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.

Ecocatastrophe in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake

Abstract: This study explores ecocatastrophe in Canadian author Margaret Atwood’s novel Oryx and Crake through the lens of environmental apocalypticism. By exploring the characters and motifs in the dystopian world of the novel, relevant contemporary themes such as the implications of genetic engineering, unbridled human avarice and consumerism, population growth and the relationship between human beings and the planet that we inhabit are explored. Through the theme of environmental apocalypse, the novel teaches us that only by acknowledging the interior value and integrity of nature and by trying to establish an equal relationship with nature can humans develop harmoniously, together with nature.

Cesare Pavese, Homo Mediterraneus?

Abstract: This article reads the work of Cesare Pavese in light of the critical challenges of transnational Italian studies and analyzes Pavese’s aesthetics of rootedness, representations of migration, and practices of translation as sites of tension between local and global geographic scales. Accepting Carlo Bernari’s provocative suggestion that we consider Pavese a “Southern” writer, the article traces how Pavese portrays the land, sea, and ocean within a geophilosophical “sistema di rapporti” (Furio Jesi) reminiscent of a Heideggerian “fourfold.” In Pavese, an “anti-oceanic” attitude goes hand in hand with his treatment of land and sea as two opposite mythical realms, which we see expressed in his translation of Herman Melville’s “oceanic” novel Moby-Dick. Similarly, Pavese’s dystopian accounts of emigration can be seen as anti-oceanic narratives that articulate the need to return. With his telluric symbolism and his notion of an indissoluble attachment to the land, Pavese’s aesthetics participates in the culture of ius sanguinis that, over seventy years after Pavese’s death, is still a remarkable feature of Italian society, as we see in contemporary debates on the 1992 Italian citizenship law.

The Way to the “Pathless Land”

Abstract: The work is devoted to reflections on the text of A.A. Zinoviev’s dystopia “The Global Humant Hill”. The main ideas of the work, the general trends in the development of civilization outlined in the novel are traced. The close connection of the thoughts and ideas reflected in the work with the pressing problems of the development of modern society is noted. The danger of dehu­manization of human society, submission to social standards, blindly following the path of material progress is shown. The author of the article believes that one of the main problems described in the dystopia is connected with a lack of un­derstanding of the true nature of the human personality, the psychological depth of a person, his moral, spiritual basis, ignoring which leads to disastrous conse­quences. Attention is drawn to the importance of subordinating scientific and technological development to the ideas of human welfare, to critical and skepti­cal attitude to progressive technocratic social models associated with digitaliza­tion, computerization, artificial intelligence. Zinoviev’s novel is seen as a warn­ing to younger contemporaries and future generations, for whom a collision with a complex of problems associated with a new stage of human society develop­ment is inevitable.

Partition and its echoes in Karachi: The political agencies of Fahmida Riaz and Perween Rahman

Abstract: This article, shaped as a conversation between a scholar and an artist, critically examines the mapping of the lived experience of Karachi after Partition through a discussion of the poetic journey of the feminist activist Fahmida Riaz and urban planner and architect Perween Rahman.1 These two activists were directly affected by the Partition, albeit in different ways, and it is through their creative practice that we try to understand the hauntings of the past in the present. This helps us to move beyond linear ways of interpreting the Indian Partition’s many effects on lived experiences of communities in Karachi. While Riaz writes of the death of metaphor and the inability of verse to capture the harsh realities of everyday life in a dystopian city, Rahman gives agency to the disenfranchised and dispossessed within the urban settlements of Karachi’s poor through a participatory model of community-based mapping. What emerges from the dialogue is a recreation of several voices across time and space that carry the echoes of Partition and the conditions that surround us now. It thereby offers a way to re-envision and reclaim an embodied form of mapping through memory and walking across disciplines to engender cultural change.

Critical theory and dystopia

Abstract: Critical Theory and Dystopia tracks dystopia as a genre of fiction which occupies the spaces of literature and of politics simultaneously. Using Theodor Adorno’s critique of the situation of writing in the twentieth century, this volume uses the notion of a ‘negative commitment’ to situate the potential and the limits of dystopia. Examining classic dystopias by Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, McManus follows the mutation of the genre in dystopias by Margaret Atwood, J.G. Ballard and William Gibson in the 1980s. A sample of twenty-first-century dystopias are then read for their efforts to break with the politics of the present, and their inability to realise those breaks. Tracing lines of continuity and of discontinuity within the genre, McManus ends by exploring the dystopias of Michel Houellebecq, Lionel Shriver and Gary Shteyngart.