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.

Seeing Beyond Sameness: Using The Giver to Challenge Colorblind Ideology

Abstract: The secondary worlds created in fantasy encourage the reader to compare and contrast the real world with the imaginary. In this way, fantasy as a genre can be transformative. In this article, the dystopia created in The Giver (1993) by Lois Lowry is examined as a metaphor for racism. After exploring the young adult novel as mystical fantasy in the context of reader response theory, the author evaluates the monochromatic world of The Giver as a portrayal of the consequences of a colorblind stance. Pedagogical considerations and implications for practice are also discussed.

Utopian Yearnings, Dystopian Thoughts: Houellebecq's The Elementary Particles and the Problem of Scientific Communitarianism

Abstract: In a 1999 interview, French novelist Michel Houellebecq outlines a decidedly teleological view of history: ". . . deep down, I am with the Utopians, people who think that the movement of History must conclude in an absence of movement. An end to History seems desirable to me" (Bourriaud et al. 1999, 244; my emphasis). In The Elementary Particles (1998), his controversial, award-winning novel, Houellebecq advances a bitter critique of liberalism and liberal democracy and, in particular, of their economic and cultural forms, capitalism and advanced consumerism, before offering at novel's end a conjectured antidote to the "progressive decline and disintegration" that have marked Western civilization for a very long time (2000, 259).] A powerful roman a these, Houellebecq's work mounts what is, finally, an ineffectual challenge to the defining and ennobling tenets of liberalism: free will, self-determination, property rights, the separation of the public and private spheres, tolerance, and laissez-faire morality. While his reading of contemporary social and political mores is not without isolated insight, its communitarian foundations warrant rebuttal and, I will argue, his "utopian" proposals ultimate rejection.The Elementary Particles presents a social history of France and, by extension, of the West that runs from the conclusion of World War Two through to the year 2079, at which point in time the human race has achieved a utopian resolution to its purported centuries-long slide into anomie, misery, and despair. The novel's co-protagonists are Michel Dzerjinski, a research scientist, and Bruno Clement, an apparatchik in the French education bureaucracy. These two half-brothers have led uniformly miserable lives for the most part, and now find themselves emotionally and morally expended in middle age, each playing out the endgame of his lonely existence. At the heart of their existential quandary, argues Houellebecq, lies social "atomization" which, notionally, is endemic in contemporary Western society.As we learn, the novel's title carries a double significance, the one diagnostic, the other millenarian. In the first instance, it suggests a highly fragmented society in which, in Houellebecq's saturnine view, individuals are inconsequential, dysfunctional particularities of a dysfunctional whole, and therein are living illustrations of the "atomization of society" (2000, 129). However, by novel's end, in the late twenty-first century, the ability of scientists to manipulate sub-atomic genetic matter, i.e., "elementary particles," results in a permanent elimination of human suffering and discontent. Social atomization has been cured through the miracle of eugenics. Time and contingency have been eliminated. Liberalism has joined other defunct political models in the ideological dustbin. With the ensconcement of scientific communitarianism as global political system, "History" has, in effect, come to an end, its place taken by a timeless HISTORY, the eternal goal of all Utopian thinkers, whatever their stripe. But what apparently dire circumstances would propel science in this direction? What would lead people to accept genetic engineering as a final solution to human woe? What has been gained and what compromised in the process? The Elementary Particles is a series of provocative, though, frankly, chilling responses to these questions.1Economic liberalism is an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. Sexual liberalism is likewise an extension of the domain of the struggle, its extension to all ages and all classes of society. (Houellebecq 1999, 99)From the perspective of a thoroughly eugeneticized late twenty-first century, the prologue of The Elementary Particles offers a gloomy post-mortem analysis of the life and times of Michel Djerzinski:[Djerzinski] lived through an age that was miserable and troubled. The country into which he was born was sliding slowly, ineluctably, into the ranks of the less developed countries; often haunted by misery, men of his generation lived out their lonely, bitter lives. …

Yesterday’s tomorrows and tomorrow’s yesterdays: utopian literary visions of Antarctic futures

Abstract: This article surveys utopian visions of Antarctica’s future offered by literary texts in English. The “metaphorics of opposition” associated with Antarctica’s South Polar location has made it a popular site for literary utopias for centuries. Since the time-displaced utopia (or euchronia) began to flourish in the late nineteenth century, numerous literary speculations on the future of the continent have appeared. The article points out emergent patterns and repeated motifs within this subgenre. In early temporal utopias, Antarctica provides welcome space for imperial expansion and resource exploitation. In the dystopian, post-apocalyptic fiction that burgeoned after the Second World War, its icescape functions as both a possible threat and a place of refuge. The continent can be a source of hope in recent near-future fiction, although usually in an ambiguous manner. Literary visions of a future Antarctica inevitably extrapolate problems and opportunities evident in their authors’ own times. They provide e...

"Community, Identity, Stability": The Scientific Society and the Future of Religion in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Abstract: Michel went over to the bookshelf and took down What Dare I Think? and handed it to Bruno. "It was written by Julian Huxley, Aldous's older brother, and published in 1931, a year before Brave New World. All of the ideas his brother used in the novel--genetic manipulation and improving the species, including the human species--are suggested here. All of them are presented as unequivocally desirable goals that society should strive for." Michel Houellebecq I take as my epigraph, and as the starting point of this paper, a passage from Michel Houellebecq's 1998 novel The Elementary Particles. When Bruno visits his brother Michel, he excitedly contends that "everyone says Brave New World is supposed to be a totalitarian nightmare, a vicious indictment of society, but that's just hypocritical bullshit. Brave New World is our idea of heaven: genetic manipulation, sexual liberation, the war against aging, the leisure society" (132). Michel, a molecular biologist, agrees, arguing that both Huxleys (1) believed totally in the kind of society depicted in Brave New World (1932) and that it was only after the Nazi experiment "poisoned the well" of the eugenics argument, and after Julian became the director-general of unesco, that Aldous rewrote his own literary past, claiming that his novel had been a dystopia all along. It is not difficult to counter Houellebecq's argument. A close reading of Brave New World reveals too many sites of satire simply to claim that Aldous was endorsing the specific scientific society he depicted. However, Houellebecq's argument correctly implies that reading the novel in the context of the scientific discourse that surrounded its publication problematizes the standard reading, which has led Brave New World to be recognized as "a kind of byword for a society in which the values (or nonvalues) of scientific technology are dominant, and which therefore reduced man to a species of machine" (Firchow, "Science and Conscience" 301). Several scholars have complicated a simplistic dystopian reading of the novel by analyzing it alongside Aldous's positive view of eugenics and scientific planning, which he elaborated in nonfiction essays and letters around the time of Brave New Worlds publication. Robert S. Baker, David Bradshaw, and Joanne Woiak, (2) for instance, have argued that analyzing Brave New World in the light of Aldous's interest in eugenics and scientific planning reveals a highly ambivalent novel, one which cannot be simply read "as a cautionary tale about the dehumanizing effects of technology" (Woiak 107-08). Instead, Aldous's novel can be seen as an imaginative engagement with the contemporary scientific debate surrounding the role of eugenics and scientific planning in the future of society. Woiak's conclusion is that Brave New World "offers a sophisticated critique of how scientific knowledge emerges from and in turn serves the social, political, and economic agendas of those in power" (Woiak 124). Woiak concludes that the target of the novel's satire is not advanced science but the ideologies of societies which may use it; however, a more specific conclusion can be developed by reading Brave New World alongside What Dare I Think? by Julian Huxley. Following Woiak's suggestion to study "the influence of relevant scientific ideas and sources" (110) in the creation of Aldous's novel, my reading complements these studies by examining the ways in which the novel can be seen as a text that reflects Aldous's positive views of eugenics. More importantly, it also goes beyond these studies, by identifying the distinct areas of overlap shared with What Dare I Think?; in particular, Brave New World seems to be responding to Julian's call for a "world controlled by man" (42), his belief that such a world will require preservations for "strange human beings" (24), and the potential for the use of advanced pharmacological substances (66-69). Of greatest interest is the way in which Brave New World responds to Julian's belief in a biological "religious emotion" (195). …

Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction: The Formative Period, 1926-1970

Abstract: During the past 50 years American science fiction has become one of the most popular forms of fiction throughout the world It provides the best index to the impact of all fields of science, as well as technology, on the literary and popular imaginations Indeed, it has helped to shape the dreams that lie behind the worldwide interest in space exploration, while at the same time it has provided the cutting edge of social and political criticism and satire Understanding Contemporary American Science Fiction undertakes an overview of the field during those crucial decades when it evolved from a form of fiction in the pulp magazines to one of the most popular forms of the contemporary novel Clareson traces the principal thematic strains of the field, from the view of a technologically triumphant humanity that foresaw nuclear holocaust and an earthy dystopia, to the rich diversity of the 1960s Writers such as Isaac Asimov, Robert A Heinlein, John W Campbell, Ray Bradbury, Marjorie Nicolson, Max Ehrlich, Judith Merril, and Kurt Vonnegut are featured