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.

George Orwell: Animal Farm-Nineteen Eighty-Four

Abstract: George Orwell is a writer who has been appropriated by very different political regimes and opinions, pressed into service as his various critics have seen fit. Though a polemicist and satirist at heart, his anti-totalitarian ideals are expounded with deft story-telling and a simplicity that belies the ultimately complex debates to which he gave voice. The changing responses to his two classic novels, Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-four (1949), provide an illuminating account of the developing preoccupations of the second half of the 20th century. In this Readers' Guide, Daniel Lea takes a decisive path through the maze of interpretations that has accumulated around Orwell's best-known novels, examining critical reactions from the beginning of the Cold War through to the collapse of Communist Eastern Europe, and at the same time placing Orwell within a long tradition of dystopian writings. In exploringthe artistic, cultural and social contexts of Orwell's work, it is an essential resource for students and general readers alike.

America of future past: the post-apocalyptic chronotope of Jim Crace’s The Pesthouse

Abstract: Drawing on Mikhail Bakhtin’s assumptions concerning the literary chronotope, the article explores spatio-temporal relationships in The Pesthouse (2007), a novel by contemporary British writer Jim Crace (b. 1946). Katarzyna Pisarska contends that the dominant, post-apocalyptic chronotope of the novel arises from the interaction of two generic chronotopes, utopian and dystopian, which question the American myth of manifest destiny towards its ultimate reassertion. The topos of “a city on a hill”, which presupposes the conflation of America’s past (Eden) and future (New Jerusalem), is reworked as the eponymous pesthouse—the place of disease and recovery of not only the novel’s protagonist but also, implicitly, of the American dream. In the end, Pisarska argues, the novel expresses a revisionist nostalgia ( sensu James Berger), as it produces the shock of the past invading the present in order to bring forth a utopian impulse.

Mudslides Make Good History

Abstract: Historians don't generally have much to do with the Big History Business of this country. Perhaps we should. Americans soak up documentaries, love to watch "historical" films, and have an authentic desire to understand more of our country's history. Sales of nobly elevating national histories are astonishing, or so it seems to those of us who write for the academic market. I am frustrated by what passes for history in much of our popular culture. My mother got so fed up with the History Channel's fascination with the Third Reich that she declared "No Nazis at Night" a household rule. Yet at the same time, I am inspired by the desire to learn more and see more and understand more about the past that I witness in bookstores, at megaplexes, and in my friends' living rooms. Those of us who think about liistory for a living, who teach and write about it for students and scholars, can do a better job connecting with this deeply-rooted historical passion. (Please, let us not leave it to Martin Scorsese, who would have us believe that the United States Navy responded to the draft riots of the Civil War by shelling lower Manhattan.) Furthermore, we can make these connections without sacrificing our hard-won insights into plural perspectives, multiple causality, and general complication in the worlds of the past.1Luckily, environmental history offers excellent ways to write good history that engages public interest. The landscape, terrain, and human ecology of the American western states provide abundant material for work that will challenge, inform, and involve our neighbors as well as each other.The American West has some colossally Big Stuff: big deserts, big mountains, big dams, big plains, big waves, big dust storms, big mansions. There's an epic quality to much of the weather and topography west of the Mississippi. Subtle detail can be crucial for historical insight, but largeness of scale can also be tremendously exciting. Big Stuff has innate drama, and much of it has inherently narrative qualities. Big Stuff also yields great visuals. Dramatic narrative and images capture people's imaginations and fire their curiosity. I think if we-that is, people who would use their hard-earned time to read an article like this-include more drama, narrative, and imagery in our work, we will end up writing stronger histories that advance our fields and also engage our fellow citizens.I see four main themes through which western environmental history can help us do this. For the sake of alliteration (the kind of popular technique that works even if professional historians think it's kind of cheesy), I'm calling these Disease, Disaster, Desiccation, and Dystopia. In the coming years, I'd like to read more about each of these. Here's what I mean.Start with disease. Bad bugs make good copy. Everyone likes reading about disease-the more loathsome, the better. This is why Richard Preston in his "Trilogy of Dark Biology" can move back and forth between historical journalism and fiction without losing any of his audience: his prose terrifies us, it fascinates us, and it makes us feel informed about our present-day world. Moreover, Elizabeth Fenn's recent Pox Americana demonstrates that excellent (and much-better-documented) history can get immense air-time in our popular culture when it is about something that we all fear, like smallpox. Disease and sickness have massive gross-out appeal. This paradox makes horror movies sell, and 1 think it can also expand the sales and readership of histories that embrace the sometimes unpleasant realities of the human form.2The search for health in various places reveals the complicated history of regional identity in this country. Emigrants to the West struggled to avoid "sickly" places and claim "healthy" ones. Yet as successive regions became denned as healthy with respect to illnesses like malaria or tuberculosis, the "healthful West" moved along at quite a good clip. In turn, health concerns influenced how generations of Americans shaped and engineered* their Wests. …

Dystopia as a subversion of Utopia: Upamanyu Chatterjee’s Novels

Abstract: Resistance to a Utopian world is often seen in most of the works in Modern fiction. The complicated relationship between the ideal and the real becomes a source of argument for and against the genre Utopia or even Dystopia. In the recent times one can find a rise in the publication of dystopian novels. Although there is evidence to prove that it is a twentieth-century phenomenon, it is interesting that the genre seems to grow stronger day after day. This article explores dystopia as a subversion of Utopia in the selected novels of Upamanyu Chatterjee, The English August: An Indian Story, The Mammaries of the Welfare State, The Last Burden, Way to Go, Weight Loss. Keywords— Dystopia, Utopia, Decadence, degeneration, alienation