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.

Socially Empty Space and Dystopian Utopianism in the Late Nineteenth Century

Abstract: In ‘The Paris of the Second Empire in Baudelaire’, Walter Benjamin refers at one point to ‘socially empty space’, an idea that he claims to have found in Marx. I have been unable to locate this concept in Marx’s writings, but this might not matter, for the formulation in any case seems more Benjaminian than Marxian. Benjamin himself, however, uses it rather enigmatically. He invokes it in relation to some lines from Baudelaire about an old woman who, because she is excluded from ‘the large, closed parks’ of Paris, sits alone and pensive on a bench in a public garden, ‘at that hour when the setting sun / Bloodies the sky with bright red wounds’ (pp. 101–2). Even in this context, where it appears to refer to those zones of the metropolis that are deliberately designed to exclude the people that inhabit it, the idea of ‘socially empty space’ remains abstract and undeveloped. So in this chapter I want to exploit precisely the emptiness of the phrase, its elusive suggestiveness, in order to think about the utopian and dystopian aspects of depopulated space for capitalist modernity; that is, for a society archetypally defined by the sheer populousness of its metropolitan cities, which Raymond Williams once characterized in terms of ‘an unprecedented — crowding and rushing — human and social organization’ (p. 29).1 Socially empty space is a species of space in which, because one expects it to be filled, densely populated, like the emblematic spaces of metropolitan modernity, the absence of people is perceived almost as a presence.

No Hero and No Faces: The Postmodern Antihero in Reza Ghasemi’s The Nocturnal Harmony of Wood Instruments

Abstract: Reza Ghasemi’s novel, The Nocturnal Harmony of Wood Instruments, is an intriguing narrative of exile, portraying a nameless protagonist/narrator living in a dystopian microcosm. Hallucinating and self-delusional, he presents a collage-like picture of his life and the account of a novel of the same title he has apparently written. The present study investigates the diverse postmodern characteristics of the work such as metafiction, pastiche, paranoia, dissociation of meaning, looseness of association, and apocryphal history. These characteristic attributes are masterfully employed by the writer in a harmonious yet befuddling texture. This exploration of the postmodern elements serves as the necessary context for the depiction of the narrator/protagonist as a postmodern antihero. It is stated that as an inevitable outcome of dominance of postmodernism which carries with itself memories of disasters and traumas, the apocalyptic vision of the world, and an entropic picture of the universe, there is no room for heroism in its traditional and archetypal sense. Far from being a hero distinguished with heroic codes of action, and in contrast to charismatic heroes capable of leadership and worthy of admiration, Ghasemi’s protagonist, it is proved, is an antihero unable to see any pattern in life and rarely its destination. Far from trying to establish his own personal, suprasocial codes, the antihero is always a displaced person and in relation to society, infrasocial. His self-centeredness makes him not only unheroic, but anti-heroic. The study traces the artistic rendering of the postmodern ambiance in the birth and development of an archetypal antihero.

Ideologias, utopias, distopias, “entopias”: movimentos contra-hegemônicos na relação natureza-cultura

Abstract: In this article we take the concepts of ideology and utopia from Paul Ricoeur, of dystopia from Francois Ost and offer the concept of understanding the relationship between nature and culture. We will describe, from a cognitive openness to the empirical world, a paradigmatic case whose interpretation contemplated such concepts and some of their uses. That’s the saga of Leonel Siqueira da Silva’s family who, for twenty-five years, claims the right to remain in the Morro das Andorinhas, oceanic region of the city of Niteroi / RJ. The follow up of the controversies led the construction of the concept of entopia, which invites us to rekindle with the world, to make places permanently habitable, to couple, to harmonize local representations, to live cultural forms with new rules of time, space and law “atopia” in order to recover the dimension of feasibility, absent in the two first and distorted in the third, in a new way of.

Berlin A Spectacularly Gendered Cinematic Landscape of Dystopian Devastation

Abstract: Historical films about Hitler and Nazi Germany are perennially popular both within and beyond the academy. However, even in films not set in, or in any way involving, Nazi Berlin but rather only fi...