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.
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TL;DR: The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009) as mentioned in this paper is a classic example of speculative speculative fiction that explores the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational.
Abstract: Any fictional text, however realistic, portrays a world that is not real. But speculative fiction--as Margaret Atwood designates her futurist, dystopian novels, The Handmaid's Tale (1985), Oryx and Crake (2003), and The Year of the Flood (2009)--offers a particular and explicit challenge to its readers' sense of the temporal distance separating the fictional mise-en-scene from the contemporary real world. Dystopian speculative fiction takes what already exists and makes an imaginative leap into the future, following current sociocultural, political, or scientific developments to their potentially devastating conclusions. In Atwood's words, speculative fictions explore "the consequences of new and proposed technologies in graphic ways by showing them as fully operational," which is something that "'novels' as usually defined cannot do" (In Other Worlds 62). Yet the imaginative effects of dystopian literary speculations depend precisely on their readers' recognition of a potential social realism in the fictional worlds portrayed therein. These cautionary tales of the future work by evoking an uncanny sense of the simultaneous familiarity and strangeness of these brave new worlds. The future as imagined in dystopian speculative fiction must be simultaneously recognizable and unrecognizable, both like and not-like the present (see Suvin 71; see also Appleton, Howells, and Mohr). In order to grasp the caution offered by the tale, we must see the imagined future in our actual present and also recognize the difference between now and the future-as-imagined. Thus, the reader of such fiction must sustain a kind of double consciousness with respect both to the fictionality of the world portrayed and to its potential as our own world's future. In Atwood's Oryx and Crake, for example, we find a near-future world that both approximates and projects forward from the political, socio-economical, technological, and climatological givens of our present moment. In the near future as imagined by Atwood, elites work and play in manicured gated communities, while everyone else is relegated to dangerous urban jungles known as pleeblands; biotech corporations command their own secret police forces such as the CorpSeCorps (short for Corporation Security Corps, but also, more grimly, Corpse Corps); genetically engineered life forms are trademarked and marketed for medical purposes and lifestyle enhancement; and the dire effects of rising sea levels and droughts associated with global warming are accepted by a younger generation that mocks the nostalgic longings of their parents and grandparents for a long ago golden age. The futurist setting of the novel suggests that we are at risk of coming to such a pass, though some readers may feel that this is already substantially, if not literally, the way we live now. Readers of Oryx and Crake are not alone in their temporally uncertain, or doubled, relation to the novel's dystopian mise-en-scene. For Atwood's protagonist--born "Jimmy" but introduced to the reader as "Snowman"--the futurist dystopia sketched above is already a memory. Oryx and Crake opens with Snowman awakening to a bleak, post-apocalyptic world that makes the socio-economic disparities and biotechnological threats of his past, a past in which he was still "Jimmy" and a past that stands as the reader's possibly inevitable future, look rosy by comparison. We don't immediately understand what has happened to Snowman's world, or when, but as we continue to read, we apprehend that Snowman believes himself to be the sole survivor of a global pandemic that has extinguished the rest of humanity. Gradually, we learn of Snowman's largely unwitting, yet also willfully unknowing, complicity in a scheme by which a bioengineered super virus was disseminated across the globe. The same mad scientist (Jimmy's best friend Crake) who masterminded the pandemic also bio-engineered a small tribe of genetically "improved" trans-humans, primitive but gentle replacements for humanity, who have been left under Snowman's care to inherit the earth. …
27 citations
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04 Oct 2012
TL;DR: The Culture of Disaster as discussed by the authors explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today, arguing that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency that made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy.
Abstract: From antiquity through the Enlightenment, disasters were attributed to the obscure power of the stars or the vengeance of angry gods. As philosophers sought to reassess the origins of natural disasters, they also made it clear that humans shared responsibility for the damages caused by a violent universe. This far-ranging book explores the way writers, thinkers, and artists have responded to the increasingly political concept of disaster from the Enlightenment until today. Marie-Helene Huet argues that post-Enlightenment culture has been haunted by the sense of emergency that made natural catastrophes and human deeds both a collective crisis and a personal tragedy. From the plague of 1720 to the cholera of 1832, from shipwrecks to film dystopias, disasters raise questions about identity and memory, technology, control, and liability. In her analysis, Huet considers anew the mythical figures of Medusa and Apollo, theories of epidemics, earthquakes, political crises, and films such as "Blow-Up" and "Blade Runner". With its scope and precision, "The Culture of Disaster" will appeal to a wide public interested in modern culture, philosophy, and intellectual history.
27 citations
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TL;DR: This paper explored the power of dystopian imaginations by examining the form and function of dystopias in colonial contexts, both in general and through one particularly salient and salient aspect of the dystopian imagination, which is that it can be used to control women.
Abstract: This paper explores the power of dystopian imaginations. It does so by examining the form and function of dystopias in colonial contexts, both in general and through one particularly salient and si...
26 citations
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TL;DR: For instance, the authors analyzed an aesthetically complex, philosophically disturbing and ideologic ally ambivalent cinematic dystopia of a few years ago, Blade Runner, and found that the concept of imitating "truly human" beings retains any coherence once the feasibility of designing "more human than human" robots becomes an increasingly imaginable technological possibility.
Abstract: Film and other forms of popular culture place enormously powerful tools at the disposal of students of politics and society. This paper analyses an aesthetically complex, philosophically disturbing and ideologic ally ambivalent cinematic dystopia of a few years ago, Blade Runner. Unlike the vast majority of films in the science fiction genre, Blade Runner refuses to neutralize the most abhorrent tendencies of our age and casts serious doubt on a host of the cliches about where we should locate their causes. Among the most significant questions it challenges us to confront are: In what does the "truly human" consist? Does the concept of imitating "truly human" beings retain any coherence once the feasibility of designing "more human than human" robots becomes an increasingly imaginable technological possibility? What might relations between the sexes and family life become if the twin eventuality of an uninhabitable earth and the perfection of robotic technologies should come about? While political theoris...
26 citations
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TL;DR: The Taxpayers March of 2009 as mentioned in this paper was an example of a white male reaction to the election of a black US president, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and economic nightmare.
Abstract: n 12 September 2009 more than sixty thousand supporters of the 9/12 Project and TEA Baggers (Taxed Enough Already) marched on Washington. Although participants in the Taxpayers March decried Barack Obama’s health-care reform, “big government” spending, and corporate bailouts, their placards sent a more alarming message. Bobbing among the crowd of mostly white faces were separate images of Obama with a Hitler moustache and “joker” makeup (made famous by the late Heath Ledger in The Dark Knight) as well as allusions to Venezuelan president Hugo Chávez and the implied “horrors” of socialism. These symbols evoke a lexicon of fear that frames the current cultural politics of race and countenance of the nation as an omen of “immanent totalitarianism” (Goldberg 1). Swirling suspicions of Obama’s U.S. citizenship, religious affiliation, and middle name (Hussein), for example, work to preemptively discredit his leadership in hopes of exposing the “Obama nation” as an “Obamanation.” Following the September rally, Republican congressman Trent Franks called Obama “an enemy of humanity,” while a writer for Newsmax.com suggested a military coup was needed to deal with “the Obama problem.” While the rallies and rhetoric are inflamed by an unresolved economic morass, they have assumed an increasingly racialized tone in their failure to build multicultural alliances and jaundiced position on immigration reform. The eruption of such hostility and discontent so shortly after the election of a black president marks an open renewal of white male backlash, “Dixiecrat,” racism and anti-multiculturalism, which can be read as a collective response to a perceived political and economic nightmare. Despite the apparent spike in popularity of right-wing media pundits like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh, figureheads of a revamped white identity politics, there is O The Racial Politics of Disaster and Dystopia in I Am Legend sean braytOn
26 citations