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.

New Wave Science Fiction and the Exhaustion of the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic

Abstract: The paper explores the development of the utopian and dystopian literature in the experimental and prolific period of New Wave science fiction. The genre literature of the period chiefly expressed the dissolutions of the universe, society, and identity through its formal literary devices and subject-matter, thus making it easy to arrive at the conclusion that the many SF works of J. G. Ballard’s post-apocalyptic narratives, for example, exhausted and bankrupted the utopian/dystopian dialectic. However, the article provides textual evidence from one of the most prominent authors of the New Wave and the theoretical basis to suggest the contrary, namely that the categories of utopia and dystopia had by that time reached a level of transformation unprecedented in the history of the genre. Furthermore, the paper explores the inherent qualities science fiction shares with utopian literature, and suggests that the dialogism of the science fiction novel, especially that of the New Wave, has brought about the revival of utopia and rediscovered its potential.

Sex, Violence and Concrete: The Post-war Dystopian Vision of London in Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: While London was to prove the cauldron in which the future of modern Britain would unfold, the early post-war anxieties about London and the social, political, and cultural future of the country initiated a series of near-future dystopian visions of the city. Although this was never an extensive tradition, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (1962), and J.G. Ballard’s High Rise (1975) represent three clear waypoints in its development. It has, nonetheless, marked a continuing sense of a loss of national prestige and an acute anxiety over the future of both the city and modern British society. Strikingly, given the known liberal credentials of these authors, such anxieties have provoked in these novels a conservative fear of change, whether represented by a socialist government, a burgeoning youth culture, or technological development. Some sense of the political miasma of what should have been a triumphant Left following the General Election victory of 1945 can be detected in Kingsley Amis’s attack on Orwell in his 1957 pamphlet ‘Socialism and the Intellectuals’: ‘the “present political apathy of the intelligentsia” was largely the fault of Orwell who had become “a right-wing propagandist by negation, or at any rate a supremely powerful – though unconscious – advocate of political quietism”’. And yet following the darkest days of the later 1940s, London and Britain began to turn around – rationing was finally to disappear, London gradually began to rebuild and a national festival crowned the years of Labour government. Moreover, a consensus was formed among the planners and architects, if not the inhabitants of the city: ‘London needed modernising’. This essay will concentrate on the instigating text of the tradition, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four is without question the immediate post-war instigator of the dystopian-city genre in the UK, and while critical attention has focused on the novel’s political

The Handmaid’s Tale Through the Lens of Marxism

Abstract: In Margaret Atwood’s novel The Handmaid’s Tale , the handmaid of the title is most frequently viewed by critics as a symbol of female marginality whose innocence and sincerity expose the hypocrisy and artificiality of patriarchal society. We will argue that Atwood goes beyond establishing Handmaids as simply one side of a dialectical opposition between matriarchal society and patriarchal society. The handmaids additionally stand as a symbol of proletariat, subjugated by the bourgeoisie to the point of slavery, harshly indoctrinated in a psychologically-damaging fashion, and are denied the basic freedoms. From a sociological perspective, Atwood’s story is an appreciated instrument to scrutinize through the theory of Marxism. With the application of this theoretical analysis, it is discovered that the world portrayed in The Handmaid’s Tale is a dystopian nightmare which subdues the proletariats. Most criticism overseas the class to which the handmaid belongs.

"Fancy's Images": Reinventing Shakespeare in Christine Edzard's the Children's Midsummer Night's Dream

Abstract: Over the course of the 1990s, Shakespeare films enjoyed an unprecedented resurgence. Movies such as Baz Luhrmann's William Shakespeare's Romeo + Juliet (1996), Kenneth Branagh's Hamlet (1997) and Michael Hoffman's A Midsummer Night's Dream ( 1999) stretched the bounds of Shakespearean cinematic representation, providing structures that revivified the Bard for modern consumption. More recently, Julie Taymor's Titus (2000) and Michael Almereyda's Hamlet (2000) have continued the reanimating process: their films present the plays as dystopian reflections upon the anxieties and preoccupations of the late twentieth-century mindset. Now there is a further Shakespearean filmic outing to add to the catalogue-Christine Edzard's The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, which was released in 2001. But rather than mobilizing Shakespeare's play to accommodate the interests of an older generation of spectators, Edzard finds in it specifically childlike concerns. For this is a film performed entirely by children of between eight and twelve years. Not only does such a casting decision represent an event unique in Shakespearean cinematic history; it also enables the director to bring back to our understanding of the dramatist a sense of wonder and invention, qualities that, in adulthood, can sometimes be quickly compromised. Throughout a distinguished career, Edzard has established herself as a significant voice in the reinterpretation of classic writers. Born in Paris in 1945. Edzard worked with Franco Zeffirelli on his Romeo and Juliet (1968) before founding with Richard Goodwin, in 1975, Sands Films. The studios occupy two vast warehouse spaces in Rotherhithe, South London, and among the productions of the company have been a six-hour film adaptation of Charles Dickens's Little Dorrit (1987) and a television feature, The Fool (1989), based on the philanthropic reflections of Henry Mayhew, London Labour and the London Poor (1851). An exploratory engagement with social malfeasance and urban ills thus animates these early cinematic endeavours, as a culmination to which Edzard directed, in 1992, As You Like It, relocating Shakespeare's pastoral comedy to London's corporate business world and articulating, through images of the blighted docklands, a trenchant condemnation of Thatcher's Britain, For The Children's Midsummer Night's Dream, Edzard, and producer Olivier Stockman. have executed a similarly bold, but less obviously social move, since the drama is read in terms of children taking over a Shakespearean performance. As a result, the film becomes an exercise in a kind of debunking of Shakespearean influence, with the young performers appropriating Bardic themes to match the considerations of their own experience. It is a wonderful achievement, not least because the film was made on a tiny budget of 1.2 million and because it involved 360 children from local primary schools, many of whom had no formal acting experience. Although many reviews were positive on the film's release, others took exception to the children's lack of training, arraigning Edzard for having created "some horribly over-extended school play, in which you know none of the children" (Tookey 7) and for having allowed her performers to enact "search-and-destroy work on Shakespeare's poetry" (Andrews 12).1 These critical comments seem to me to be both unhelpful and neglectful of the film's integrity. They run shy of acknowledging the overarching directorial agenda, which is to extend the compass of the play's performative possibilities, and they fail to register a related strategy, which is to reorient the ways in which the Shakespearean corpus is transmitted and appreciated. A single scenic instance suffices to illustrate Edzard's filmic method. At the start, a group of schoolchildren gather in a wooden, Elizabethan-style private theater to watch a puppet version of A Midsurnmer Night's Dream. Quickly, the children's conversation is quieted as they become involved in the discussions and debates of the puppet Theseus and Hippolita. …

The Virus of Fear and the Politics of Globalization

Abstract: Tocqueville employed the notion of the virus to describe the strange process that led the utopian ambitions of the French revolution to collapse into bloody terror I use this idea to trace the history of the relationship between utopia, dystopia and the virus of fear Following discussion of Tocqueville’s notion and its connection to the modern event par excellence, I examine the origin of ancient modernity in Herotodus’s Histories I show that anxiety, fear and paranoia were embedded in the normal symbolic order of capitalism from the beginning and suggest that the modern version of Platonic communism expressed by Rousseau, Marx and Engels, and realized by Robespierre, Lenin and Stalin, was fated to produce nightmarish totalitarianisms because of the ways it reacted to the radical collapse of European totalitarianisms and the rise of American liberalism in the post-Second World War neoliberal utopia of fear, which suggests that radical anxiety is a condition to be embraced New fundamentalisms reflect the emergence of new conservative utopias: psycho-social reaction-formations meant to resolve the anxiety of global insecurity Throughout the paper I hold onto Tocqueville’s metaphor of the virus to suggest that the fear of otherness has always been at the heart of efforts to control radical anxiety