scispace - formally typeset
Search or ask a question
Topic

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.


Papers
More filters
28 Dec 2016
TL;DR: The Mad Max: Fury Road series as mentioned in this paper explores the film's utopian response to the dystopian realities of capitalist patriarchy, arguing that the film rewrites masculinity for a post-capitalist, post-patriarchal world.
Abstract: The contemporary post-apocalypse film is utopian in its various promises for recovery from the destruction caused by the end of days, and perhaps none more so than George Miller’s 2015 installment of his genre-defining Mad Max saga, Fury Road , featuring Tom Hardy as the titular character and Charlize Theron as Imperator Furiosa, the female warrior who goes rogue to save the women held as sex slaves (“prize breeders”) by the monstrous tyrant Immortan Joe. Lauded by audiences, particularly female audiences, for its feminist revisions to the one of the most aggressively masculine popular film genres – and enraging “men’s rights activists,” a sure sign of doing something right – Fury Road , and in particular Theron’s Furiosa, have become icons of twenty-first century feminist empowerment. The film is utopian not in the sense that it presents an ideal world, but that it imagines successful liberatory revolution and the destruction of decrepit systems of oppression, out of which a more perfect, egalitarian world can then emerge. Through the grotesque, parasitic tyranny of Immortan Joe’s monstrous necropolitics that reduces subjects to mere bodies for the deathly reproduction of the decaying corpse of capitalism, the film exposes the inextricable links between traditional masculinity, patriarchy, and capitalist exploitation. It reveals how these ideologies work in toxic complicity in order to name, regulate, discipline, and render subjects, in the parlance of the film, ‘half-life;’ in the words of political theorist Achille Mbembe, this exercise of power serves to create “ death-worlds , new and unique forms of social existence in which vast populations are subjected to conditions of life conferring upon them the status of living dead .” This paper explores the film’s utopian response to the dystopian realities of capitalist patriarchy, arguing that Mad Max: Fury Road rewrites masculinity for a post-capitalist, post-patriarchal world.

3 citations

Journal Article
22 Jun 2012-Style
TL;DR: Forster's short story "The Machine Stops" as discussed by the authors is a dystopian vision with an implicit call to remember the powers of nature, take in the full scope of the environment, and reject social systems that do not adapt to ecological changes.
Abstract: All the old literature, with its praise of Nature, and its fear of Nature, rang false as the prattle of a child. --E. M. Forster 1.1 The Conundrum E.M. Forster's short story "The Machine Stops," first published in 1909, is a dystopian vision with an implicit call to remember the powers of nature, take in the full scope of the environment, and reject social systems that do not adapt to ecological changes. Like many works in its genre, it tacitly defines what it means to be human by depicting an anti-human way of life (Cooke). Forster's vision is a culture-specific expression of anxiety before a society increasingly dependent on machines--a response to rapid industrialization and the technological optimism of futuristic utopians like H.G. Wells. In a wider view, the story celebrates normative human universals: parental investment and attachment, pair bonding, communal gatherings, adherence to small social circles, physical contact, interpretation of facial expressions and vocal tone, physical prowess and a delight in dynamic, cognitive play (Boyd 434-46; Brown; Cooke; Dissanayake). Commentators on Forster have tended to focus on his humanitarian ideals, either to extol them or to demonstrate their inherent instability (Crews, Armstrong). For most traditional humanists until the late twentieth century, Forster's personality and its development through his life were the major points of approach for understanding his literary substance and style (Stone, Trilling, Colmer). More recently, critics have put postmodern cultural theories to work on Forster's suppressed homosexuality, his politics, his relationship to the British empire and his conflicted depiction of women (Goldman, Markley, Miracky, Lane). These aspectual explorations have sought little common ground. Indeed, some postmodernists have viewed their own interpretive heterogeneity "as a sign, critically speaking, of [Forster's] finally coming of age" (Bradshaw 5). Despite this heterogeneity, the postmodemists have something important in common both with each other and with the traditional humanists: an appeal to cultural factors in Forster's life, such as his relation to modernism and industrialism, his peripheral role in the Bloomsbury group or his preoccupation with Hellenism and Oriental mysticism (Ardis, Head, Medalie, Peppis). Such categories have formed the lowest common denominator for his oeuvre. Many valuable observations have been made in this way. Critics have charted Forster's main cultural influences, stylistic devices and themes. They have noted his predilection for antitheses and his oft-portrayed meeting between stagnated intellectualism and mystified nature (Crews; Bradshaw 4; Peppis 60). But they have not accessed the biological level underneath the cultural factors, neither for explanation nor to take its necessary constraints into account. Accessing that level could give us a better view of Forster's particularities, provide explanation in place of metaphorical reduction, and restrain some of the more misleading speculations or disagreements about Forster's meanings. "The Machine Stops" can serve as a test case for the utility of accessing a biological level in Forster's system of meanings. Dominic Head rightly observes that Forster's short stories are "commonly held to be insubstantial" (Head 77). "The Machine Stops" would be unfairly included in that judgment. It contains the chief elements in Forster's symbolic universe and reaches the full scope of his imaginative depiction of stagnated social contexts versus unruly nature. Thus, it can reveal the bare essentials of his image of humanity. Forster depicts corrupted behavior involving universal human concerns in order to create aversion in his readers. Taking that aim as a starting point, we can go beyond his narrator's ostensible concern with machines and gain insight into a deeper concern with what makes human life worth living. "The Machine Stops" celebrates precisely the adaptation that it seems to be disclaiming against. …

3 citations

Proceedings ArticleDOI
30 Aug 2010
TL;DR: In this article, the authors characterize two diverging trends of thoughts to illustrate the distance between one conception and the other, and demonstrate that the narrative depicted in science fiction can have a marked impact on the attitudes of the public toward specific policies.
Abstract: A capitalist dystopia tied to space commercialization, which depicts companies effectively supplanting the state and instituting company policy with complete disregard to the rights or needs of individuals, has been a pervasive thread in science fiction movies. Underlying such representations are fears of the loss of individuality as a result of the disappearance of the state, as well as of those mechanisms that tie the relationship between individuals and their governments. Such depictions vary widely from the generally held view in the space policy community that the commercialization of space is a needed and welcome goal to achieve sustainability and that it is directly tied to increasing the benefits of space. Most notably, these contradict the complex interdependence of governments and private companies involved in space. In this paper I characterize these two diverging trends of thoughts to illustrate the distance between one conception and the other. Drawing from literature on science fiction and dystopia, and using examples from the current debate regarding U.S. space policy, I demonstrate that the narrative depicted in science fiction can have a marked impact on the attitudes of the public toward specific policies. Such distinct perceptions are a valid representation of a link between space and society. Awareness of these narratives is important to address concerns over specific policies, as well as a way to bridge the gap between the public and the space policy community.

3 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors explore the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly.
Abstract: This article explores the fate of political theology in Kazuo Ishiguro's speculative fiction Never Let Me Go (2005) and, by implication, in contemporary fiction more broadly. To pursue a reading of Christianity that extends from Hegel through Lacan to Žižek, the article argues that political theology’s future may perversely lie in a materialism emptied of all transcendental guarantees: political theology is the historically privileged master fantasy or illusion which reveals the fantastic or illusory status of our entire relation to the real in (neo-)liberal modernity. In conclusion, the article argues that Ishiguro’s fiction may thus be read less as a melancholic dystopian study in total ideological capture or surrender than as the representation of a state of immanent freedom beyond the power relations of (neo-)liberal subjectivity.

3 citations


Network Information
Related Topics (5)
Narrative
64.2K papers, 1.1M citations
73% related
Politics
263.7K papers, 5.3M citations
71% related
Capitalism
27.7K papers, 858K citations
69% related
Ideology
54.2K papers, 1.1M citations
69% related
Social movement
23.1K papers, 653K citations
68% related
Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141