Topic
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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TL;DR: In this article, the stylistic differences between the novels making up the African trilogy (Things Fall Apart - 1958, No Longer at Ease - 1960, Arrow of God - 1964) and his subsequent masterpieces A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987) are highlighted.
Abstract: Although tackling Chinua Achebe’s novels as illustrative pieces of postcolonial African literature, this article moves a step further in tracking down the elements projecting these literary texts into universalization. The major aim is to highlight the stylistic differences between the novels making up the African trilogy (Things Fall Apart - 1958, No Longer at Ease - 1960, Arrow of God - 1964) and his subsequent masterpieces A Man of the People (1966) and Anthills of the Savannah (1987). If the African trilogy particularly relies on and therefore has been analyzed in terms of culture-specific items and postcolonial issues, the other two novels acquire new dimensions, giving birth to what can be called dystopian standardization characteristic not only of a certain space or time, but of any society fighting corruption and abusive political systems inevitably leading to oppressive regimes, chaos and collapse.
TL;DR: The majority of those narratives share a similar world-model, featuring an over-crowded, fortified refuge and its ruler turning a utopian sanctuary into a dystopian confinement as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: In the past few years there has been a growing interest in depicting permanently sieged strongholds, secluded last stands, or quarantined asylums within a post-apocalyptic world so as to strengthen the sense of the ultimate isolation and disconnection from the desolated world outside. The majority of those narratives share a similar world-model, featuring an over-crowded, fortified refuge and its ruler turning a utopian sanctuary into a dystopian confinement. This means that the society in such a world faces two actual threats: one imminent, be it a zombie apocalypse, bands of scavengers, or epidemic that forces people to take refuge – and the other one, concealed, which reveals itself when everything seems to be under control.
TL;DR: In this article, the authors propose a philosophical-political reflection on the becoming of the city, from the ancient city of Athens to the dystopian dimension, the constellation of city models reflects the ideal to which every human society must or can strive.
Abstract: The article proposes a philosophical-political reflection on the becoming of the city. From the ancient city of Athens to the dystopian dimension, the constellation of city models reflects the ideal to which every human society must or can strive. The city can be seen as a metaphor of the soul, and the soul as a harmonious division of the city. The evolutionary parable of the city is also the symbol of political categories in transformation; it represents historical scenarios and possible worlds.
TL;DR: The authors examines Samit Basu's Chosen Spirits (2020), a speculative narrative, which depicts a world of extreme surveillance and dystopia, technology-controlled, and the deep differences between the privileged and the underprivileged.
Abstract: This paper examines Samit Basu’s Chosen Spirits (2020), a speculative narrative, which depicts a world of extreme surveillance and dystopia, technology-controlled, and the deep differences between the privileged and the underprivileged. The Indian version of the novel is considered for this paper. Through this work of dystopian fiction, this paper understands how this pandemic could accelerate the world into a living dystopia, and how dystopian fiction speculates the futures awaiting us. This paper is an effort to understand the privileged spaces and power structures that ensure the marginalised populations are bound to the margins, and how, a pandemic could lead to the further erasure of the unprivileged, until and unless, the ones on the comfortable side of the power structures, take a stronger stance.
TL;DR: The Drowned World project as discussed by the authors proposes to employ text-driven image synthesis as an aesthetic apparatus obscuring the distinction between imagination (potentiality) and virtuality (artificiality) to offer a computational poetics of a world drowning in data.
Abstract: abstract:The art-as-research described in this article—a project named The Drowned World, after J.G. Ballard's dystopian novel of the same name—is a reflection on environmental collapse and its technical representation in the Anthropocene. Is imagination being subsumed by the artificial? Are the sociotechnic hyperobjects of artificial intelligence and global warming chimera of the imagination, or are they certainties emergent from a desire for virtuality? In The Drowned World project, the author proposes to employ text-driven image synthesis as an aesthetic apparatus obscuring the distinction between imagination (potentiality) and virtuality (artificiality) to offer a computational poetics of a world drowning in data, an imaginative ecology of the virtual sublime.