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.

Giving the Sickness a Name: Reading Timothy Findley's Headhunter and Walker Percy's The Thanatos Syndrome as Diagnostic Fictions

Abstract: As examples of what Walker Percy calls "diagnostic fiction," both Headhunter and The Thanatos Syndrome trace contemporary discontents back to a growing disconnection from purpose and justice. Both books use the interactions of psychiatrists and their patients to illustrate how modern civilization's sickness can be spread or fought, and both authors prophesy against those who promote this sickness through their longing for power. While "addicts of desire" such as Findley's Dr Kurtz and Percy's Dr Comeaux are finally defeated by true "physician[s] of the soul" such as Dr Marlow and Dr More, both novels end by reminding readers that anomie and nihilism still afflict this civilization. En tant qu'exem-ples de ce que Walker Percy qualifie de "fiction diagnostique," Le chasseur de tetes tout comme he syndrome de Thanatos font remonter l'origine des m6contentements actuels A la disjonction croissante entre intention et justice. Ces deux livres font appel h l'interaction entre les psychiatres et leurs patient/es pour illustrer la fagon dont la maladie de la civilisation moderne peut s' etendre ou etre combattue, et la faton dont les auteurs prophetisent contre ceux et celles qui cherchent a activer cette maladie afin d'obtenir plus de pouvoir. Tandis que les "accros du desir," le Dr Kurtz de Findley et le Dr. Comeaux de Percy, sont finalement mis en echec par de vrais "phsysicien[s] de ]me" tels que Dr. Marlow et Dr. More, les deux romans concluent en rappelant aux lecteurs et lectrices que I'anomie et le nihilisme continuent a affliger cette civilisation. As Kenneth Radu has noted, Headhunter (1993) is Timothy Findley's indictment of a world in which "limits have disappeared" and "perversion and insanity have changed places with humanity and reason" (40) - that is, it is Findley's indictment of much of the modern world. Although he has set his story in a dystopian Toronto of the near future, Findley clearly wants his readers to recognize that this unreal city embodies ideas and truths that can be found in all the "civilized" places of the earth. Playing his ideas out against the existing geography and culture of Toronto, Findley attempts to expose and explain what he sees as a latent strain of nihilism in modern culture, a strain that has emerged because this civilization (in his words) "has ceased to be in the hands of those of us who call ourselves civilized" (Slopen 41). In this novel, plagues afflict both the body and the spirit. "Sturnusemia," the latest pandemic illness (said to be spread by starlings and other animals), claims victims throughout the city, but so do madness and despair. Many citizens show signs of an immitigable acedia; their diminished ability to feel and pursue healthy desires leads them to seek pleasure in mastery and murder. Believing themselves free of responsibilities for others, inhabitants of a world in which values and limits are rare while lies and self-deception are common, they act as if everything that is, anything - is permitted. In fact, everything is permitted: "their" doctor, Rupert Kurtz, director of the Parkin Institute of Psychiatric Research and epitome of establishment values, grants them permission to pursue their worst impulses.' Such permissions are the basis of his successful career (Headhunter 434). Amidst the abolition of all restraint, Kurtz's eventual antagonist, the psychiatrist Charles Marlow, realizes that "Sturnusemia and AIDS were [now] not the only plagues. Civilization - sickened - had itself become a plague. And its course, in [this] world, could be followed by tracing the patterns of mental breakdown" (271). Signs and symptoms everywhere point not to contingent difficulties but to a coming end. As Marlow notes that "Psychiatric case loads, everywhere, carried alarming numbers," he finds that only one diagnosis is possible: a death-urge is winning. "Broken dreamers, their minds in ruins. This was the human race" (271). Findley's image of civilization mutating into a plague carries an echo of that "unknown and terrible plague" dreamt of by Raskolnikov at the end of Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment (555). …

Choose your own future: the sociotechnical imaginaries of virtual reality

Abstract: Virtual Reality has been heralded variously as the next steppingstone in technological innovation, a utopian ‘empathy-machine’ and a dystopian addictive technology. Using critical discourse analysis, we explore the types of narratives underlying this global attention and the ideological values, beliefs and interests therein. We contribute to the critical marketing literature by demonstrating how an examination of sociotechnical imaginaries reveals the ways in which the market mediates the reception of new technologies and the kinds of worlds these technologies bring about. Through an interactive ‘choose your own adventure’ narrative, we bring these imaginaries into relief and invite readers to navigate alternative potential futures for VR. The data underpinning the narrative highlight the role of marketers and marketing in shaping our social, political and economic reality.

Introduction: From "Nauchnaia Fantastika" To Post-Soviet Dystopia

Abstract: Science fiction is the genre that links our lives to the future: the faster the pace of scientific and technological advancement, the greater our awareness of what István Csicsery-Ronay called “the science-fictionality” of everyday life. The more we feel the effect of scientific and technological change on global flows of economic, social, and cultural exchange (not to mention the blurring of biological and environmental boundaries), the more we are drawn to a literature that Boris Strugatskii identified as “a description of the future, whose tentacles already reach into the present.“ It is hardly surprising that scholarly interest in Russian and Soviet science fiction has been growing in recent years, with an expanding roster of roundtables and panels exploring the topic at professional conferences. Why talk about Soviet science fiction? As the articles in this special thematic cluster suggest, science fiction functions more as a field of intersecting discourses than as a clearly delineated genre: for readers of Slavic Review, it is a genre that foregrounds the interdisciplinary connections between the history of Soviet science and technology, political and economic development, and social and literary history. Science fiction, in short, offers a way to read the history of the future, with texts selfconsciously oriented toward distant spatial and temporal horizons, even as they point insistently back to the foundational factors shaping the vectors of a society's collective imagination.

A feminist reading of Charlotte Wood’s the natural way of things as critical dystopia

Abstract: This thesis offers a close reading of Charlotte Wood’s 2015 novel, The Natural Way of Things (NWOT) as a critical dystopian fiction, which modifies familiar dystopian convention through the spatial, rather than temporal, displacement of its subjects. This departure from the dystopian narrative’s characteristic setting in the near or distant future intensifies the potent horror of the narrative by encouraging readers to consider that the suffering endured by the young female characters in the narrative is, to varying degrees, happening right now, every day, in contemporary Australia. Furthermore, the act of the women’s containment within a prison setting invites a feminist critique of the myriad ways in which women in contemporary Australia are silenced, subordinated by and even sometimes complicit in the perpetuation of a social order that delimits what a woman is or should be, and what a woman does or shouldn’t do. This will be demonstrated through a close reading of the novel that focuses on two key elements. The first is Wood’s use of a distinctly Australian, pejorative rhetoric, the everyday familiarity of which accentuates the contemporaneity of the novel while simultaneously acting as a device for enforcing a male-based dystopic order. The second key element is central character Yolanda Kovacs’ intense alienation from her body; throughout NWOT, Yolanda confronts the chronic, life-long objectification of her body and in so doing, offers a critique of the bodily objectification of women in contemporary Australia. Her eventual retreat into an animal-like state is an act of radical resistance. The implications of this retreat for the intertextual present, however, involve a damning critique of a social order in which the only way women can conceptualise an autonomous subjective existence is through escape, isolation and the abandonment of a human existence altogether.