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.

Images of a Networked Society: E.M. Forster's "The Machine Stops."

Abstract: It is a commonplace that we are in the midst of a computer revolution that will change our society perhaps more radically than the Industrial Revolution, and likewise a commonplace that the literary imagination has often gone before us in envisioning not only the shape but the possible significance of such changes. A striking example is E. M. Forster's dystopian story "The Machine Stops" (1909), which deserves renewed attention as the computer age accelerates and as the breakup of the Soviet Union may make Orwell's world of totalitarian control and fear, 1984, seem less imminent than Forster's of satisfied individuals sitting, before their networked personal computers. Forster scholars have frequently either ignored "The Machine Stops," Forster's only portrayal of a future world, or devoted only a couple sentences or paragraphs to it; through the 1970s many judged it a limited creation. Those treating it at greater length have typically focused on how it develops Forster's recurring humanist concerns about connection--of individuals with themselves, senses plus spirit, or individuals with each other and with the natural world--while some recent critics have looked at narrative technique. But some scholars, including those critical of the story, have also seen it as prophetic. And beginning with Mark Hillegas's The Future as Nightmare (1967), discussions of the story began to appear in another kind of forum: books and articles on science fiction and dystopian fiction. "The Machine Stops" has come to be hailed as influential, the earliest of the twentieth-century dystopias exploring attitudes toward science and technology.(1) Even the more recent of such commentaries have focused on the story's portrayal of technology in general: for example, people do not have to work and have become soft since the machine works for them. These analyses either predate the widespread use of home computers or do not discuss them. Further, none devotes sustained attention to the religious issues so central to the story. By looking at intersections between religious thinking and computerization in "The Machine Stops," this essay can explore some key questions about the effects of computerization on our lives and values. The citizens in the world of "The Machine Stops" live in individual cells, empty except for a chair, a desk, and the controls of a machine. What happens to people's relationship to a power outside themselves, and to their relationships with each other, when their days are increasingly spent in relationship with a networked communication device? I will explore these issues through images and metaphors, assuming as does Robert Frost in his "Education by Metaphor: A Meditative Monologue" that humankind's most profound thinking is metaphorical. First, Forster portrays an entirely indoor society, a society that looks only at the man-made. This condition began well before the citizens' underground life, as people had increasingly homogenized the earth: "What was the good of going to Pekin when it was just like Shrewsbury?" (10). Then the environment was somehow poisoned, made uninhabitable for all higher life forms, so that people had to move underground--all this written decades before nuclear fission, bomb shelters, and the Swiss's reputed ability to house their entire nation in shelters under their mountains. Forster is of course not alone in imagining the future city as underground. H. G. Wells's The Time Machine (1895) places the workers, the Morlocks, underground, while the Eloi live above. Fritz Lang's movie Metropolis (1927), based on the novel by Thea von Harbou, shows an aboveground society of the well-to-do undergirded by workers in a hellish world of overwork and steam. In these cases, however, note that there is a clear division: an at least apparently good life above ground and a hell below. In "The Machine Stops," all inhabit an underground "good life" that is hell. Moreover, the issue of class, so important in those other works and in Forster's own novels, is nonexistent here. …

Big Science: Dystopia and Utopia — Establishment and New Criminology Revisited

Abstract: Hey Pal! How do I get to town from here? And he said: Well just take a right where they’re going to build that new shopping mall, go straight past where they’re going to put in the freeway, take a left at what’s going to be the new sports center, and keep going until you hit the place where they’re thinking of building that drive-in bank. You can’t miss it. And I said: This must be the place.... Golden Cities. Golden towns (Laurie Anderson, Big Science, Warner Brothers, 1982).

Transplantation Gothic: Tissue transfer in literature, film, and medicine

Abstract: This book is a shadow cultural history of transplantation as mediated through medical writing, science fiction, life writing and visual arts in a Gothic mode, from the nineteenth century to the present. These works explore the experience of donor/suppliers, recipients and practitioners, and simultaneously express transfer-related suffering and are complicit in its erasure. Examining texts from Europe, North America and India, the book resists exoticising predatorial tissue economies and considers fantasies of harvest as both product and symbol of ‘slow violence’ (Rob Nixon), precarity and structural ruination under neoliberal capitalism. Gothic tropes, intertextualities and narrative conventions are used in life writing to express the affective and conceptual challenges of post-transplant being, and used in medical writing to manage the ambiguities of hybrid bodies, as a ‘clinical necropoetics’. In their efforts to articulate bioengineered hybridity, these works are not only anxious but speculative. Works discussed include nineteenth-century Gothic, early twentieth-century fiction and film, 1970s American hospital organ theft horror in literature and film, turn-of-the-millennium fiction and film of organ sale, postmillennial science fiction dystopias, life writing, and scientific writing from the nineteenth century to the present. Throughout, Gothic representations engage contemporary debates around the management of chronic illness, the changing economics of healthcare and the biopolitics of organ procurement and transplantation—the strange times and weird spaces of tissue mobilities. The book will be of interest to academics and students researching Gothic studies, science fiction, critical medical humanities and cultural studies of transplantation.

Representasi banjir dalam film “love at first flood” di thailand

Abstract: The phenomenon of flood disaster that flooded the city in Thailand for 40 days, the flood resulted in looses that not only property but also the increasing number of deaths every day. A traumatized state, director Poj Arnon made a flood film that almost entirely flooded the setting in Thailand (Love at First Flood 2012). This qualitative research by the semi-analytical method of Christian Metz or semiology analysis explains how the Love at First Flood film present dystopia and utopia repression that explains the reinforcement of messages that make up a meaning. The eight-step Metz mapping is used to unpack distinctive film structures, Through metaphorical masters and catharchic languages containing the repression of dystopia and utopia as a sign, the meaning expressed in the film’s messages is: (1) A support, (2) Awareness for mutual help, (3) Respects for fellow human beings. Keywords : Semiotics film; Flood; Dystopia and utopia representation.