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.

Getting World Going in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake

Abstract: In this article I explore Nancy's understanding of “sense” as world: the two are inseparably entwined, which is why to speak of a sense of the world is tautological. Nancy reflects on philosophy's role in this crystallization of “sense” as world (and world as sense), identifying it as writing on the border between myth and “the abyss.” Philosophy is a style of writing that opens the (sense of the) world between the always-relative projection (“myth”) and the absolute annihilation of meaning (“the abyss”). My own interest is not so much in philosophy's role as in literature's, and to begin such an exploration the dystopian novel, a generic hybrid between philosophy and fiction, appears as an ideal first case study. I have chosen Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake because as an apocalyptical (re-)creation myth, complete with the emergence of new animals and new humans, it seems particularly well-suited to this reflection.

The Struggle to be Human in a Posthuman World

Abstract: Over the preceding chapters, we have discussed many possibilities for new world orders, some utopian but more often dystopian. One of the possibilities facing the world at the beginning of the twenty-first century is the prospect that we are entering a posthuman era in which many of the binary concepts used to make sense of experience in the past will no longer function. Western culture, dominated as it has been by liberal humanist principles, has traditionally been underpinned ideologically by binary oppositions between concepts such as natural and artificial, organic and technological, subject and object, body and mind, body and embodiment, real and virtual, presence and absence, and so on. Such binarisms have been increasingly critiqued, first by post-modernist deconstruction of how they function within Western culture as strategies of inclusion and exclusion, and second, through posthumanist reconceptualisations of the oppositional boundaries underpinning dominant conceptual paradigms. Thus, during the last few years a new range of concepts has begun increasingly to enter children’s literature — the cyborg, virtual reality, technoculture, cloning, and genetic engineering. In short, children’s books and films have begun responding to the posthuman, the focus of this chapter.

The Discourse of Sweetness in Ama Ata Aidoo's No Sweetness Here

Abstract: In "For Whom Things Did Not Change," the second story in Ama Ata Aidoo's collection No Sweetness Here, a young man recounts the talc of a bad yam. In it he tells how Nanaa cuts a slice of a large yam; it is rotten. Then she cuts another slice, and another, and another. All are rotten. Finally, she gouges out the head of the yam. It is brown and soft. Rotten. The young man, Kobina, draws from the childhood parable a significance for the corrupt social context of modern Ghana: What was it that ate it up so completely? And yet, here I go again, old yam has to rot in order that new yam can grow. Where is the earth? Who is going to do the planting? Certainly not us - too full with drink, eyes clouded in smoke and heads full of women. (Aidoo 22) The image of soil and regrowth, here stated emphatically and then rejected as implausible, goes to the heart of a good deal of Africa's writing. Achebe's Things Fall Apart, a depiction of the unhappy confluence of tribal mores and colonial dictates, puts forward land, the soil, and the possession thereof, as one of the indices of defeat and victory. Wilson Katiyo's A Son of the Soil articulates that powerful bond between the African sensibility and the fruitful earth that has nurtured life and has been loved for countless generations. Ngugi's Weep Not Child places the ownership and farming of land firmly at the center of debate as it characterizes the fate of an individual swept onward, bewildered, toward the certainty of majority-rule independence. But the agrarian attachments of the so called "first generation" of African writers are not shared by Aidoo. Her preoccupation with "land" and "growth" is not primarily linked to a postcolonial discourse on agricultural, or cultural, or religious usurpation - though these issues certainly inform the background of her perceptions. She makes relatively little of the image of "earth" and "planting" in No Sweetness Here. It is a minor issue in the collection's title story (61); there is only occasional mention elsewhere. More directly, she is concerned with what Homi Bhabha has described as "the cultural and historical hybridity of the postcolonial world . . . as the paradigmatic place of departure" (Bhabha 21). It is the immediate predicament of Ghana's cultural and political hegemony that defines the context of her discussion, and her narrative affinity is with a present-future nexus rather than with retracing an indigene-colonial hypothesis. In effect, she shifts the emphasis of her discourse away from explication of why things came to be as they are toward speculation as to how things may be altered. In Bhabha's terms, Aidoo takes as her paradigmatic starting point the experience of the present, without in any way disavowing the past as the informer of present consciousness, and strives to re-evaluate and re-define the aspirations of the future in relation to a present, dystopian actuality. Aidoo's commitment to the issues and problems of the present has always been determined. In an interview she gave in the early 1970s she insisted that "I cannot see myself as a writer, writing about lovers in Accra because you see, there are so many other problems" (McGregor 19). More than 20 years later she is still asserting contemporary issues as the pre-eminent focus of her writing: "It's like suffering from a permanent migraine. . . . Meanwhile everyone expects us, and we expect ourselves, to solve all our problems instantly. Whew!" (Chew and Rutherford 4) the Nigerian poet, Tanure Ojaide, has argued that "for us Africans literature must serve a purpose: to expose, embarrass, and fight corruption and authoritarianism. . . . It is understandable why the African artist is utilitarian" (Ojaide 17). Certainly, the idea of constructive participation and debate is vibrant in the first wave of African writers, like Cyprian Ekwensi, Amos Tutuola, and Camara Laye; but it is equally apparent in the work of the "second generation" (Larson 245) of authors, like Ayi Kwei Armah and Wole Soyinka. …

Orwell's Satirical View of Romantic Love in the Terrorized World of Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: The beginning of twentieth century was accompanied with the prevailing current of technology in different aspects of human life. At first, it incited a positive stimulus which could build a utopian world on the advancement of technology. However, the bloody World Wars averted this view and the technological utopia was replaced by Orwellian dystopia. Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four is a satirical work which moves against Wells' utopian toward the reflection of a distorted technological society. Undoubtedly, satire is the best literary mode for dystopic depiction of the world specifically the one portrayed in Nineteen Eighty-Four . Winston Smith, the central character of this novel, is lower from his society in terms of intelligence and power of action. Therefore, he is put under rigid controls and brainwashing. And at last, he awfully rejects his love in favor the principles of the Party. Thus, in this study, we try to investigate Winston's romantic life in a satiric manner with respect to Northrop Frye's theme of romance which includes the three phase of agon, pathos and anagnorisis.