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.

The Feminist Dystopia: A Literary (Sub)genre?

Abstract: This thesis examines whether or not feminist dystopian fiction can be seen as a distinct literary (sub)genre. It considers the importance of looking at both internal features of texts and at recognition by the field with regard to the emergence of (new) (sub)genres. Chapter one will focus on theory on genre, for which Claire Squires’ Marketing Literature: The Making of Contemporary Writing in Britain (2007) is of particular importance, as her work discusses both these aspect with regard to genre and simultaneously focuses on the significance of genre to the marketplace. Chapter two will focus on Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), as this novel has been analysed as a feminist dystopia and is nowadays often used as touchstone for contemporary works regarded as similar to it – demonstrating its significance to this thesis. Chapter three will focus on the internal features through an analysis of both The Handmaid’s Tale and the four novels of which my corpus is composed, which are Jennie Melamed’s Gather the Daughters (2017), Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), and Sarah Hall’s The Carhullan Army (2007). Chapter four shows how the field has dealt with these works and whether or not the feminist dystopia is used and acknowledged as a generic label. This thesis establishes that Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale presents a narrative that remains of relevance in that it can be applied to different times and contexts and it continues to be of interest to both academics, television producers, and critics. Atwood’s work and the four novels of which my corpus is composed all present narratives that can be labelled as feminist dystopian fiction, which is concluded on the basis of a shared set of internal features. These features are often pointed out by critics (and sometimes also by publishers), but feminist dystopian fiction is not (yet) entirely recognised as a distinct literary (sub)genre.

Designing utopia. Avant-garde architecture vs. processes of modernization

Abstract: In the first half of the 20th century, the relations between the social revolution, the processes of modernization, and avant-garde art and architecture were very close. Piotr Juszkiewicz, analyzing the relations between modernism and totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, stated that “totalitarian regimes did not reject a certain form of artistic language by default because they were interested in their utility”. “Fundamental elements of our architecture are conditioned by the social revolution”, wrote El Lissitzky. In the face of such declarations, the relations between avant-garde designers and social or Communist trends should not come as a surprise. Post-revolutionary Russia became a true test site for new movements, whereas modernist and Constructivist artists enthusiastically proceeded to build the new (better) reality. The development of industry (primarily heavy industry) was to become a driving force behind the modernist processes. Examples of industrial plants built in the 1920s and 1930s in the Soviet Union show the enormous impact exerted by modern construction and urbanism on the formation of the “new man”. Numerous products of avant-garde architecture reflected the image of the “new world” and became the transmitters of the new Soviet ideology. For the inhabitants of Ekaterinburg, Magnitogorsk, or Kharkov, modernist buildings and landscape layout formed a permanent image of the city and its concept. Urban designs, such as the “Linear City” of Ernst May in Magnitogorsk, were utopian modernist dreams executed on an enormous scale. The circumstances of their creation, followed by the times of their greatness and fall, form a portrait of the avant-garde architecture understood as a utopia, the future that never arrived.

Pynchon's "Entropy": A Russian Connection

Abstract: In 1923, Russian naval engineer Yevgeny Zamyatin published an essay which antagonized the Soviet government, an annoyance that increased greatly when Zamyatin's dystopian novel We, a satire on the Russian Revolution never yet published in the Soviet Union, appeared in Russian in Prague. The 1923 essay is titled lion Literature, Revolution, Entropy, and Other Matters. In it, Zamyatin argues against complacency in government and art and for a continuing revolution, for a continual changing of forms and for a continuous receptivity to new ideas, however distasteful. I think that Thomas Pynchon was aware of Zamyatin's essay when he wrote his own story "Entropy" in 1958-59, but I must create a Kekulean chain to establish the connection.

The Intoxication of Power in George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932)

Abstract: George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty Four (1949) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) stand as two powerful works of art that emanated from a mere disorder and fragmentation. To put it differently, this work of art emanated from a world that underwent an extremely rigorous political transformations and cultural seismology. This is a world that has witnessed an overwhelming dislocation. All those upheavals brought into being a new life, that is to say, a reshuffled life. A new life brings forwards a new art. This research, accordingly, attempts to put all its focus on two modernist visionary works of art that have enhanced a completely new system of thought and perceived the past, the present, and even the future with an entirely new consciousness. In the world of Nineteen Eighty Four and Brave New World, power seems to get beyond of what is supposedly politically legitimate. This power has paved the way for the emergence of a totalitarian system; I would rather call it a totalitarian virus. This system has emerged with the ultimate purpose of deadening the spirit of individualism, rendering the classes nothing but “docile masses”. I will be accordingly analysing how power becomes intoxicating. In other words, I will attempt to give a keen picture of how power becomes no longer over things, but rather over men according to Nietzsche’s philosophical perception of “The Will to Power”.