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.

Fictions of power in English literature, 1900-1950

Abstract: 1 Heroic Action: Narratives of imperial adventure. 2 Superhuman arts: Narratives of nationalistic faith. 3 Sexual dominance: Leaders and lovers in fiction between the Wars. 4 Violence: The thirties thriller and the 'gathering storm'. 5 Law: The liberal critique and the nightmare of totalitarianism. 6 Technopower: 'Leviathan on wheels' in dystopian science fiction. Bibliography Index

Apocalypse and dystopia in contemporary Italian writing

Abstract: "To explore the womb, or tomb, or dreams; all these are usual Pastimes and drugs, and features of the press: And always will be, some of them especially When there is distress of nations and perplexity Whether on the shores of Asia, or in the Edgware Road. Men’s curiosity searches past and future And clings to that dimension". (T. S. Eliot, “The Dry Salvages” (212).) Eliot here embraces several common elements of what we might understand by ‘apocalypse’. The original Greek term is concerned with ‘revealing’, with searching “past and future”, the better to understand what has happened and will happen. Yet although St John’s book of Revelation is concerned primarily with explaining his eschatological vision of the ‘last things’, both to encourage the early Church (of final reward) and to act as a stern warning (against increasing corruption and apostasy), it is the powerful notion of the violent or cataclysmic end of all things that has persisted and most influenced our perception of ‘apocalypse’ through the ages, as represented in literature. Dystopia, a term of relatively recent coinage (although the concept itself is not new), is closely linked with apocalypse—as indeed with its opposite, or the imagined ideal, utopia—all terms featuring prominently in contemporary fiction and discourse: the last twenty years have seen a spate of books, plays and films with ‘apoca-lyptic’ themes and/or titles, as also of scholarly essays seeking to represent or explain some aspect of our world in terms of the biblical prophecy.

Biogenetics, The Nation, and Globalization in Paolo Bacigalupi’s Critical Dystopias

Abstract: This essay explores the Utopian political possibilities of biogenetic seed production through a reading of two critical dystopian works by Paolo Bacigalupi: The Windup Girl and “The Calorie Man.” These texts are set in a dystopian future in which food production is completely controlled by a handful of global corporations who have successfully genetically engineered seeds to be unfertile. While extrapolating tendencies of the present overlap between neoliberal global capital and the development of patented genetically modified (GM) food production, Bacigalupi’s work also reveals fissures between the nation-state and global capitalism in the latter’s quest for unfettered circulation of profits. This essay tracks Bacigalupi’s representation of biogenetics across time and space, exploring how seeds and other genetic material can become a terrain of struggle between nation states and multinational capital and not simply a commodity through which value flows from the nation to global corporations. This essay argues that Bacigalupi’s work educates our desire for an alternative to the current configuration of biogenetic engineering—not in the service of a nostalgic rejection of bioengineering, but instead a future-oriented transformation of the conditions in which bioengineering is used and a movement toward a utopian future.