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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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Journal Article
TL;DR: For example, Wedde's 1986 novel Symmes Hole can be understood in relation to a complex affinity for the land that has long shaped New Zealand culture as mentioned in this paper, which was a defining feature of the literary renaissance of the 1930s and has been revitalized by the social upheavals since the 1960s.
Abstract: The antipathy toward the city of Wellington in Ian Wedde's 1986 novel Symmes Hole can be understood in relation to a complex affinity for the land that has long shaped New Zealand culture. The trope of city versus country, which was a defining feature of the literary renaissance of the 1930s, has been revitalized by the social upheavals since the 1960s. A crisis of conscience occasioned by the revival of Maori land protests has seen many Pakeha embrace a Maori model of identity based on connection to the land as a means of retrospectively legitimizing their own claim to occupancy. Furthermore, the weakening of traditional colonial ties following Britain's entry to the EEC, and the emergence of new forms of imperialism in the Pacific-particularly corporate globalization and nuclear testing-have heightened this awareness of location on the part of New Zealanders. Accordingly, the land has come to embody all that is original, pure, and innocent, while the city signifies the artificial, the heterogeneous, and the displaced. Although Wedde's dystopian vision of Wellington encourages a situated reading of history by tracing the city's decline into superficial consumerism back to the Great Age of European exploration, his conception of urban space is premised on an opposition with 'the natural,' which is problematically associated with 'the native' and thus serves, paradoxically, to reinforce the essentializing rationales of imperialism. A critical excavation of the monuments to national (and multinational) history in the novel further reveals how the task of recuperating New Zealand's cultural identity by valorizing indigenous customs over imposed or imported ones is compromised by a covert desire to break free from the colonial past. This approach, which draws on Friedrich Nietzsche's idea of the monumental and critical species of history, brings together and develops prior interpretations of Symmes Hole, notably Linda Hardy's influential account of the natural settlement syndrome and David Dowling's analysis of Wedde's turn from a satirical to a romantic mode. The city/country split thus highlights the contradictions inherent in the novel's dual attempt to expose the folly and vice of history while seeking absolution in myth.The elaborate double narrative of Symmes Hole spans more than two centuries of foreign influence in the Pacific. The novel's chief historical protagonist is James "Worser' Heberley, who sailed into Te Awaiti channel on April Fool's Day, 1830. Like a number of his fellow whalers, Heberley married into the local Maori community, forming what colonial promoter Edward Gibbon Wakefield called 'a new people.' As noted, however, in Wedde's pseudonymous introduction to the novel, the history of these new people 'was to go underground before the advancing wave of organized colonization' (8). Drawing on Heberley's journal and an array of other texts relating to the Pacific, the authorial figure of 'the researcher' imaginatively recuperates the fragments of this buried history as he wanders around modernday Wellington.The twin threads of the narrative are held together by a number of spatio-temporal and ideological relations between Heberley and the researcher, both of whom are 'trying to get home' (11). Most obviously, their respective stories are set on opposite sides of Cook Strait, thereby creating a divide between late twentieth-century Wellington-the official centre of commerce, politics and culture, built on the foundations of the original Wakefieldian settlement-and the site of Heberley's putatively natural landfall in the Sounds.1 Wellington is also portrayed as a city that has succumbed to the spread of global capital, further distancing it from the local culture that Heberley's Te Awaiti life once seemed to promise. Hence, Wellington is doubly tainted as illegitimate in terms of its colonial origins and inauthentic in terms of its neo-colonial condition. Despite the researcher's best efforts to deconstruct the enduring European myth of a Pacific paradise by uncovering Wellington's past, his eventual retreat from the 'fallen' city into the mythical realm of the 'native' community ironically restages Heberley's escape from the corruption of Western civilisation. …

1 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
30 Jun 2011
TL;DR: In this article, the authors present two perspectives from which propaganda can be considered a prevailing practice among the forms of organizational communication management, specifically if their aims are to obtain a social license.
Abstract: This article presents two perspectives from which propaganda can be considered a prevailing practice among the forms of organizational communication management, specifically if their aims are to obtain a ‘social license’. The first is the traditional view, according to which propaganda use symbolic values to persuade ​​in search of attitudinal and behavioral changes; the second, a contemporary approach in which propaganda is a form of advertising dedicated to the dissemination of ‘public goods’, symbolic objects associated to mutual benefits and collective goals. Looking for ways of identifying this contents, is presented the difference utopia/dystopia, which when applied to the analysis of HidroAysen and “Patagonia without dams” campaigns allow to argue that they are expressions of propaganda, because both point to the change in attitudes and show ‘public goods’, and both have renowned dystopian variables (of ‘non-realized order’) in their messages.

1 citations

Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: In this article, the authors define dystopia as any text that depicts the lead-up to and/or after-effects of global cataclysms or the onset of totalitarianism in such a way as to offer little or no hope for humanity's short- or long-term survival.
Abstract: Recuperating Dystopia-Thinking Big Among the RuinsRuined cities, broken institutions, and ecological, technological, political, and economic collapses mark nearly all texts labeled "dystopic fiction." While the term dystopia is relatively unstable and fluid, the literal translation from the Greek as "not-good-place" is a useful start. For this essay, I will define dystopic fiction as any text that depicts the lead-up-to and/or after-effects of global cataclysms or the onset of totalitarianism in such a way as to offer little or no hope for humanity's short- or long-term survival. Examples of such dystopic texts that foster or advance such a definition include George Orwell's 1984 (1948), Philip K. Dick's Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep (DADoES 1968), and Cormac McCarthy's The Road (2006). Although one could argue that both Orwell and McCarthy offer the slightest of hopes that Oceania's citizens will, one day, revolt against Big Brother and/or that the Boy will find solace with the stranger he meets after his father's death, neither outcome is in any way assured. And, certainly, few would want to visit Orwell's "Oceania," Dick's Los Angeles, or McCarthy's American wasteland as these are certainly "not-good-places," but dystopic fictions often go further to reveal futures we may well be creating today through disastrous environmental policies, continued threats of global thermonuclear or biological warfare, and the expansion of cybernetic technologies into the sentient.Neal Stephenson's novels, from The Big U (1984) to Seveneves (2015), are often labeled "dystopic" because they do often feature these kinds of calamities, but such marketing offers little use-value for understanding his significant contributions to contemporary science fiction. Stephenson's novels and public statements break with this loose definition of the dystopic at nearly every turn by offering scenarios where human creativity and cognition offer real hope against such potential disasters. As Fredric Jameson articulates in Archaeologies of the Future (2005), Snow Crash (1992) and The Diamond Age (1994) are better termed "anti-Utopias" as they reject what Jameson calls "grand Utopian idea of wish-the abolition of property, the complementarity of desires, non-alienated labor, the equality of the sexes" (145). Instead, Stephenson's early works often privilege such values as the accumulation of private property, unfettered capitalism, Victorian colonialism, and often rigidly defined gender roles, but both novels ultimately suggest that non-alienated labor, especially creative engineering and design work, is a potential salvation.Because his breakthrough novel Snow Crash details an America divided between those living in storage units and those who can afford to hide themselves inside privately secured housing developments controlled by oftenracist "Franchise-Organized Quasi-National Enterprises" or "FOQNEs," it is easy to see why readers, critics, and booksellers group it with 1984, DADoES, and other works that forecast the end of liberal democracies. However, Snow Crash ends with the computer hackers triumphant against the despotic forces that would enslave them. Despite similarly apocalyptic settings in Stephenson's other works, including a grossly polluted Boston in Zodiac (1988); a Shanghai divided into magisterial, terraformed properties of delight and wonder for the rich and powerful and miserable slums in The Diamond Age; and the doomed surface of the Earth after the Moon's sudden destruction in Seveneves, Snow Crash resists classification as a dystopia. Truly, each of Stephenson's settings is either the result of a societal system crash that has destroyed the economic, political, social, and other institutions or one in which the present is careering towards such a crash that may or may not come to pass in the novel. But in each work, his protagonists build a cognitive response to ameliorate the present discomforts or prevent, take advantage of, or simply try to survive an impending catastrophe. …

1 citations


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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141