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.

The Construction of Time, Place and Society in 21st Century American Dystopia Fiction: A Corpus Linguistics Analysis of Deixis

Abstract: With the challenges of the 21 st century, there seems to be an urgent need to reflect more on the way literature constructs the world for the sensitive age group of young adults. In this vein, the present paper is an attempt to investigate the way time, place and society are linguistically portrayed for young adults in the interesting literary genre of dystopia science fiction. This attempt is the track that the paper pursues to find out why and how the young adult readers get so indulged with the world of dystopia science fiction. The young adult seems to reconstruct the dystopic science fiction temporal, special and social atmosphere with the aid of language. Thus, there must be a certain linguistic structure for the construction of the three vital elements of the world (time, place and society) in this literary genre. To achieve its aims, the paper combines the concept of deixis with Werth’s (1999) Text World Theory. For more precise results, the corpus linguistics tools of concordance and frequency are employed by using Anthony’s (2019) AntConc software. The data consists of eight young adult dystopia science fiction works; Suzanne Collins’ The Hunger Games Trilogy (2008-2010) (a series of three novels) and James Dashner’s The Maze Runner (2009- 2016) (a series of five novels). Keywords: corpus linguistics; deixis; dystopia; science fiction; Text World Theory

From Eden to Dystopia: An Ecocritical Examination of Emergent Mythologies in Early Los Angeles Literary Texts

Abstract: ..................................................................................................................... iii PUBLIC ABSTRACT .........................................................................................................v FRONTISPIECE ............................................................................................................... vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS ............................................................................................... vii LIST OF FIGURES ............................................................................................................x INTRODUCTION—STARTING POINTS: A THOMAS GUIDE® OF WORDS ............1 CHAPTER 1. “WRITTEN IN NATURE’S OWN HAND-WRITING”: LOS ANGELES AND SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA IN TRAVEL GUIDES AND NARRATIVES, 1873–1884 .....................................................19 2. A PARADISE FOR SOME: CHARLES F. LUMMIS, NATURE, AND MYTHMAKING IN THE LAND OF SUNSHINE, 1895–1901 .....................................................................................52 3. TOXIC FICTIONS: CIVIC VISIONS OF NATURE IN LOS ANGELES AND THE EMERGENCE OF NOIR, 1921–1939 .........................87 CONCLUSION—“AND A RIVER RUNS THROUGH IT”: TWO CENTURIES OF READING THE LOS ANGELES RIVER .........................................119 WORKS CITED .............................................................................................................136 x LIST OF FIGURES Figure Page 1-1 An 1883 postcard shows the Templars on parade during their conclave in San Francisco .............................................................................20 1-2 Cover of Semi-Tropical California (1874) ....................................................35 1-3 Scene of downtown LA, circa 1883 ..............................................................36 1-4 Tree-lined street that may be surrounded by distant orange groves ..............36 1-5 The “death chart” from Truman’s Semi-Tropical California ........................40 2-1 Front cover of Lummis’s inaugural issue ......................................................63 2-2 Redesigned cover with the motto “The Lands of the Sun Expand the Soul” ........................................................................................................64 2-3 Photo of “The Victoria Regia—Blossom and Leaf” .....................................70 2-4 Photo of “Juana and Her Children, Mission San Gabriel” ............................72 2-5 Final cover design for The Land of Sunshine, renamed Out West in January 1902 .....................................................................................79 2-6 Masthead for the “20th Century West” column ............................................80 2-7 Illustration of “When Juan Goes By” ............................................................82 2-8 Photo of “Don Antonio and Doña Mariaña” .................................................82 3-1 Cover of the 1921 “Nature’s Workshop” brochure .......................................89 4-1 Map of Los Angeles from the 1924 “Facts About Industrial Los Angeles: Nature’s Workshop” brochure ...............................................127 4-2 Map of the Los Angeles River .....................................................................129 INTRODUCTION STARTING POINTS: A THOMAS GUIDE® OF WORDS “The history of LA storytelling, if more complicated, still basically boils down to a trilogy. Nature blesses LA. Nature flees LA. And nature returns armed.” (Jenny Price, “Thirteen Ways of Seeing Nature in L.A.” n.p.) In “The Literary Destruction of Los Angeles,” a chapter in his evocatively titled Ecology of Fear: Los Angeles and the Imagination of Disaster (1998), Mike Davis categorizes the myriad ways in which a century of writers and filmmakers have enjoyed wreaking apocalyptic havoc on the City of Angels. While perhaps taking some creative license in unleashing zombie hordes, alien invasions, incredibly fast-growing grass, irradiated ants, and the occasional visit from Satan himself, the creators of LA’s fictional destruction(s) have actually had a rich history from which to construct their “dark rapture[s]” of the city’s demise (277). After all, Davis reminds us, “Los Angeles ... is perfectly cast in the role of environmental suicide. Only Mexico City has more completely toxified its natural setting, and no other metropolis in the industrial Northern Hemisphere continues to grow at such breakneck speed” (318). From its first US census in 1850 to the most recent one in 2010, the city of Los Angeles has ballooned from a small pueblo of 1,600 souls to a sprawling megalopolis of over 3,792,000. Amidst the stereotypical dreamers, schemers, and (as a bit of both) moviemakers comprising those millions of Angelenos—joining another 6,000,000-plus residents in LA County—there 1 Before GPS, the ubiquitous Thomas Guide® (a spiral-bound atlas) was the best and sometimes only way to navigate the chaotic maze of streets and web of freeways that is Los Angeles. 2 are even some nature lovers. But, many ask, other than its famed beaches, what is there for a nature lover to love about LA? This thesis won’t attempt to answer that particular question, but it will assay to unravel the conception of Los Angeles as a place apart from nature by peering into the past representations of LA and Southern California to see exactly where the “natural” LA went. More specifically, I aim to understand how the idea of nature has been pivotal to the construction and deconstruction of a mythology of Los Angeles as seen in literary texts from the first decades of its existence as part of the United States. However, as immense as Greater Los Angeles is, the body of literature and scholarship about it remains equally immense. Therefore, I will borrow a scholarly move from cultural historian David Wrobel and declare that, “[g]iven the extent of scholarship on” the region, this thesis “can hardly provide a comprehensive overview. ... [T]he intent here is to be provocative rather than comprehensive, to raise a range of interesting and important issues for other scholars to consider”—or, rather, for me to consider in my own future scholarship (22). To begin, I must first try to specify exactly what I mean when I talk about “Los Angeles.” Others have defined it as “the sprawling up-for-grabs city lying at the end of the frontier”; “a museum of failed urbanism, the great what-not-to-do of twentiethcentury city building and civic enterprise”; and a “metropolis that suffers both extreme environmental ruin and polar social and economic inequities” and yet is “the finest place in America to think and write about nature” (Fine 118; Deverell & Hise 2; Price, “Thirteen” n.p.). In cultural representations, Los Angeles “writing would perpetuate ... three topics: delight in an Arcadian paradise, frustration that a potential utopia is stalled for lack of water, and a critical eye cast on the citizenry” (McClung 24). Jenny Price 3 declares that LA is “not just a place where we’ve liked to tell stories. It is a story” (“Thirteen” n.p.). Part of its story has become, like the rest of the American West, “the multitudinous mythologized versions of its past ... a sanitized, simplified version of a messier more ambiguous history” (Wrobel 19). Since Los Angeles is a city notoriously created by advertisers and boosters from the get-go, Hal Rothman’s reminder that “[t]he identity of such [heavily promoted, touristic] places became what they marketed” introduces a darker irony in the idea of LA’s mutation from the booster’s Edenic wonderland to the noirists’ bleak human wilderness (106). Similarly, Michael Ventura removed Los Angeles from something rooted in physical place and chronicled history when he noted, “Imagination is all that finally defines L.A.” (qtd. in Price, “Thirteen” n.p.). But Price vividly counters that idea: “L.A. is not ‘all imagination.’ It has never been ‘your dream life,’ so watch out for the blowback—for smog, mud, freeway gridlock, racial violence, poverty, homelessness, beach erosion, sewage spills, severe water pollution, and the fact that the rest of the West hates you for hoarding their water supplies” (“Thirteen” n.p.). Clearly, the idea of “Los Angeles” brings with it a heaping pile of cultural baggage and identities, so a more clear-cut definition seems necessary for the purposes of this thesis. In his essay “Los Angeles Against the Mountains,” John McPhee defines LA geographically, stating that “[t]he words ‘Los Angeles’ as generally used here refer neither to the political city nor to the county but to the multinamed urban integrity that has a street in it seventy miles long (Sepulveda Boulevard) and, from the Pacific Ocean at least to Pomona, moves north against the mountains as a comprehensive town” (184, emphasis added). It this definition that represents what I mean by “Los Angeles” in the following pages—a complex geographical entity that then becomes 4 further complicated by “the tension between ... [t]wo broad positions: the paradigmatic singularity and prognostic quality of metropolitan Los Angeles” (Villa & Sanchez 499). In other words, LA is both itself, bounded by McPhee’s (still rather amorphous) physical geography, and the great harbinger of what’s down the line for the rest of the world if LA’s lessons aren’t heeded—which brings me to a final definition of Los Angeles: a place that “Americans have used ... to think” (Price, “Thirteen” n.p.). One of the things that, according to Price, “Americans have used LA to think” about is nature. Even more slippery and difficult to define than “Los Angeles,” the idea of nature lies at the heart of this thesis and therefore must be defined in some fashion. At its most basic, my use of the word “nature” here refers to the physical environment of the Los Angeles area—the mountains, the Pacific, the rivers, the flora and (less so) fauna, and the climate. Nature in this sense encompasses both the found

Hope of a hopeless world: eco-teleology in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood

Abstract: At the hands of Margaret Atwood, literary ecological tropes assume a dystopian demeanour. Through a comparative analysis of her related speculative fictions, Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood, this paper argues that Atwood’s ecocriticism is a desecularised manifesto that imagines a messianic form of ecotheology. It does so by first outlining expressions of ‘overhumanisation’ that act as Atwood’s critique of scientism. This essay makes the case that Atwood’s ecotheology is better figured as eco-telology that works by apophasis so as to articulate hope in a hopeless world. It concludes that Atwood’s eco-teleology postulates the human subject as a ‘thing in between’ as theorised by David E. Klemm and William Schweiker, and gestures to Ernst Bloch’s idea of the ‘Not-Yet’ to feed its utopian desire.

Citizenship under Surveillance: Dealing with the Digital Age

Abstract: The world is not sliding, but galloping into a new transnational dystopia … The Internet, our greatest tool of emancipation, has been transformed into the most dangerous facilitator of totalitarianism we have ever seen. The Internet is a threat to human civilization.

Fans as e-participants? Utopia/dystopia visions for the future of digital sport fandom:

Abstract: Media technologies and digital practices are reshaping and redefining the future of sport fandom. This article points to some of the utopian and dystopic transformations for fandom presented by (po...