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.

Quest for the Impossible: Conformity and Sameness in Two Science Fiction Dystopias: Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932) and Lois Lowry's The Giver (1993)

Abstract: This paper is a comparative study of the quest for the impossible: conformity and sameness in two science fiction dystopias: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (Britain in 1932) and Lois Lowry’s The Giver (America in 1993). It is an attempt to demonstrate the two novelists’ ideologies of the quest for perfection through achieving conformity and sameness in two dystopian societies; such a quest is a quest for the impossible. The methodology of this study is based mainly on the concept of dystopian science fiction and on the characteristics of the dystopian society depicted in science fiction literature that are stated in M. Keith Booker’s Dystopian Literature: a Theory and Research Guide (1994), and in M. Keith Booker’s and Anne–Marie Thomas’ “Dystopian Science Fiction†in The Science fiction Handbook (2009).

Translation Theory, Utopia and Utopianism in Paul et Virginie, Aguirre: Wrath of God, Candide and New Atlantis

Abstract: through the general translation theories of Eugene Nida and George Steiner, through postcolonial treatments of translation in such studies as Tzvetan Todorov's La conquete de l'Amerique and Stephen Greenblatt's Marvelous Possessions, to more recent works such as Eric Cheyfitz's The Poetics of Imperialism and Tejaswini Niranjana's Siting Translation: History, PostStructuralism, and the Colonial Context, much attention has been given to the production of cultural and linguistic meaning as transformed by the encounters of different language speakers. For the most part, these studies have analyzed the deafening effect of colonial imperatives on the Western world's comprehension of the other's voice, culture and language. Although none of these studies is particularly concerned with language theory in a Utopian context, they often discriminate between Utopian approaches to language as compared to colonial translation theory. Douglas Robinson terms the "Utopian hermeneutic" a positive pole in a binary of translation and non-translation. He stresses that the Utopian involves a "mystical willingness to immerse oneself in a foreign culture without colonizing it, to stop translating and to start listening, to open yourself up to the 'mysteries' of an alien culture without necessarily trying to render what you learn into English" (121). This Utopian hermeneutic is in direct contrast to the "ideology of travel" (Marin 1993:415) or the "appropriative attempt to articulate, to convey, to communicate something about the other, to 'bring something home' in George Steiner's phrase" (Robinson 121). While the Utopian impulse may idealize a mystical union in a perfect world, Utopian writing is always already engaged with the difficult process of bringing the experience home and rendering it into the language of the homeland reader. This translation process dramatizes various colonizing, appropriative and mystical impulses which are manifest both at the mimetic and at the diegetic levels. The figure of the translator often appears in the narrative with both a role in the story and a symbolic role in the discourse, pointing the reader toward the difficult hermeneutics which Utopian translation involves. The workings of Wolmar or a Big Brother in Utopian and dystopian texts are readily apparent because these characters call attention to the ideological necessity of delimiting the meaning of place and space if one is to create a perfect society. In the case of Bernadin de Saint-Pierre's Paul et Virginie, the allegorical naming of places in the utopia calls the reader's attention to the moral and mnemonic fixtures in the collective psyche of the utopia. These sites, named

Ideology and Class Division in Veronica Roth’s Divergent

Abstract: The paper attempts to overview the ideology and the class division amongst factions in the novel. The ideology of the five factions in the future city of Chicago is embedded with self traits which dictates that everyone must fit into one dominant trait. The classification by traits or personalities makes clear provision that society will run as it is expected by the leader of the faction. The Divergent of Veronica Roth postulates the depiction of the utopia society that turns Dystopia by the insurgent led by Tris a character that possesses all the qualities and traits of the faction. The culture and the ideology of bourgeois and slave’s society prevail vividly in the novel which is indicated by the ruling faction, Erudite as the bourgeois while the subjugated faction, Abnegation as the slave society. This paper utilizes the descriptive approach to meticulously break down the events by selecting and highlighting the occurrences in the novel as the way of obtaining the data. The theory of ideology by Raymond Williams (1977) was used in this paper to expose the core or base of cultural ideology amongst the classes. The paper finds out that the every faction has its own ideologies even though they were rooted from the same founding fathers.

The Dystopian Theodicy of Parson Malthus

Abstract: One may imagine possible worlds without sin and without unhappiness, and one could make some like Utopian or Sevarambian romances: but these same worlds again would be very inferior to ours in goodness. I cannot show you this in detail.... But you must judge with me ab effectu, since God has chosen this world as it is. Leibniz, Theodicy In the great lottery of life, wrote Thomas Malthus in his First Essay on Population, most men have drawn a blank. This striking metaphor captures both the epigrammatic elegance of the essay and the harsh realism of its message, which held that the utopian schemata, rife in the Jacobin atmosphere of the day, were doomed to failure (if for no other reason) simply by the pressure of population on the food supply. The principle of population, as Malthus's premise would come to be called, took shape initially not as an independent argument but rather as a refutation of the theses of others, as the full title of his original essay suggests: An Essay on the Principle of Population, As It Affects the Future Improvement of Society. With Remarks on the Speculations of Mr. Godwin, M. Condorcet, and Other Writers. They had titles in those days! Daniel Malthus was admirer of Rousseau. This essay originated in a dispute, albeit a congenial one, between a father and son, but with the customary roles of such generational ideomachias reversed. Daniel Malthus, the father--fanatical admirer, friend and sometime host of Jean-Jacques Rousseau--was the passionate enthusiast, idealistic and visionary, while the son, just into his thirties, cast the cold--one might even say arctic--eye of practical experience and logic on the millennarian projections of those avatars of Rousseau, William Godwin and the Marquis de Condorcet, who inspired the father. Godwin's Enquiry Concerning Political Justice (1793), that paean to philosophical anarchism that inspired a generation of radicals and Romantics--particularly, of course, Shelley--projected perfectibilism par excellence. "There will be no war, no crimes, no administration of justice ... and no government," Godwin affirmed. "Beside this, there will be neither disease, anguish, melancholy, nor resentment. Every man will seek, with ineffable ardour, the good of all." Written the same year as Godwin's treatise, Condorcet's Sketch for a Historical Picture of the Progress of the Human Mind is no less optimistic, ironically so, of course, since its author composed his fervent testament to hope almost literally in the shadow of the guillotine kept humming by a revolution in the process of devouring its own children, of which he was a distinguished one. A Girondist member of the Legislative Assembly that deposed Louis XVI, Condorcet nevertheless fell victim of the Terror, was arrested and died in prison two days later. Still his faith in the utopian future of mankind never, apparently, wavered. "The time will come," he wrote, "when the sun will shine only on free men who know no other master but their reason; when tyrants and priests and their stupid or hypocritical instruments will exist only in works of history." Indeed, he affirmed, "the moral goodness of man, the necessary consequence of his constitution, is capable of infinite perfection." Thomas Malthus saw "unconquerable difficulties" with thought of Rousseau and disciplies. The younger Malthus was not blind to the appeal exerted by these optimistic and idyllic images of the future, confessed, indeed, to having been "warmed and delighted with the enchanting picture which they hold forth." But his clear-eyed realism, his empirical cast of mind, forced him to acknowledge "great and, to my understanding, unconquerable difficulties" preventing their realization. He rejected as warrantless those postulata of a human nature radically transformed that render utopian extrapolation easy. (G. K. Chesterton's famous criticism fits: "The weakness of all Utopias is this, that they take the greatest difficulty of man"--his nature--"and assume it overcome, and then give elaborate account of the overcoming of the smaller ones. …

Virtual Utopias and the Imaginary of the Internet

Abstract: This chapter explores the counterpart of virtual utopianism, namely the dystopian imaginary that sees in the internet not freedom, liberation and equality, but their opposites — the loss of privacy and autonomy, the alienation from others through technology and addiction, and exposure to risk and danger from the likes of online thieves, terrorists and paedophiles. Drawing upon accounts offered by sociologists, psychologists, political commentators and journalists, the chapter maps a growing cultural pessimism that figures the internet as a source of, not a solution to, the problems of modern society.