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 ‘Baroque Weaving Machine’: Contrasting Counterpoint in James Joyce and Anthony Burgess

Abstract: The English polymath Anthony Burgess is today most commonly remembered for his dystopian novella A Clockwork Orange, later filmed by Stanley Kubrick. However, he was an avowedly experimental author of over 30 novels who nevertheless garnered significant popular sales for his fiction and worked extensively in the collaborative fields of popular television and cinema. He espoused conservative politics, the aesthetics of modernism, and aspects of Roman Catholicism during an era when all three were largely unfashionable, and yet found his opinion was sought by many prominent European newspapers on current affairs. From outside academia, he produced volumes of literary criticism and pursued a career as a novelist who composed music, describing himself as a composer who wrote novels. He was an exile who wrote about England, and an Englishman who wrote about the collapse of the British Empire, leavened by a proto-postcolonial perspective. He was unashamedly highbrow, yet habitually appeared on chat shows. He was simultaneously a reviewer, performer, editor, poet, dramatist, composer, journalist, educator, and fiction writer.

Speculating reality: a review of Claire Coleman’s "Terra Nullius"

Abstract: Fiction has the power to show the reality of people’s experiences and spark emotion in those who read it. Speculative fiction especially has been used to observe our political and cultural climate and project an image of what is possible, even probable, through speculating about worlds that are unlike our own reality. My shelf is filled with speculative dystopian novels; George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, exploring surveillance and censorship in an authoritarian State, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, studying conservative approaches that tyrannize women. Terra Nullius, written by Wirlomin Noongar woman, Claire Coleman, sits beside these classics in its own right, detailing the dystopia generated by colonialism in Australia.

Naturalizing Apocalypse: Last Men and Other Animals

Abstract: Expectations of a dystopian or apocalyptic future are central to twentieth and twenty-first century culture, and constitute a pervasive influence on popular culture, religious identity, and political ideology. Political scientists, philosophers and literary critics have emphasized the Manichean worldview that underlies present-day concerns with the future: a desire to cast historical events in terms of a struggle between light and darkness, good and evil, until the end of time. 1 ‘The apocalyptic imagination’, notes sociologist John Wallis, ‘has a tendency to conceive the world in starkly dualistic terms [...] There are, in other words, no shades of grey within apocalypticism, nor any moral ambiguity’. 2 Millenarian ideology, according tothisinterpretation, precipitates violence: for the believer, events cohere as part of a universal, apocalyptic plan; actual or perceived opponents are traitors or agents of evil; the sense of an imminent end of history inspires plans of empowerment, and calls for ruthless action. The Revelation of John, with its mythic and graphic description of end-time conflict, provides a compelling context for such narratives of apocalyptic bloodshed. Revelation, according to feminist theologian Tina Pippin, is a source of ‘sublime horror’, a celebration of sadistic violence that casts its shadow on other public expressions of religious faith. 3 In her wide-ranging study of spirit forms, Phantasmagoria, Marina Warner reaches an even bleaker conclusion. For the British novelist and cultural historian, ‘the present disturbing diffusion of this biblical book [Revelation] has a new, unexamined moral force, a redundant nastiness, the kind that many centuries of thought about justice and humanity have striven to put aside’. 4 But not all expressions of apocalyptic culture lend themselves to this interpretation. Unlike other end-time narratives, last man fictions–tales of solitary survivors and of the sudden annihilation of

Two dystopic visions on the relationship of humans and progress

Abstract: Zaha Hadid’s statement that is used as an epigraph to this book is also the cornerstone of this essay: “Non puo esserci progresso senza affrontare l’ignoto”. This sentence has an ambiguous meaning and can be interpreted in at least two different ways: either as a natural challenge or as an aggressive defiance. This ambiguity encompasses the relationship between individuals, communities and progress, reminding the image of Janus, each facing a different side, both forming the same and a different entity. It is a natural and complementary ambivalence. Every endeavour undertook by promoters of progress has a degree of uncertainty, a pending threat of failure, and the outcome always produces positive and negative consequences frequently in uneven ways. Culturally, in a consistent way at least from the beginning of modernity, Western civilisation has regarded progress as a natural unstoppable endeavour. Sometimes even as a duty of every rational educated person – to pass (or trespass) the frontier of the known, to act, to evolve, to transform, to change, and to discover the “God given world”. This almost linear way to understand progress, to view reality from a dominant, sometimes exclusive point of view, tends to erase the notion and effects of negative consequences both on individuals and on communities, assumed by the dominant culture as acceptable collateral damages in the name/notion of rational evolution. In this essay, the main goal is to defy this dominant trend of evolution as based mainly on material, objective, rational progress, and defy the unique view of a future based on quantifiable and technological evolution. This challenge will be done with the comparative analysis of two literary texts: Emile Souvestre’s Le monde tel qu'il sera and Cordwainer Smith’s “Alpha Ralpha

Mayakovsky’s Bedbug: Revolution, Time, and Utopia

Abstract: In Russia, the very idea of a Communist revolution – from 1905 onwards – meant both hope and dread. This attitude is quite clearly shown in a very significant part of the Russian literary process, from 1908 to the beginning of the Stalin era. An obvious thread, in fact, connects Aleksandr Bogdanov ( Red Star , 1908), Evgeny Zamyatin ( We , 1921) and Vladimir Mayakovsky ( The Bedbug , 1929): the growing awareness that the Communist revolution, as Lenin had conceived it, was little more than a model and that a model could not describe – much less forecast – a complex reality (a complex system) like a social and political one. As a result of this awareness, hope and a dark prophecy (Bogdanov) slowly turn into despair (Mayakovsky). The model is subsumed by Vladimir Mayakovsky’s dystopian satire of The Bedbug and The Bathhouse which propose a new paradigm of dystopia: a bottleneck in the flow of the information produced by blind adherence to a preconceived project that prevents the discovery and the implementation of la volonte generale in so complex a system as human society .