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.

From Wigan Pier to Airstrip One: a critical evaluation of George Orwell's writing and politics post-September 11

Abstract: This thesis summons a contemporary reading of George Orwell, evaluating his current role and function as novelist, essayist, and twentieth century cultural icon The year 2003 marked the centenary of Eric Blair's birth and proved a productive year for Blair (and Orwell) enthusiasts After nearly three years of research, my journey through Orwell's words and world(s) has undergone significant re-evaluation, taking me far beyond such an appropriate commemoration In the tragic aftermath of 9/11 - through Afghanistan and Iraq, Bali, Madrid, and London - Orwell's grimly dystopian vision acquires renewed significance for a new generation Few writers (living or dead) are as enduringly newsworthy and malleable as George Orwell The scope and diversity of his work - the sheer volume of his letters, essays, and assorted journalism - elicits a response from academics, journalists, critics and readers My research, tempered by a 'War' on terror and a televisual Big Brother, shapes these responses at a time when 24-hour surveillance is viewed as the path to instant celebrity Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four provides unique insights into a highly pervasive and secretive regime, which in light of post 9/11 political trajectories is highly admonitory These pathways and connections are produced in my research I do not make easy links between past and present - Eric and Tony Blair - at the level of metaphor or simile Indeed, the pages that follow traverse the digital archives and probe the rationale for mobilising Orwell in this time and place I am focussed on writing a history and establishing a context calibrated to the fictional Oceania This doctorate commenced as an investigation of George Orwell's journalism and fiction one hundred years after his birth At the outset of the candidature, the Twin Towers fell and new implications and interpretations of Orwell arose My research demonstrates that the Oceania of Orwell's imagining presents an evocative insight into the contemporary alliance forged by the Bush, Blair, and Howard triumvirate in its quest for world peace Using Orwell as a guide, I move through theories of writing and politics, in the process uncovering capitalism's inherently hostile and negligent attitude towards those who are materially less fortunate I began my work convinced of Orwell's relevance to cultural studies, particularly in understanding popular cultural writing and the need for social intervention I concluded this process even more persuaded of my original intent, but shaped, sharpened and compensated by new events, insights, tragedies and Big Brothers It is imperative for the future directives of cultural studies that critical, political, pedagogic and intellectual links with Orwell are (re-)formed, (re-)established and maintained My text works in the spaces between cultural studies and cultural journalism, pondering the role and significance of the critical - and dissenting - intellectual Memory, History, and Identity all circulate in Orwell's prose These concerns and questions have provided impetus and direction for this thesis They have also shaped the research Few expect Orwell's totalitarian dystopia to materialise unchallenged from the pages of a book The wielders of power are more capable and more subtle Yet it is impossible to deny that the litany of lies and contempt central to Big Brother's Oceania is reproducible by any administration assisted by a complicit media and a malleable citizenry The emergence of such a phenomenon has been well documented in the post 9/11 United States This thesis has arisen out of the miasma of hubris, lies and contempt framing and surrounding Mr Bush's war on terror My purpose - not unlike Orwell's in Nineteen Eighty-Four - is to warn, not judge or berate Orwell understood political rhetoric He was not a prophet but a journalist who interpreted the nuances and temptations of excessive power He had witnessed the extraordinary 'death' of history in Spain, and thereafter he raised his pen to combat intellectual hypocrisy and dishonesty wherever he found it Under Orwell's tutelage, plain words pierce, probe and unsettle They are sharp cutting instruments, fully capable of transcending time How else are we to explain his enduring popularity as a writer? This thesis offers a critical and interpretative homage to George Orwell, a man who recognised the beauty of well chosen words, who loved and appreciated their enduring complexity and power A framing structure has been chosen that places Orwell in close relation to poverty, class and politics, war and journalism Individual chapter headings (and their contents) exploit Orwell's unique response to the significant talking points of his era After resolving to write professionally, Orwell starved and struggled in Paris, and frequented 'doss houses' in and around London I track these wanderings in chapter one He studied the effects of the Depression and unemployment in Yorkshire and Lancashire (chapter two), and fought and was wounded in Spain (chapter three) Thereafter he turned to political writing and journalism (chapter four) What he failed to anticipate was a post war Britain overwhelmed by despondency and dissolved by internal devolution (chapter five) His concluding apocalyptic discharge, the dystopian Nineteen Eighty-Four, was directed at the higher echelons of institutional power and corporate corruption in Britain, America, and Europe, which I explore in chapter six The world has changed significantly since Orwell (and J B Priestley) went in search of England's faltering 'pulse' in the 1930s Englishness and traditional working class values have distorted and shifted in unexpected ways These transformations are partly the result of war and the loss of empire They are also a response to American cultural and economic hegemony, the privatisation of industry, offshore investments, the emergence of the European Economic Community, and the burgeoning global economy George Orwell matters, even after this scale of change because he faced his own prejudices on the page and developed a writing style that enabled him to challenge the accepted orthodoxies and hypocrisies of his era This is evident when returning to his essays and journalism, fifty-five years after his death He possessed the ability to make readers feel uncomfortable, raising topics and concerns that we would rather not discuss Denounced as a traitor by the pre-1956 unreconstructed left and feted as a hero by the self-congratulatory right, Orwell resists labelling and easy categorization We owe him a considerable debt for exposing the likely directions of unchecked political ambition, and this insight should not be treated lightly As I read him, Orwell was the last man in Europe, 'the canary in the mine' He is a literary world heritage site of considerable iconic appeal and international significance He is an outsider's 'outsider' perpetually facing inwards, and we need him now

The Intimacy of Distance: South Korean Cinema and the Conditions of Capitalist Individuation

Abstract: Author(s): Kim, Jisung Catherine | Advisor(s): Whissel, Kristen M | Abstract: In The Intimacy of Distance, I reconceive the historical experience of capitalism's globalization through the vantage point of South Korean cinema. According to world leaders' discursive construction of South Korea, South Korea is a site of "progress" that proves the superiority of the free market capitalist system for "developing" the so-called "Third World." Challenging this contention, my dissertation demonstrates how recent South Korean cinema made between 1998 and the first decade of the twenty-first century rearticulates South Korea as a site of economic disaster, ongoing historical trauma and what I call impassible "transmodernity" (compulsory capitalist restructuring alongside, and in conflict with, deep-seated tradition). Made during the first years after the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis and the 2008 Global Financial Crisis, the films under consideration here visualize the various dystopian social and economic changes attendant upon epidemic capitalist restructuring: social alienation, familial fragmentation, and widening economic division. The revamped film industry and liberalization of censorship laws that accompanied this historical moment also enabled South Korean filmmakers to explore unresolved and long repressed sociopolitical tensions with North Korea and the United States. Through readings of feature-length films across the genres of melodrama, romance, blockbuster, horror and youth-oriented art films, accompanied by sociological and historical research that situates South Korean films within the broader transnational history of the Cold War and the regional history of South Korean nation-building, I reveal how this film culture's portrayals of "intimacy" and "distance" provide a method for visualizing the ongoing aftereffects of geopolitical historical change that may be invisible to the naked eye. My project explains how modes of nonlinear temporality, narrative patterning, and imagery of violence, competition, individualism and diaspora in stories of everyday life covertly represent historical experiences of U.S. militarism, heartrending national division, and volatile boom-and-bust economic cycles. By connecting impossibilities in personal life to larger crisis in national and transnational life, my project reexamines taken-for-granted perspectives and helps us see anew the ongoing intersection of American imperialism, South Korea and the globalization of capitalism since the mid-century era.

The Utopian Novel in America, 1886-1896: The Politics of Form

Abstract: In the late 1800s, Americans flocked to cities, immigration, slums, and unemployment burgeoned, and America's role in foreign affairs grew. This period also spawned a number of fictional glimpses into the future. After the publication of Edward Bellamy's "Looking Backward" in 1888, there was an outpouring of utopian fantasy, many of which promoted socialism, while others presented refined versions of capitalism. Jean Pfaelzer's study traces the impact of the utopian novel and the narrative structures of these sentimental romances. She discusses progressive, pastoral, feminist, and apocalyptic utopias, as well as the genre's parodic counterpart, the dystopia.

No Place Else: Explorations in Utopian and Dystopian Fiction

Abstract: Writers have created fictions of social perfection at least since Plato s "Republic. "Sir Thomas More gave this thread of intellectual history a name when he called his contribution to it "Utopia, "Greek for "no" "place."With each subsequent author cognizant of his predecessors and subject to altered real-world conditions which suggest ever-new causes for hope and alarm, no place changed. The fourteen essays presented in this book critically assess man s fascination with and seeking for no place. In discussing these central fictions, the contributors see no place from diverse perspectives: the sociological, the psychological, the political, the aesthetic. In revealing the roots of these works, the contributors cast back along the whole length of utopian thought. Each essay stands alone; together, the essays make clear what no place means today. While it may be true that no place has always seemed elsewhere or elsewhen, in fact all utopian fiction whirls contemporary actors through a costume dance no place else but here. from the PrefaceThe contributors are Eric S. Rabkin, B. G. Knepper, Thomas J. Remington, Gorman Beauchamp, William Matter, Ken Davis, Kenneth M. Roemer, William Steinhoff, Howard Segal, Jack Zipes, Kathleen Woodward, Merritt Abrash, and James W. Bittner."

Defaced: The Visual Culture of Violence in the Late Middle Ages

Abstract: Destroyed faces, dissolved human shapes, invisible enemies: violence and anonymity go hand in hand. The visual representation of extreme physical violence makes real people nameless exemplars of horror -- formless, hideous, defaced. In Defaced, Valentin Groebner explores the roots of the visual culture of violence in medieval and Renaissance Europe and shows how contemporary visual culture has been shaped by late medieval images and narratives of violence. For late medieval audiences, as with modern media consumers, horror lies less in the "indescribable" and "alien" than in the familiar and commonplace.From the fourteenth century onward, pictorial representations became increasingly violent, whether in depictions of the Passion, or in vivid and precise images of torture, execution, and war. But not every spectator witnessed the same thing when confronted with terrifying images of a crucified man, misshapen faces, allegedly bloodthirsty conspirators on nocturnal streets, or barbarian fiends on distant battlefields. The profusion of violent imagery provoked a question: how to distinguish the illegitimate violence that threatened and reversed the social order from the proper, "just," and sanctioned use of force? Groebner constructs a persuasive answer to this question by investigating how uncannily familiar medieval dystopias were constructed and deconstructed. Showing how extreme violence threatens to disorient, and how the effect of horror resides in the depiction of minute details, Groebner offers an original model for understanding how descriptions of atrocities and of outrageous cruelty depended, in medieval times, on the variation of familiar narrative motifs.