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.

”När det tar slut och börjar om igen”: Ekokritiska perspektiv på Stefan Castas ungdomsdystopier

Abstract: The Swedish author Stefan Casta has written several books for children and adults, thematically addressing nature and environment. This paper highlights and discusses ideological and aesthetical aspects in his recent novel, Den grona cirkeln (2011) and its sequel, Under tiden (2012), from an ecocritical perspective. The novels combine environmental commitment with a dystopian story about four young people who survive a climate catastrophe but get lost in a world they no longer recognize and where ordinary logic does not seem to exist. The paper elucidates this process by a comparison with Buell’s (2001) concept of toxic discourse as there are several parallells, such as elements like a lost paradise, inescapable toxic, and the oppression of powerful societal interests, throughout the story. Simultaneously, ambivalence towards culture and civilization is expressed. Nature and culture become intertwined in a way that differs from the conventional dichotomy and this complexity is the supporting structure of the texts. The four teenagers, and even more so the following generation, become symbols of a new future, a pattern recognized from much dystopian as well as children’s fiction, where the weak and oppressed turn out to be the heroes. The optimistic and didactic ambition in this kind of dystopian stories is often aimed at creating an engagement for environmental issues and a sustainable future among young people. By placing the story in an imagined future as well as adding fantastic elements, Stefan Casta creates a kind of ”Verfremdungseffekt” on phenomena we often do not question in our lifestyle. This could be a liberating relativization to the young readers; the social and cultural drives that rule many of our life choices are not essential and can therefore always be reconsidered. Keywords: Ecocriticism, Stefan Casta, dystopian fiction, nature, environment, climate change

Utopia or Dystopia: Fashion Health and Well-Being

Abstract: This paper explored the issues facing the fashion industry as it faces up to climate change and the need for us as humans to balance the biological with the cultural.

The Heart Just Insists: In the Struggle with Elizabeth "Betita" Sutherland Martinez

Abstract: There is no separating my life from history. --Betita Martinez We Shall Not Be Moved I AM VISITING MY OLD FRIEND BETITA MARTINEZ ON HER 87TH BIRTHDAY. For almost two years she has been living in a residential facility in San Francisco, her body retreating, her faculties unspooling. She is quite frail, her hearing truncated, her short-term memory whittled away by strokes. She's legally blind, yet can spot a dog yards away. Conversation has become an ode to the everyday, not the grand political discourse it used to be. Now it's a struggle for her to speak just the right words that once flowed in Spanish and French, not to mention sharply chiseled English. If Betita's commitment to "destroy hatred and prejudice" was her "sacred duty," as she put it in a manifesto written when she was sixteen, it was language and writing--the ability to "tell people what I wish to tell them"--that was her passion. (1) So it must have felt like a defeat when, not too long ago, physical and cognitive limitations forced her to give up a true love of some eighty years: the written and read word. There are moments, however, when past and present coexist. Today, she rises to the occasion of her birthday, blowing air kisses to a small gathering of well-wishers, and singing along with Barbara Dane on "We Shall Not Be Moved," just as she had done in Cuba in 1966 with hundreds of thousands of antiwar protesters. (2) Betita and I have known each other for forty years, from the time we worked together on a radical pamphlet about the police, through our years as comrades in a Marxist organization, and during the last two decades as recovering leftists struggling to find our way through the dystopian gloom. She's always been more optimistic than me about the future of humankind. "Hey," she responded to my political melancholy during the Bush dynasty, "I just finished watching a documentary about the Donner Party and, believe me, things could be worse." While most of us licked our wounds and picked up our interrupted lives, she protested alongside anybody who would march in the 1990s and was never without a sheaf of leaflets in the 2000s. She'd lived, as she puts it, through five international wars, six social movements, and seven attempts to build socialism around the world? (3) There was no stopping her now. She kept the faith, while mine wavered. "The heart just insists on it," she once explained. Betita looms large in my memory as a professional revolutionary who managed on a few hours of sleep and an occasional steak, with little time for small talk. "It was nothing to work twelve hours a day, seven days a week," recalls Mary King, a comrade of Betita's in the 1960s. "We were exhausted half the time." (4) More like thirteen hours, according to Betita. She wasn't always a committed political activist. At one time she was a child of privilege, on the fast track to professional success. Child of Privilege Elizabeth Martinez, the only child of a "mixed marriage," grew up in the 1920s and 1930s in Chevy Chase, the white, middle-class section of Washington, DC's segregated suburbs. Her parents called her "Betita" for short. Her dark-skinned father, Manuel Guillermo Martinez, who had witnessed the Mexican Revolution as a young man, worked his way up from a clerk in the Mexican Embassy to professor of Spanish literature at Georgetown University. Her blue-eyed, American mother, Ruth Sutherland Phillips, got a master's degree from George Washington and taught advanced high school Spanish. Ruth was a local tennis champion, accomplished pianist, and bridge enthusiast. "Few people love life more than she did," wrote Betita after her mother's death. (5) "My physical life was easy," Betita recalls about her materially comfortable youth. "I remember dinners at home. The three of us would sit around a big mahogany table in the Gracious Dining Room. …

The shared criticism of nineteen eighty-four and macbeth

Abstract: Throughout history, political works of literature have attempted to examine politics of a particular society the author lived in or the world politics in general. Their criticism largely include the oppressions made by ruling classes, authorities, tyrannical leaders and the defects of political systems in a country. Moreover, by providing people knowledge about the circumstances of their environment and the world, they changed the way people perceive and understand events that inevitably affect their lives. No matter how many years have passed, history repeats itself and authors, poets, playwrights etc. deal with the same issues in life continuingly. For instance, although there are three huge centuries between the times of the English poet and playwright William Shakespeare and one of the leading novelists of the 20th century English literature George Orwell, both authors harshly criticize suppressive authorities in most of their works. I argue that, being strong political works, Shakespeare’s play Macbeth (1606) and Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty- Four (1949) have many surprising similarities between their underlying criticisms of suppressive, tyrannical authority figures and the chaos and unnaturalness created by their rules, with the help of the shared themes of uncertainty and confusion. In Nineteen Eighty-Four and Macbeth, both Orwell and Shakespeare harshly criticize the absolutist ideology and the usurping tyrants who rule these states. Both works criticize political extremism and lawless despotism; and the underlying implication of the works is that if there is a constant and huge flaw in a ruling state, brutality and bloodshed are inevitable. According to Alan Sinfield, “The reason why the state need[s] violence and propaganda [is] that the system [is] subject to persistent structural difficulties” (122). George Orwell saw the hazards of tyrannical and totalitarian ruling systems after he experienced the Spanish civil war. He was a genuine socialist and his accomplished novel Nineteen Eighty-Four is unquestionably a warning to people all around the world about totalitarianism. Being the authoritarian tyrant of Nineteen Eighty- Four, Big Brother’s [in fact the Party’s] sole aim is to consciously make people work for the party and to leave them starving in terrible life conditions. Big Brother becomes the authority by demolishing human rights and the possibility for a democratic state, only for his greed for being on the top. Just like Macbeth, Big Brother “vaporizes” anyone that goes against his ideologies, anyone who talks of freedom and of better living conditions. Furthermore, they are both unlawful and violent leaders: They act like they are god-like figures, Macbeth claiming to be the divine rightful king of Scotland and the description of Big Brother is god-like, no one ever saw him but he is said to be constantly watching and he is controlling everyone. Both are despotic leaders devoted to the absolutist ideology which supports that even if the ruler is a tyrant he is unquestionable and every single act he does is legitimate. Big Brother and Macbeth have an endless greed to gain more and more just for their “vaulting ambition”. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, O’Brien tells Winston, “The Party seeks power entirely for its own sake. We are not interested in the good of others; we are interested solely in power. Not wealth or luxury or long life or happiness; only power, pure power” (234). Similarly, written in the 16th century in which there was a development from Feudalism to the Absolutist state, Macbeth criticizes the violence exercised under the practises of Absolutist ideology. Shakespeare was aware that as long as there is a tyrant ruling the country, chaos and disorder will prevail and extend in that society. Macbeth, the usurping tyrant who has been triggered by the uncanny witches, goes astray: His passion to ascend to the throne and his evil deeds in the end cause a civil war between Scotland and England. He unjustly becomes the king by killing the legitimate and worthy King Duncan and exterminates every single person that questions his authority or threatens his monarchy even after he becomes the king. Moreover, Macbeth has no heir to ascend his throne after him: He has no other reason but his greed for doing his evil deeds. For example, in Act 4 Scene I, long after his ascend to the throne, he recklessly continues to slain those around him just to assert his place. In his last encounter with the witches, Macbeth asks questions to them to learn more about his future as a king. Then the witches send their masters as apparitions for them to answer him. The first apparition, which appears as an armed head, tells Macbeth: “Macbeth, Macbeth, Macbeth: beware Macduff, / Beware the Thane of Fife” ( 69-71). Later, the second apparition as a bloody child says: “Be bloody, bold and resolute; laugh to scorn/ The power of man, for none of woman born/ Shall harm Macbeth” (78-80). Here the bloody child implies that Macbeth will be slain by nobody but Macduff who was “untimely ripped” from his mother’s womb; he was considered not be born of woman. Although Macbeth does not realize the meaning of this prophecy at first, upon the first apparition’s words, he decides to murder the Macduff family for fear of a revolt against his reign: “From this moment, The very firstlings of my heart shall be/ The firstlings of my hand... The castle of Macduff I will surprise; /Seize upon Fife; give to th’edge o’th’sword/ His wife, his babes, and all unfortunate souls/ That trace him in his line” (145-152). Upon hearing the murder of Lady Macduff and the children, Macduff, who is in the English court to meet Malcolm there, decides to take revenge from Macbeth and he and the English army declare war against Scotland. ...

Jean Malaquais: A French Orwell?

Abstract: This essay discusses the uncanny parallels, paradoxes, and puzzles in the lives and careers of author of Nineteen Eighty-Four, the famous George Orwell, and the virtually unknown French writer and political radical, Jean Malaquais. The striking affinities between Orwell and Malaquais, both of whom came to literary maturity in the 1930s, involve both their themes and genres. Both men fully engaged the issues of their times as independent leftists. Both also wrote political novels, documentary reportage, war diaries, and anti-utopias that addressed the conditions of the poor and working class (especially miners), the agonies of war-torn Europe, and the dangers of a totalitarian dystopia in the near future. Their remarkable affinities even extended to participation as volunteer soldiers in the same militia during the Spanish Civil War, the POUM (United Marxist Workers’ Party). Yet no biographer or scholar has ever compared the two men or even noted their numerous, arresting similarities. The divergent “afterlives” of Orwell and Malaquais raise large questions about cultural memory, the literary Zeitgeist, and Clio’s caprice.