traumatizing outcomes of mechanized warfare on the human body

Remembrance versus reinvention: memory as tool of survival and act of defiance in dystopian narratives

Abstract: This paper will explore some of the most memorable dystopian narratives of the last century (from Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World, George Orwell’s 1984, Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 and Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale to Kurt Wimmer’s Equilibrium) in order to establish the extent to which the obliteration and/ or rewriting of the past is employed as a tool of manipulation and control and its recovery becomes essential for those who strive to preserve their individuality and independence of thought and action. The features shared by protagonists such as Bernard Marx, Winston Smith, Guy Montag, Offred, and John Preston include an uncomfortable awareness of the discrepancies between actual historical events and the version accepted and delivered by the establishment and faith in the importance of individual and collective memory and the need to recover and protect the narratives of the past. Indeed, the most notable common coordinate of their various acts of rebellion against a regime whose principles they can no longer accept entails an obsessive fascination with books, the very items which the totalitarian societies envisaged by most authors of dystopian fiction regard as dangerous and consequently strive to ban and eradicate. Far from focusing exclusively on acts of defiance, the paper also aims to identify and discuss the instances in which certain protagonists employ memory manipulation strategies akin to the ones promoted by the establishment and thus become responsible for their own brainwashing. The ultimate aim of this analysis is to outline the various responses to more or less oppressive systems and to assess memory’s potential in the preservation of identity and actual survival. The fascination with memory shared by all dystopian narratives is a clear indication of the important role played by the ability to manipulate the human capacity for recollection and rewrite the past in any totalitarian regime. This paper aims to focus on four twentieth-century novels that can be regarded as particularly relevant in terms of the complex interplay of “reality, virtuality, memory and subjectivity” (Mennel 140) that seems to characterize the contemporary dystopian vision and to explore the ways in which their protagonists deal with the awareness that the version of the past available to them has little correspondence in actual * Ovidius University, Constanţa, Romania University of Bucharest Review  Vol. III/2013, no. 2 (new series) Cultures of Memory, Memories of Culture