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.

Does the Categorical Imperative Give Rise to a Contradiction in the Will

Abstract: The Brave New World-style utilitarian dystopia is a familiar feature of the cultural landscape; Kantian dystopias are harder to come by, perhaps because, until Rawls, Kantian morality presented itself as a primarily personal rather than political program. This asymmetry is peculiar for formal reasons, because one phase of the deliberative process on which Kant insists is to ask what the world at large would be like if everyone did whatever it is one is thinking of doing. I do not propose to write a Kantian Brave New World myself, but I am going to ask, of what these days is called "the CI-procedure," what would happen if everybody followed it. I will argue that if the CI-procedure works as advertised, it exposes a practical incoherence in the commitment to having it govern one's actions: in the Kantian vocabulary that goes with the territory, that the Categorical Imperative gives rise to a contradiction in the will. (Less formally, that it is self-refuting.) My target will be a recently influential interpretation of Kant, due primarily to John Rawls and a number of his students, most prominently Onora O'Neill, Christine Korsgaard, and Barbara Herman, a group I will for convenience refer to as the New Kantians.1 Although it does draw on earlier interpretative work, this body of writing is relatively self-contained, and manageable in a way that the Kant literature as a whole no longer is. I don't myself wish to take a stand on whether the New Kantian reading is exegetically correct; it suffices for present purposes that it has proven itself interesting, plausible, and powerful enough to have moved Kantian moral philosophy back from the marginalized position it occupied a little over a quarter-century ago to the center of contemporary ethics. I will begin by rehearsing the CI-procedure and the theory that accompanies it; the reader is warned that the setup will take more time than is usual in papers of this kind. Kant himself used the label 'Categorical Imperative' to mark three ideas that he thought were at bottom the same: the practical priority of universalizability, of respect for persons, and of autonomy. They are, however, at any rate on the surface, rather different, and in order to sidestep the issue of whether the different versions of the Categorical Imperative are in fact equivalent, I

Speculative Fiction's Contribution to Contemporary Understanding: The Handmaid Art Tale.

Abstract: Margaret Atwood describes her book The Handmaid's Tale (1998) as speculative fiction, because the story she tells takes situations that actually exist to their logical conclusion if the cultural and political momentum of contemporary times continues on its trajectory. Atwood describes that The Handmaid's Tale "is a slight twist on the society we have now" (1998, p. 317). In this novel, the Handmaid states, "Like other things now, thought must be rationed" (Atwood, 1998, p. 8). There was, however, no rationing of thoughts as students in our university classes watched the film, The Handmaid's Tale (Wilson & Schlondorff, 1990), based on Atwood's story (1998, original 1986). The two graduate courses, geographically distant from each other, discussed the film online in spring, 2004. The film generated conversation about the Handmaiden's role in the socialization of knowledge. Knowledge is clearly connected to its cultural contexts in The Handmaid's Tale. The film also served as a catalyst for thinking about art education as a Handmaiden within a patriarchal tradition. The following excerpts from this online dialogue are examples of how the film opened discussion concerning agency within institutional expectations of conformity:The idea of the Handmaid in her silence and struggle to be within the confines of an oppressive dictatorship represents something for me. As an educator, I often find myself seeking desperately to find ways in which I may be true to my own beliefs about learning and my own creative self, while at the same time somehow being accepted within an institution that silently strikes out at anything or anyone who might be seen as not conforming, (student, January 18,2004)You touched on an idea I thought of throughout my viewing of the film ... I kept thinking of how Kate exercised her agency through the (limiting and oppressive) role of the Handmaid. Her "self was not entirely crushed and she seemed to work with the agency and advantages that she could in the situation. I, too, felt that this was like teaching art. (student, January 20, 2004)Atwood describes the culture she creates as a "dystopia," a dysfunctional Utopia. In that narrative, a violent war of ideologies is taking place; the world is divided between a conservative religious culture and guerrilla freedom fighters. The conservative leadership has assigned traditional roles to women including wife, cook, and even courtesan. Due to pollution from nuclear fallout, many wives cannot bear living children. Therefore, a new class of young fertile women has been invented for use in the conservative culture as surrogate wombs. These women are called "Handmaids." If we consider the content and goals of art education from the portrayal of the Handmaiden in art education discourse, we uncover rhetoric that is eerily similar to that of Atwood's tale. Our own speculative account of the Handmaiden considers the struggle for the meaning, goals, and content of art education. We begin our exploration of the Handmaiden in art education discourse by considering graduate students' reflections on her current and potential role in education. We conclude with re-visioning art education as Handmaiden.Handmaiden in Art Education DiscourseWe find references to the "Handmaiden" starting with Stephen Dobbs's dissertation in 1972, and continuing through Stinespring's (2001) publication in Arts Education Policy Arts Review. In such publications, art education is metaphorically gendered female and derided, especially when she "serves as a handmaiden to social studies." Some enduringly support Eisner's stirring comment, "One wonders whether in the end art education will become little more than a handmaiden to the social studies" (1994, p. 190). Eisner makes light of, and essentially denigrates the role of the Handmaiden. Perhaps he has not considered that Handmaidens have gracefully and honorably served as backbone and heart of many types of communities and cultures throughout history. …

Representing Heroic Figures and/of Resistance: Reading Women’s Bodies of Violence in Contemporary Dystopic Literatures

Abstract: The present thesis takes as its starting point the analysis of heroic women in contemporary popular culture, specifically within dystopic texts. Relying on the use of feminist theory to interrogate the texts of the corpus, in the introduction a clear distinction will be drawn between postfeminist discourse and rhetoric and Third Wave feminist intervention. The heroines of the novels Pride and Prejudice and Zombies (2009), Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters (2009), Jane Slayre (2010), The Life and Times of Martha Washington in the Twenty-First Century (1990-2007), and The Hunger Games trilogy (2008, 2009, 2010), will serve as the focus for an analysis of female heroism, violence, and posthumanity. Each of the three chapters dedicated to textual analysis considers the way in which the various heroines’ violence is mobilised, and how its representation works to reinscribe or resist patriarchal discourse. My argument is that the discourse which constructs violent women works as a form of violence in and of itself, to which the heroic female body is subjected. The focus on dystopic texts written between 1990 and 2010 serves as the basis for an analysis that seeks to consider not only how the heroine is a construction of the contemporary moment, but also how popular culture and media are driving forces in the way in which postfeminism has come to occupy a central role in the narrative surrounding strong, violent heroines. The range of sub-genres, contemporary Gothic, comic books, and young adult fiction, offer a broad field for interrogating this ubiquitous figure. Chapter 1, ‘Spectres of Feminism: Postfeminism and the Zombie Apocalypse’ considers how the integration of posthuman monsters (zombies primarily but also vampires, sea monsters, and the she-wolf) manipulates the potential for agentic heroines such that their violence is reinscribed within heteronormative and Humanist frameworks. The matrimony plot so prevalent in the texts further highlights the way in which the active heroine’s violence is only permissible within the bounds of heteronormative desire. Chapter 2, ‘Violent Heroines, Comic Books and Systemic Violence’ considers the construction of the super heroine of the comic book genre and turns to consider the way in which a racialised female body disrupts the norm and yet is still subjected to patriarchal strategies for containing representations of heroic women’s bodies and violence. The introduction of the cyborg as the posthuman enemy further emphasises how violence is mobilised in the postfeminist heroine as a means of sustaining patriarchal culture and anthropocentric normativity. The analysis in Chapter 3, ‘Katniss Everdeen and The Hunger Games: Dystopia and Resistance to Neoliberal Demands,’ brings to light the potential for a heroine that disrupts the postfeminist model seen in the previous two chapters. Through an interrogation of the way in which the novels are critical of spectator culture and the romance plot, a space for resistance is opened up. The representation of a heroine who eschews the individualist notions of postfeminist heroism by privileging the formation of affective bonds, as well as embracing the posthuman condition rather than fighting against it, offers the potential for a Third Wave feminist protagonist. Considering, in the conclusion, the way in which heroines and viragos are represented in contemporary texts, whether they be fighting zombies, enemies of the state or the state itself, it is clear that the way in which women’s violence is often offered as a postfeminist depiction of women’s equality and power serves to reinscribe women within a patriarchal framework. For the late-capitalist, globalised culture, it is imperative to represent a postfeminist vision of women as powerful, independent and equal without actually challenging the socio-political structure. This dissertation identifies the ways in which postfeminist versions of heroic women are constructed and offer a possible alternative, one which coincides with a Third Wave feminist understanding of the heroine’s role in contemporary society.

Strange constellations: a history of Australian science fiction

Abstract: Introduction Australian Science Fiction to 1925 Early Romances Utopian and Dystopian Works Novels of Racial Invasion 1926-1959: The Rise of Traditional Science Fiction in Australia 1926-1939: Forerunners of Modern Australian Science Fiction 1940-1959: Local Expansion A. Bertram Chandler Wynne Whiteford 1960-1974: International Recognition and the New Wave The 1960s The Early 1970s 1975-1984: Small Presses and Growing Reputations Aussiecon and After Writers of the 1970s George Turner Damien Broderick The Early 1980s 1985-1998: Serious Recognition Aussiecon Two and After Greg Egan Writers of the 1990s Conclusion: Into the Unknown Selected Bibliography Index