Download or read book Dreamworld or Dystopia written by Michael A. Livingston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2021-12-16 with total page 167 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nordic Model was originally understood as a compromise between Western and Soviet systems. The Soviet Union has been gone for a generation, but the Nordic Model survives. Much of this has to do with the Model's change from an economic to a largely cultural model. In particular the Model has come to emphasize human (especially women's) rights; environmental consciousness; and cultural innovation. While these each contain an element of fantasy, they retain sufficient substance to provide encouragement to 'progressive' circles in the United States, United Kingdom, and other countries. Important in its own right, the Nordic Model provides a fascinating case study of the transmission of goods and ideas between different regions, and the ability of a small and out of the way region to maintain its own identity in a globalized world.
Download or read book The World of Dystopia written by Fritz Reuter Leiber and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2018-12-21 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Musaicum Books presents to you this unique collection, designed and formatted to the highest digital standards and adjusted for readability on all devices. Contents:The Creature from Cleveland DepthsThe Night of the Long KnivesThe Moon is GreenNice Girl with Five HusbandsAppointment in TomorrowBread OverheadBullet with His NameThe Big EngineA Bad Day for SalesThe Last Letter
Download or read book Nordic Utopias and Dystopias written by Pia Maria Ahlbäck and published by John Benjamins Publishing Company. This book was released on 2022-11-24 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Nordic countries have long been subject to certain idealised, even utopian imaginaries, particularly with regard to images of pristine nature and the societal ideals of democracy, equality and education. On the other hand, such projections inevitably invite dissent, irony and intimations of the utopia’s dark underside. Things may yet take, or may have already taken, a dystopic course. The present volume offers twelve contributions on utopias and dystopias in Nordic literature and culture. Geographically, the articles cover the Nordic countries of Denmark, Finland, Norway, and Sweden, as well as the autonomous area of Greenland. Through the articles’ varied subjects — ranging from avant-garde literature and long poems to noir TV-series, young adult fiction, popular historiography, and political discourse in literature outside of Norden — the volume brings forth a historically rich, multi-layered picture of social, cultural and environmental imagination in the Nordic countries. Nordic Utopias and Dystopias is thus of interest not only to specialists in dystopian and utopian research but more broadly to scholars of literature and culture, and the political and social sciences, especially but not exclusively in the Nordic context.
Download or read book Tax and Culture written by Michael A. Livingston and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2020-03-19 with total page 145 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Tax scholars traditionally emphasize economics and assume that all tax systems can be evaluated in more or less the same way. By applying the insights of anthropology, sociology, and other social sciences, Michael A. Livingston demonstrates that tax systems frequently pursue different values and that the convergence of tax systems is frequently overstated. In Tax and Culture, he applies these insights to specific countries, such as China and India, and specific tax issues, including progressivity, tax avoidance, and the emerging area of environmental taxation. Livingston concludes that the concept of a global tax culture is, in many cases, merely a reflection of Western hegemony, and is unlikely to survive the changes implicit in the rise of non-Western nations and cultures.
Download or read book The PlayStation Dreamworld written by Alfie Bown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2018-03-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.
Download or read book The Spaces of the Modern City written by Gyan Prakash and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2021-06-08 with total page 469 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: By United Nations estimates, 60 percent of the world's population will be urban by 2030. With the increasing speed of urbanization, especially in the developing world, scholars are now rethinking standard concepts and histories of modern cities. The Spaces of the Modern City historicizes the contemporary discussion of urbanism, highlighting the local and global breadth of the city landscape. This interdisciplinary collection examines how the city develops in the interactions of space and imagination. The essays focus on issues such as street design in Vienna, the motion picture industry in Los Angeles, architecture in Marseilles and Algiers, and the kaleidoscopic paradox of post-apartheid Johannesburg. They explore the nature of spatial politics, examining the disparate worlds of eighteenth-century Baghdad, nineteenth-century Morelia, Cold War-era West Berlin, and postwar Los Angeles. They also show the meaning of everyday spaces to urban life, illuminating issues such as crime in metropolitan London, youth culture in Dakar, "memory projects" in Tokyo, and Bombay cinema. Informed by a range of theoretical writings, this collection offers a fresh and truly global perspective on the nature of the modern city. The contributors are Sheila Crane, Belinda Davis, Mamadou Diouf, Philip J. Ethington, David Frisby, Christina M. Jiménez, Dina Rizk Khoury, Ranjani Mazumdar, Frank Mort, Martin Murray, Jordan Sand, and Sarah Schrank.
Download or read book The Future of the Nineteenth Century Dream Child written by Amy Billone and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-10 with total page 180 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This book investigates the reappearance of the 19th-century dream-child from the Golden Age of Children's Literature, both in the Harry Potter series and in other works that have reached unprecedented levels of popular success today. Discussing Harry Potter as a reincarnation of Lewis Carroll's Alice and J.M. Barrie's Peter Pan, Billone goes on to examine the recent resurrection of Alice in Tim Burton's Alice, and of Peter Pan in Michael Jackson and in James Bond. Visiting trends that have emerged since the Harry Potter series ended, the book studies revisions of the dream-child in texts and films that have inspired mass fandom in the twenty-first century: Stephenie Meyer's Twilight, E.L. James's 50 Shades of Grey and Suzanne Collins's The Hunger Games. The volume argues that the 21st-century desire to achieve dream-states in relationship to eternal youth results from the way that dreams provide a means of realizing the fantastic yet alarming possibility of escaping from time. This current identification with the dream-child stems from the threat of political unrest and economic and environmental collapse as well as from the simultaneous technophilia and technophobia of a culture immersed in the breathless revolution of the digital age. This book not only explores how the dream-child from the past has returned to reflect misgivings about imagined dystopian futures but also reveals how the rebirth of the dream-child opens up possibilities for new narratives where happy endings remain viable against all odds. It will appeal to scholars in a wide variety of fields including Childhood Studies, Children's/YA Literature, Cinema Studies, Cultural Studies, Cyberculture, Gender Studies, Queer Studies, Gothic Studies, New Media, and Popular Culture.
Download or read book Climate Trauma written by E. Ann Kaplan and published by Rutgers University Press. This book was released on 2015-12-04 with total page 221 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Each month brings new scientific findings that demonstrate the ways in which human activities, from resource extraction to carbon emissions, are doing unprecedented, perhaps irreparable damage to our world. As we hear these climate change reports and their predictions for the future of Earth, many of us feel a sickening sense of déjà vu, as though we have already seen the sad outcome to this story. Drawing from recent scholarship that analyzes climate change as a form of “slow violence” that humans are inflicting on the environment, Climate Trauma theorizes that such violence is accompanied by its own psychological condition, what its author terms “Pretraumatic Stress Disorder.” Examining a variety of films that imagine a dystopian future, renowned media scholar E. Ann Kaplan considers how the increasing ubiquity of these works has exacerbated our sense of impending dread. But she also explores ways these films might help us productively engage with our anxieties, giving us a seemingly prophetic glimpse of the terrifying future selves we might still work to avoid becoming. Examining dystopian classics like Soylent Green alongside more recent examples like The Book of Eli, Climate Trauma also stretches the limits of the genre to include features such as Blindness, The Happening, Take Shelter, and a number of documentaries on climate change. These eclectic texts allow Kaplan to outline the typical blind-spots of the genre, which rarely depicts climate catastrophe from the vantage point of women or minorities. Lucidly synthesizing cutting-edge research in media studies, psychoanalytic theory, and environmental science, Climate Trauma provides us with the tools we need to extract something useful from our nightmares of a catastrophic future.
Download or read book Chinese Theories of Fiction written by Ming Dong Gu and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2007-06-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this innovative work, Ming Dong Gu examines Chinese literature and traditional Chinese criticism to construct a distinctly Chinese theory of fiction and places it within the context of international fiction theory. He argues that because Chinese fiction, or xiaoshuo, was produced in a tradition very different from that of the West, it has formed a system of fiction theory that cannot be adequately accounted for by Western fiction theory grounded in mimesis and realism. Through an inquiry into the macrocosm of Chinese fiction, the art of formative works, and theoretical data in fiction commentaries and intellectual thought, Gu explores the conceptual and historical conditions of Chinese fiction in relation to European and world fiction. In the process, Gu critiques and challenges some accepted views of Chinese fiction and provides a theoretical basis for fresh approaches to fiction study in general and Chinese fiction in particular. Such masterpieces as the Jin Ping Mei (The Plum in the Golden Vase) and the Hongloumeng (The Story of the Stone) are discussed at length to advance his notion of fiction and fiction theory.
Download or read book The PlayStation Dreamworld written by Alfie Bown and published by John Wiley & Sons. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From mobile phones to consoles, tablets and PCs, we are now a generation of gamers. The PlayStation Dreamworld is – to borrow a phrase from Slavoj Zizek – the pervert's guide to videogames. It argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace – a powerful arena for constructing our desires – or else the dreamworld will fall entirely into the hands of dominant and reactionary forces. While cyberspace is increasingly dominated by corporate organization, gaming, at its most subversive, can nevertheless produce radical forms of enjoyment which threaten the capitalist norms that are created and endlessly repeated in our daily relationships with mobile phones, videogames, computers and other forms of technological entertainment. Far from being a book solely for dedicated gamers, this book dissects the structure of our relationships to all technological entertainment at a time when entertainment has become ubiquitous. We can no longer escape our fantasies but rather live inside their digital reality.
Download or read book Playing Dystopia written by Gerald Farca and published by transcript Verlag. This book was released on 2018-11-30 with total page 435 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Video games permeate our everyday existence. They immerse players in fascinating gameworlds and exciting experiences, often inviting them in various ways to reflect on the enacted events. Gerald Farca explores the genre of dystopian video games and the player's aesthetic response to their nightmarish gameworlds. Players, he argues, will gradually come to see similarities between the virtual dystopia and their own ›offline‹ environment, thus learning to stay wary of social and political developments. In his analysis, Farca draws from a variety of research fields, such as literary theory and game studies, combining them into a coherent theory of aesthetic response to dystopian games.
Download or read book Brave New World written by Aldous Huxley and published by e-artnow. This book was released on 2017-10-16 with total page 287 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Set in London in the year AF 632 (2540 AD) this political and dystopian science fiction novel, paints a chilling picture of a consumerist society where being a misfit spells utter doom for a person. Here assisted reproductive technologies, mindless sex and orgies, and guided rules for expressing of human emotions reduce relationships to mechanical farces. Written in 1931, the novel is still relevant today and more so because, as Huxley mentioned in "Brave New World Revisited", our real world is turning into the world of the novel much faster than we originally thought! Aldous Huxley (1894–1963) was an English writer, novelist, philosopher, humanist, pacifist, and satirist. He later became interested in spiritual subjects such as parapsychology and philosophical mysticism. By the end of his life, Huxley was widely acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent intellectuals of his time. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in seven different years.
Download or read book Dystopia written by Janet McNulty and published by Janet McNulty. This book was released on with total page 128 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Imagine living in a world where everything you do is controlled.Book 1 in the Dystopia Trilogy In the distant future the United States has been split into two regions separated by a barren wasteland; this is the country of Dystopia. Here the individual is discouraged, freedom is an illusion, food is rationed, and everything you do is tracked by a chip implanted in your arm. This is Dana Ginary’s world. At age seventeen, people receive their career assignments chosen for them by a government body. Forced to work at the Waste Management Plant because she was declared too individualistic, Dana finds herself surrounded by death and brutality. Knowing her days are numbered, she looks for a way to leave the plant before she, too, becomes one of its causalities. It is then she meets a man named George and soon finds herself caught up in a cat and mouse game between the resistance and the Dystopian government. Dana finds herself faced with an agonizing choice of whom she will betray and whom she will save: her friend George, her parents, or herself. The eyes are always watching.
Download or read book Sunshine Patriots written by Bill Campbell and published by Rosarium Publishing. This book was released on 2016-01-30 with total page 198 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rebellion erupts on the "paradise" planet of Elysia, plunging the colony into chaos. In response, the all-powerful United Earth dispatches its elite corps of cyborg soldiers, led by Aaron "the Berber" Barber. After more than a decade of killing hideous aliens across the galaxy, Barber questions his celebrated role in United Earth's military/industrial/entertainment complex when he finally has to face his fellow humans.
Download or read book The Scientific World View in Dystopia written by Alexandra Aldridge and published by . This book was released on 1984 with total page 120 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Taming the Disorderly City written by Martin J. Murray and published by Cornell University Press. This book was released on 2008 with total page 284 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In postapartheid Johannesburg, tensions of race and class manifest themselves starkly in struggles over 'rights to the city'. Martin J. Murray brings together urban theory and local knowledge to draw a picture of this city, where real estate agents and the very poor fight for control of space.
Download or read book Finding Meaning and Beauty in an Idiotic World written by Wei-Ching Chang and published by FriesenPress. This book was released on 2019-04-25 with total page 279 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: What are the most important things in life, and how can we live more ethical, fulfilling lives? In our modern world, it is not always easy to answer these questions; human needs and ethics have been obscured by the destructive demands of capitalism, colonialism, discrimination, militarism, and other sociopolitical forces. In Finding Meaning & Beauty in an Idiotic World, Wei-Ching Chang offers us a roadmap to thinking through these complex issues, distilling the meaning of life into a series of universal values pertaining to truth, goodness, and beauty. No social mechanism will be left uncovered, as Chang draws upon both Eastern and Western philosophies and the fields of literature, film, political science, and women’s studies to examine each one. The themes that emerge include reason over faith and intuition, the importance of freedom and equality in democracy, how to diminish the calamites of war and violence, and ultimately, how to act cooperatively with one another in the cultivating of worldwide ethics. The result is a thought-provoking tour de force that teaches us, through the power of logic, how we can better appreciate our own lives and act more generously to nurture the lives of others on both personal and global scales.
