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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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Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: The Command of the Air (II Domino delTAria) was published in 1921 and by the time of Douhet's death was receiving serious attention from the world's major air forces as mentioned in this paper.
Abstract: IntroductionIn 1921, Giulio Douhet (1869-1930), a retired brigadier general in the Italian army, published The Command of the Air (II Domino delTAria), a bluntly explicit consideration of the evolving role of air power in the wars of the future. The book went into a second, enlarged edition in 1927 and by the time of Douhet's death was receiving serious attention from the world's major air forces. Chief among these was the United States Army Air Service, headed by Brigadier General William ("Billy") Mitchell (1879-1936), a vigorous and outspoken proponent of air power as the principal element of modern war. Mitchell's views on strategic bombing in total war paralleled Douhet's, and by the time Douhet's book was being disseminated through the War Department General Staff and the Air Service Field Officers' School in the 1930s, their combined contention that "the bomber will always get through" was shaping the American air force's aerial strategy and tactics (Buckley 74-79; Hurley 76-91, 146; see also Sherry 23-28,238-239).For all their attractiveness to the American military, the views espoused by Douhet and Mitchell had their critics, some military, some civilian. Among the latter was Iris Louise Thaden (19051979), one of the most prominent American female pilots of the 1920s and 1930s. She won the first National Women's Air Derby (the "Powder Puff Derby") in 1929, set a women's endurance record (196 hours, 5 minutes) in 1932, and in 1936 was the first woman to win the transcontinental race for the Bendix Trophy, flying a stock Beechcraft Model Cl7 Staggerwing. She worked, in addition, as a salesperson and test/demonstration pilot for the Beechcraft manufacturing firm. Her accomplishments were recognized later in 1936, when she received the Harmon Trophy as the outstanding woman flier of 1936. She was also no stranger to military practices: her husband, Herbert von Thaden, had been a member of the United States Army Air Corps Reserve, and in 1935 was on active duty with the Air Corps at Langley Field. During his assignment there, Louise Thaden had the opportunity to pilot a twinengined Martin B-10 bomber, the then most advanced aircraft in the American air arsenal (Thaden [2004] 141-44; Sherman 633-34; Oakes 65).Thaden retired from active competition in 1938 and shortly thereafter published her autobiography, High, Wide, and Frightened (1938). The book is of interest for the candid view it gives of the life of a female pilot in the 1920s and 1930s and the issues confronting her, but takes on even greater interest with Chapter Thirteen. Here, in "Noble Experiment," a chapter omitted from the 1973 and 2004 reissues of the book, Thaden offers a little-known and intriguingly dystopian vision of life in a Douhet-influenced future. She postulates a time when Douhet's theories have been comprehensively embraced by the world's air forces, then goes on to consider just what those theories might mean to-and might cost-the female pilots who have been reluctantly pressed into service. Writing as a committed but nonmilitant feminist of the 1930s, she pays little heed to the geopolitical elements of the war she records; instead, she focuses on the personal and emotional consequences of military policy.Douhet builds his argument in several stages. Recognizing that his policies would require a significantly enlarged air force, he calls upon civil aviation to supplement military resources. For all its innocuousness as recreational or commercial flying, civil aviation has military applicability, for it "employs planes, trains pilots and maintains them in active service, and makes use of various aviation accessories ... directly utilizable by the organs of national defense." The active nature of civil aviation dictates that pilots will be flying "the latest types of plane" (as opposed to the "antiquated" types likely to be found in the military, where research and development is subject to governmental policies and whims). …
Book ChapterDOI
01 Jan 2017
TL;DR: The authors discusses key works of dystopic fiction that have inspired media resistance until today: Huxley's Brave New World (1932), Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 (1953).
Abstract: Media resistance is a recurring theme in contemporary culture, and comprises familiar concerns that can be used to create speculative and readable stories and plots. The chapter discusses key works of dystopic fiction that have inspired media resistance until today: Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) and Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953). All three novels portray authoritarian societies where the growth of mass media represents a danger to civilization. The screen media (cinema and television) are depicted as particularly bad, whereas print culture and books are depicted as representing hope for humanity.
15 Dec 2012
TL;DR: This issue of Semiotic Review began accidentally, when, in 2010, we began talking about the possibility of parasites and anthropology for the purpose of putting together a panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, it came out of mulling over the recent turn to'multispecies' anthropology, and reflecting on the role of Anthropology in the contemporary American university as discussed by the authors.
Abstract: This issue of Semiotic Review began accidentally, when, in 2010, we began talking about the possibility of parasites and anthropology for the purpose of putting together a panel for the American Anthropological Association meetings in Montreal, it came out of mulling over the recent turn to 'multispecies' anthropology, and reflecting on the role of Anthropology in the contemporary American university. Our interest at the time was to bring together anthropologists from across the field to consider parasites of all sorts: the organic and inorganic, the individual and institutional, the actual and the virtual. What our panelists - many of whom are represented in this issue of Semiotic Review - brought us were papers that did precisely that work, and much of their analyses were soundly within the tradition of semiotics, which opened up the possibility of translating that panel into this issue, and to open up the conversation to others interested in the parasite and its figurations. In this brief introduction, we review our thinking that led to the panel and eventually this issue, thinking that stems from trends in anthropology regarding multispecies analysis and the place of Anthropology more generally. We conclude by offering some suggestions on how parasites might help us thinking about societies, subjects and semiotics. One of the problems we had begun to pay attention to in multispecies analyses of human societies is the largely anthropocentric and humanistic turn in our attention to human relationships with non- humans, however ironic this might seem: are we avoiding human/non-human relationships that unsettle the agentive role of humans in the world? Where, we wondered, were the multispecies ethnographies of tapeworms, ticks and bedbugs? One of the early promises of multispecies scholarship was to displace the figure of humans at the core of so much social analysis (Haraway 2003, 2008); instead, we've found that humans - if not Man - have bounced back and established themselves at the center of a post-Copernican universe where the sun may not rotate around us, but microbes, baboons and mosquitoes surely do (Mitchell 2002). At the same time we wondered whether particular non-human agencies were being over-represented. Historians have long noted the deterministic agency accorded some technologies, e.g., trains, electricity and information and communication technologies (ICTs) (Marx 1964; Segal 1994; Urry 2009). These agencies are often figured as utopian or dystopian -- while some viewed trains as precipitating peace through travel, others have viewed them as bringing destruction in the name of progress; while some have accepted ICTs as ushering in a new age of social connectivity, others have argued that ICTs are alienating and fragmenting (Turkle 2011). Separated, abstracted and rationalized, genes have, in Haraway's classic formulation, become "disturbingly lively, and we ourselves frighteningly inert" (Haraway 1989). Or, rather, some of us have become more lively - the neoliberal subject, for which "selfish genes" serve as proxies, develop along multiple rational- choice axes, while the rest of us, rendered supine, are buffered by their endless proxies: "selfish genes," corporations, information and communication technologies. Parasites, we thought, might more appropriate capture the powers of these non-human actors; parasites might also restore the potency of the posthuman critique to multispecies scholarship by embracing harmful or negative relationships between actors. Simultaneously, and due to quite different concerns, we began to think through our discipline's role
Journal ArticleDOI
30 Jun 2022-Filolog
TL;DR: The authors examines two novels by the Slovene writer Berta Bojetu Boeta: Filio is Not at Home (Filio ni doma) and The House of Birds (Ptičja hiša), both published in the 1990's.
Abstract: This article examines two novels by the Slovene writer Berta Bojetu Boeta: Filio is Not at Home (Filio ni doma) and The House of Birds (Ptičja hiša), both published in the 1990’s. The two works depict dystopian societies focused on repression and aimed at generating systematic alienation. The plots are set in remote and isolated places (an island, a mountain, a prison, a brothel) whose inhabitants are enslaved and subjected to violence which mainly affects women. The denial of freedom that characterises these societies is one of the fundamental aspects of dystopian fiction. Despite the extreme limitation of their possibilities, the characters narrated by Bojetu find ways of resisting repression through painting, reading and the creation of human bonds, thus managing to escape from dystopian environments and keep their humanity alive.
Journal ArticleDOI
TL;DR: Ishiguro as mentioned in this paper narrated the experiences of clones whose lives have been pre-determined, shortened and doomed due to forced organ donation so that human can live healthier and longer.
Abstract: Never Let Me Go is the sixth novel by Kazuo Ishiguro published in 2005. The setting of the incidents depicted in the novel is England. Spanning more than two decades; between early 1970s up to the second half of the 1990s, hypothetic dystopian novel narrates the experiences of clones whose lives have been pre-determined, shortened and doomed due to forced organ donation so that human can live healthier and longer. Ishiguro’s narration dwells upon the interplay between the themes of memory, grief, longing for human affection, the discrepancy between technologically supported biomedical advances and ethics all of which have far-reaching implications. While search for meaning and essentiality of human affection stand out to be the humanizing aspect of life, they also contribute to the moral qualities of the novel as well as increasing novel’s significance as a cautionary story. In the vortex of emotional exploitation, social conditioning and individual degradation, clones’ experiences present a testimonial quality. Much of clones’ efforts aim at the affirmation of their existence in obtaining meaning with solidarity and memory. Through the reading of this atypical dystopian narrative, the trajectory of quest for meaning, which cannot be made up for anything else and the vitality of interpersonal affection with its unifying essentiality of memory is followed and tried to be pointed out.

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Performance
Metrics
No. of papers in the topic in previous years
YearPapers
20241
2023244
2022672
202192
2020142
2019141