Download or read book Escaping Dystopia written by Stephen McBride and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2022-07-12 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Overcoming crises and forging alternatives is the most pressing issue of our times. In this book, Stephen McBride explores the multiple crises defining neoliberalism, identifying the linkages between them, and argues for radical solutions to revive our increasingly dystopian political and economic world.

Download or read book Eurozone Dystopia written by William Mitchell and published by Edward Elgar Publishing. This book was released on 2015-05-29 with total page 700 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Eurozone Dystopia traces the origin of the Eurozone and shows how the historical Franco-German rivalry combined with the growing dominance of neo-liberal economic thinking to create a monetary system that was deeply flawed and destined to fail. It argu

Download or read book Violence and Dystopia written by Daniel Cojocaru and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2015-09-18 with total page 335 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Violence and Dystopia is a critical examination of imitative desire, scapegoating and sacrifice in selected contemporary Western dystopian narratives through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory. The first chapter offers an overview of the history of Western utopia/dystopia with a special emphasis on the problem of conflictive mimesis and scapegoating violence, and a critical introduction to Girard’s theory. The second chapter is devoted to J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel Crash (1973), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and Rant (2007), and Brad Anderson’s film The Machinist (2004). It is argued that the car crash functions as a metaphor for conflictive mimetic desire and leads to a quasi-sacrificial crisis as defined by Girard for archaic religion. The third chapter focuses on the psychogeographical writings of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Walking the streets of London the pedestrian represents the excluded underside of the world of Ballardian speed. The walking subject is portrayed in terms of the expelled victim of Girardian theory. The fourth chapter considers violent crowds as portrayed by Ballard’s late fiction, the writings of Stewart Home, and David Peace’s GB84 (2004). In accordance with Girard’s hypothesis, the discussed narratives reveal the failure of scapegoat expulsion to restore peace to the potentially self-destructive violent crowds. The fifth chapter examines the post-apocalyptic environments resulting from failed scapegoat expulsion and mimetic conflict out of control, as portrayed in Sinclair’s Radon Daughters (1994), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), and Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006).

Download or read book Confronting Dystopia written by Eva Paus and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2018-06-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: No detailed description available for "Confronting Dystopia".

Download or read book The Postworld In Between Utopia and Dystopia written by Katarzyna Ostalska and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2021-12-29 with total page 276 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This collection of essays offers global perspectives on feminist utopia and dystopia in speculative literature, film, and art, working from a range of intersectional approaches to examine key works and genres in both their specific cultural context and a wider, global, epistemological, critical background. The international, diverse contributions, including a Foreword by Gregory Claeys, draw upon posthumanism, speculative realism, speculative feminism, object-oriented ontology, new materialisms, and post-Anthropocene studies to propose alternative perspectives on gender, environment, as well as alternate futures and pasts rendered in fiction. Instead of binary divisions into utopia vs dystopia, the collection explores genres transcending this dichotomy, scrutinising the oeuvre of both established and emerging writers, directors, and critics. This is a rich and unique collection suitable for scholars and students studying feminist literature, media cultural studies, and women’s and gender studies.

Download or read book The Rhetoric of Dystopia written by Christopher Carter and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2024-06-10 with total page 215 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Rhetoric of Dystopia develops an idea of “emergent metalepsis” that describes the uncanny moments where fictive texts anticipate material events, blurring the boundary between the storyworld and the world of reception. Christopher Carter treats dystopia as rhetoric that shapes collective identities while speeding across platforms and geopolitical borders, at once critiquing and exemplifying the circulation of power relations through varied modes. This rhetoric features rampant viruses, authoritarian governments, corporate behemoths, corrupt educational and scientific institutions, and brutal policing, sometimes amplifying existing trends and sometimes merely documenting them. From Bong Joon-ho to Reed Morano, Octavia Butler to Richard McGuire, artists proffer arguments whose gravity we often fail to register, thus calling into question the uses of media literacy in an age of looming cataclysm. Carter situates this rhetoric within scholarship on literacy, built environments, border policies, global food production, and the Anthropocene.

Download or read book Rethinking Democracy for Post Utopian Worlds written by Jorge León Casero and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on with total page 355 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump written by Barbara Brodman and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2019-06-04 with total page 245 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Utopia and Dystopia in the Age of Trump:Images from Literature and Visual Arts treats literature, film, television series, and comic books dealing with utopian and dystopian worlds reflecting on or anticipating our current age. From Henry James’s dreamlike utopia of “The Great Good Place” to the psychotic world of Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, from science fiction and recent horror films, television adaptations of books such as Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, and new series such as Black Mirror to the repressive Hitlerian dystopia of Katherine Burdekin’s Swastika Night, the contributors examine the development of scenarios that either prefigure the rise of individuals such as Donald J. Trump or suggest alternatives to them. Ultimately, one might say of the worlds presented here, viewed from different social and political perspectives: one person’s utopia is another’s dystopia. This is the fifth in a series of books edited by Barbara Brodman and James E. Doan, and published by Rowman & Littlefield with Fairleigh Dickinson University Press. The Universal Vampire: Origins and Evolution of a Legend and Images of the Modern Vampire: The Hip and the Atavistic (both in 2013) focused on the vampire legend in traditional and modern thought. The Supernatural Revamped: From Timeworn Legends to Twenty-First-Century Chic (2016) examined a range of supernatural beings in literature, film, and other forms of popular culture. Apocalyptic Chic: Visions of the Apocalypse and Post-Apocalypse in Literature and Visual Arts (2017) dealt with legends and images of the apocalypse and post-apocalypse in film and graphic arts, literature and lore from early to modern times, and from peoples and cultures around the world.

Download or read book The Dystopian Imagination in Contemporary Spanish Literature and Film written by Diana Q. Palardy and published by Springer. This book was released on 2018-07-27 with total page 243 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This study examines contemporary Spanish dystopian literature and films (in)directly related to the 2008 financial crisis from an urban cultural studies perspective. It explores culturally-charged landscapes that effectively convey the zeitgeist and reveal deep-rooted anxieties about issues such as globalization, consumerism, immigration, speculation, precarity, and political resistance (particularly by Indignados [Indignant Ones] from the 15-M Movement). The book loosely traces the trajectory of the crisis, with the first part looking at texts that underscore some of the behaviors that indirectly contributed to the crisis, and the remaining chapters focusing on works that directly examine the crisis and its aftermath. This close reading of texts and films by Ray Loriga, Elia Barceló, Ion de Sosa, José Ardillo, David Llorente, Eduardo Vaquerizo, and Ricardo Menéndez Salmón offers insights into the creative ways that these authors and directors use spatial constructions to capture the dystopian imagination.

Download or read book Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian Dystopian Literature written by Carter F. Hanson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-06-09 with total page 205 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: For a genre that imagines possible futures as a means of critiquing the present, utopian/dystopian fiction has been surprisingly obsessed with how the past is remembered. Memory and Utopian Agency in Utopian/Dystopian Literature: Memory of the Future examines modern and contemporary utopian/dystopian literature’s preoccupation with memory, asserting that from the nineteenth century onward, memory and forgetting feature as key problematics in the genre as well as sources of the utopian impulse. Through a series of close readings of utopian/dystopian novels informed by theory and dialectics, Hanson provides a case study history of how and why memory emerged as a problem for utopia, and how recent dystopian texts situate memory as a crucial mode of utopian agency. Hanson demonstrates that many modern and contemporary writers of the genre consider the presence of certain forms of memory as necessary to the project of imagining better societies or to avoiding possible dystopian outcomes.

Download or read book Planet Utopia written by Mark Featherstone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2017-02-17 with total page 270 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The key figure of the capitalist utopia is the individual who is ultimately free. The capitalist’s ideal society is designed to protect this freedom. However, within Planet Utopia: Utopia, Dystopia, Globalisation, Featherstone argues that capitalist utopian vision, which is most clearly expressed in theories of global finance, is no longer sustainable today. This book concerns the status of utopian thinking in contemporary global society and the possibility of imagining alternative ways of living outside of capitalism. Using a range of sociological and philosophical theories to write the first intellectual history of the capitalist utopia in English, Featherstone provokes the reader into thinking about ways of moving beyond this model of organising social life through sociological modes of thought. Indeed, this enlightening volume seeks to show how utopian thinking about the way people should live has been progressively captured by capitalism with the result that it is difficult to imagine alternatives to capitalist society today. Presenting sociology and sociological thinking as a utopian alternative to the capitalist utopia, Planet Utopia will appeal to postgraduate and postdoctoral students interested in subjects including Sociology, Social Theory, Cultural Studies, Cultural Theory and Continental Philosophy.

Download or read book Utopia Dystopia written by Michael D. Gordin and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2010-08-23 with total page 302 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The concepts of utopia and dystopia have received much historical attention. Utopias have traditionally signified the ideal future: large-scale social, political, ethical, and religious spaces that have yet to be realized. Utopia/Dystopia offers a fresh approach to these ideas. Rather than locate utopias in grandiose programs of future totality, the book treats these concepts as historically grounded categories and examines how individuals and groups throughout time have interpreted utopian visions in their daily present, with an eye toward the future. From colonial and postcolonial Africa to pre-Marxist and Stalinist Eastern Europe, from the social life of fossil fuels to dreams of nuclear power, and from everyday politics in contemporary India to imagined architectures of postwar Britain, this interdisciplinary collection provides new understandings of the utopian/dystopian experience. The essays look at such issues as imaginary utopian perspectives leading to the 1856-57 Xhosa Cattle Killing in South Africa, the functioning racist utopia behind the Rhodesian independence movement, the utopia of the peaceful atom and its global dissemination in the mid-1950s, the possibilities for an everyday utopia in modern cities, and how the Stalinist purges of the 1930s served as an extension of the utopian/dystopian relationship. The contributors are Dipesh Chakrabarty, Igal Halfin, Fredric Jameson, John Krige, Timothy Mitchell, Aditya Nigam, David Pinder, Marci Shore, Jennifer Wenzel, and Luise White.

Download or read book Dystopian Emotions written by Jordan Mckenzie and published by Policy Press. This book was released on 2021-12-13 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This edited collection offers an original investigation of into the changing landscape of emotion in dark and uncertain times. Challenging the assumption that emotional experiences are purely personal, the authors showcase how they relate to cultural, economic and political conditions.

Download or read book Educational Ills and the Im possibility of Utopia written by Joff Bradley and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2020-05-21 with total page 197 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: As a bold provocation to reimagine what the philosophy of education might mean in the 21st century, this book responds to the exhaustion of present theoretical models and indeed the degradation of fabulative thought in its current prospectus. The contributors, from Asia, the Americas, and Europe, proffer a frank response to the everyday reality of the classroom where teachers compete with electronic devices for the attention of students whose minds are literally elsewhere, cocooned in the noospheric ether. Outside of lecture halls the world is suffering the rise of fascism, panic, and anger driven by precarious employment, and a looming fatalism and resignation in the face of ecological calamity. These developments have led to an avalanche of psychical woes afflicting young people ranging from trauma, the loss of hope and, in extremis, violence and suicide. The concerned and committed writers of this volume therefore raise the timely question of the return of utopia as a fitting, desperate, and indeed necessary response to the ecological, existential, and pedagogical crises spreading across the planet. At this most crucial juncture in human history, the excellent contributions to this book offer singularly unique perspectives regarding the possibility/impossibility of utopia. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal, Educational Philosophy and Theory.

Download or read book Utopia and Terror in Contemporary American Fiction written by Judie Newman and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2014-07-17 with total page 208 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book examines the quest for/failure of Utopia across a range of contemporary American/transnational fictions in relation to terror and globalization through authors such as Susan Choi, André Dubus, Dalia Sofer, and John Updike. While recent critical thinkers have reengaged with Utopia, the possibility of terror — whether state or non-state, external or homegrown — shadows Utopian imaginings. Terror and Utopia are linked in fiction through the exploration of the commodification of affect, a phenomenon of a globalized world in which feelings are managed, homogenized across cultures, exaggerated, or expunged according to a dominant model. Narrative approaches to the terrorist offer a means to investigate the ways in which fiction can resist commodification of affect, and maintain a reasoned but imaginative vision of possibilities for human community. Newman explores topics such as the first American bestseller with a Muslim protagonist, the links between writer and terrorist, the work of Iranian-Jewish Americans, and the relation of race and religion to Utopian thought.

Download or read book Present Tense Future Dystopian Stories from a New Generation written by AT Writing Seminar 2018 and published by Lulu.com. This book was released on 2018-04-11 with total page 183 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The future that Generation Z will inherit is threatened by issues ranging from social media abuse to genetic modification. In this anthology, twenty-four young writers from Singapore American School tackle the dilemmas closest to their hearts. While satirizing that which makes them feel powerless, they hope to shed light on the injustice in the world around them.

Download or read book Unsettling Literacies written by Claire Lee and published by Springer Nature. This book was released on 2022-03-04 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book asks researchers what uncertainty means for literacy research, and for how literacy plays through uncertain lives. While the book is not focused only on COVID-19, it is significant that it was written in 2020-2021, when our authors’ and readers’ working and personal lives were thrown into disarray by stay-at-home orders. The book opens up new spaces for examining ways that literacy has come to matter in the world. Drawing on the reflections of international literacy researchers and important new voices, this book presents re-imagined methods and theoretical imperatives. These difficult times have surfaced new communicative practices and opened out spaces for exploration and activism, prompting re-examination of relationships between research, literacy and social justice. The book considers varied and consequential events to explore new ways to think and research literacy and to unsettle what we know and accept as fundamental to literacy research, opening ourselves up for change. It provides direction to the field of literacy studies as pressing global concerns are prompting literacy researchers to re-examine what and how they research in times of precarity.