Nineteen Eighty-Four Research Articles

A Unificação do Registro de Identidade Civil e a Proteção de Dados Pessoais no Brasil

There has long been treated the idea of discipline society and control society , dealing, for example, the works of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. The contemporary brought numerous developments in relation to the concepts assigned by Foucault and Deleuze, and many of these results were predicted by the analysis of events by these thinkers, however we are still in search for understanding the evolution of societies in relation to power and its maintenance, Law, Ethics, and possible future social outcomes. It is necessary to understand the dialectics of this topic to understand the current situation and thinking about the future. The scope of this paper is to understand the social control and the ramifications of power called the Information Society, both in public and in the private sphere. The state of the art, with the advent of internet, it is significant in the history of communications in terms of speed and agility. In light of the theoretical framework chosen for the development of this paper, the control is established by the idea of discipline and the society of control is the successor to the disciplinary paradigm (the discipline is already incorporated). For Deleuze, surveillance and monitoring activities are forms of control, ie, the reinvention of Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon. The ramifications of this form of society make use of the internet and its easy access to propagate the largest number of people possible, whether through social networking programs, reality shows, including surveillance cameras, just like George Orwell referred in his book 1984 . We intend to analyze the information quickly overcomes the lack of security, given that it is today, for example, cases such as the Steering Committee of the National Civil Identification Record System - Brazilian Sirc, just implement a project- emission pilot of the new ID card - RIC, where you may have a unification of personal data and the bureaucracy of citizen service services. Article search thus demonstrate, through hypothetical-deductive method, the urgency of adopting a specific law on the protection of personal data in Brazil. To this end, it comes to point out that privacy and forms of protection are usually aligned with the technology available in each season and, with the advent of so-called Information Society captained especially the Internet and the instant and ubiquitous circulation of data it provides. The article demonstrates that even public agencies, such as the Sirc, respect the constitutional principles aimed at protecting the privacy of citizens, a fact that confirms and justifies the initial hypothesis of this work, which is, as stated, the demonstration of urgency the institution in Brazil, a specific law on personal data protection.

Ideology in Modern Times: Three Ideological Lies Behind Universal Human Rights

Originally formulated by Francois Fukuyama, today’s views of the end of ideology and final domination of liberal democracy appear to be both inadequate and naive in regard to the current political situation. The main aim of this paper is to investigate whether modern times may truly be described as post-ideological and post-political and if no, why that is. The material for this study, the concept of human rights, a crucial foundation of liberal democracies, will serve as a reference. To be able to achieve this goal, I will try to reconstruct two famous concepts of ideology present in the literature from the twentieth century. Slavoj Žižek’s critique on Marx’s view on ideology will serve as a starting point to these reflections. I will the show how the two opposing views on ideology are epitomized in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four. To be able to conduct a comprehensive analysis of universal human rights, I will need to bring in my papers term of the political by Chantal Mouffe. Moving to human rights, the hypothesis that I will try to prove is that in ‘universal human rights’, there are at least as many lies as there are words from which this term is derived. This will lead to the conclusion that human rights prove that our times are, on the one hand, highly ideological and, on the other, post-political.

Pynchon’s Nineteen Eighty-Four: Vineland, Film, and the Tragedy of the American Activism of the 1960s

This article argues that Thomas Pynchon’s Vineland (1990) aligns the corruption of underground filmmaking to the corruption of west coast radicalism by way of a system of metaphor concerning media that is based upon an engagement with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Pynchon delineates between two components of the filmic object – its metaphorical status as a medium of time and its affective nature upon the spectator. As a medium of time, the act of filmmaking is the act of producing memory and history. Aware of this, the radical film collective depicted in the novel attempt to counter the ‘government-defined history’ piped through television and mainstream movies. However, these nineteen-sixties radicals find their films corrupted by the state and eventually succumb to the affective nature of the mass media. By the 1984 of Pynchon’s novel, the former activists have become subservient to state-endorsed ideologies, reflecting a wider shift in the reality of American society across this time period. Following close textual analysis that uncovers the dialogue between Pynchon and Orwell in regards to the above, the article then addresses how the former characterizes the activists he depicts, and whether he expresses any optimism towards a revival of the American radical tradition.

“Beer and Cigarettes and a Girl to Flirt with”: Orwell, Drinking and the Everyday

This article considers Orwell's representation of everyday life in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Nineteen Eighty-Four. Focusing on his representations of drinking and public houses, it argues that Orwell emphasizes the symbolic complexity of ordinary acts, objects and spaces, which do not function as mere props and backdrops in the texts but are integral to their meanings. The essay considers in particular the implications of everyday disappointments resulting from the disjunction between myth and practice, between the desire for drink and the experience of drinking. It argues that whilst this disappointment has a political potential it can only be realized through a process of critical reflection and articulation that participants can rarely achieve in the moment itself. Reading Orwell requires a careful attention to the seemingly trivial that reveals the failings of advanced capitalism and the possibility of a more fulfilling examined life, glimpsed in the contours of its absence. In this sense, his novels demand the kind of critical strategies that later characterized cultural studies, which also grounded its challenge to the established order in the close analysis of the ordinary.

Assessing the Quality of Persian Translation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four Based on House's Model: Overt-covert Translation Distinction

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, about 10 percent of the source text was randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The dimensional mismatches and a large number of major overt errors including omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. Mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. Therefore, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation.

Assessing the Quality of Persian Translation of Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four Based on House's Model: Overt-covert Translation Distinction

This study aimed to assess the quality of Persian translation of Orwell's (1949) Nineteen Eighty-Four by Balooch (2004) based on House's (1997) model of translation quality assessment. To do so, about 10 percent of the source text was randomly selected. The profile of the source text register was produced and the genre was realized. The source text profile was compared to the translation text profile. The result of this comparison was dimensional mismatches and overt errors. The dimensional mismatches were categorized based on different dimensions of register. The overt errors which were based on denotative mismatches and target system errors were categorized into omissions, additions, substitutions, and breaches of the target language system. Then, the frequencies of occurrences of subcategories of overt errors along with their percentages were calculated. The dimensional mismatches and a large number of major overt errors including omissions and substitutions indicated that the translation was not in accordance with the House's view stating that literary works needed to be translated overtly. Mismatches on different levels of register showed that the cultural filter was applied in translation and the second-level functional equivalence required for overt translation was not reached. Therefore, the Persian translation of Nineteen Eighty-Four did not fulfill the criteria to be an overt translation.

Urban Panopticism and Heterotopic Space in Kafka’s <em>Der Process</em> and Orwell’s <em>Nineteen Eighty-Four</em>

Lamenting the doors, locks, bolts, chains, massy and grated windows of his urban confinement, eponymous narrator of William Godwin's 1794 novel Caleb Williams concludes, is society.' While visibility of these bolts and chains may have decreased, they still very much characterized European novelistic metropolis over a century later. In Kafka's Der Proces (The Trial, 1925) and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), disciplinary mechanisms of their dystopian visions transform their fictional cities into microcosms of what Michel Foucault calls l'archipel (the carceral archipelago).'This essay examines effects of penitential existence of Josef K. and Winston Smith, respective protagonists of these two novels, on their mental and corporeal functioning, and explores ways which they negotiate spaces of difference city. It argues that denizens of these novels' metropolises are inmates, body and soul, to regimes whose agendas are to construct them as conforming subjects both senses of term. Firstly, they are subjects insofar as they still possess a degree of autonomous agency. Despite K.'s arrest, for example, he is in [seiner] gewohnlichen Lebensweise nicht gehindert (not impeded from going about [his] ordinary way of life).3 Secondly, and more pertinently, they are subjects inasmuch as they are agents of their own subjection to norms of their respective societies. Given resonance of these issues of discipline and incarceration with theories of Foucault, it seems apposite to draw primarily on two Foucauldian spatial articulations of power and resistance order to analyze relationship these texts between city and its subjects-namely, panopticism and heterotopia.The provenance of panopticism, which is discussed first part of this essay, is Panopticon popularized by eighteenth-century Utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham.4 An institutional prison-house whose inmates may be observed without knowing when or whether they are under inspection, Panopticon was considered by Foucault to be le diagramme d'un mecanisme de pouvoir ramene a sa forme ideale (the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form).5 In his Surveiller et punir {Discipline and Punish, 1975), Foucault neologizes panopticism to describe a form of power relying not on overt repression, but rather upon continuous surveillance of a population and consequent strict regulation of body. The latter part of this essay investigates heterotopias. In a lecture entitled Des espaces (Of Other Spaces, 1967)/' Foucault appropriates this medical term to describe heterogeneous spaces of alterity that operate nonhegemonic conditions. As contreemplacements (counteremplacements) possessing la curieuse propriete d'etre en rapport avec tous les autres emplacements, mais sur un mode tel qu'ils suspendent, neutralisent ou inversent l'ensemble des rapports qui se trouvent, par eux, designes (the curious property of being relation with all other sites, but such a way as to suspend, neutralize, or invert set of relations designated),' heterotopias dismantle conventional order of space and function as ambiguous loci of possibility, situated between limits of one episteme and beginnings of another. Both of these spatial concepts serve to shape and regulate conduct of protagonists of novels question. Panopticism induces a paranoiac feeling of conscious and permanent visibility subjects, inaugurating their internalization of subjugating gaze. This instigates an automatic, quasi-instinctive regime of self-discipline that visibly manifests itself bodily behavior. Located at interstices of metropolis, heterotopias are frequently (but not always) characterized these novels as countersites of resistance that challenge orthodox ideology, affording protagonists glimpses of an alternative existence. …

The Concept of Violence in terms of 100 Basic Works that are Recommended to be Read in Secondary Schools

Article History: Received 10.05.2014 Received in revised form 14.05.2014 Accepted 25.05.2014 Available online 02.12.2014 Children’s literature is a whole of written and oral works that enrich children’s emotional and mental world in their life process beginning before school and continuing until their adolescence with linguistic and visual transmitters holding an artistic concern. The books are the main tools of children’s literature. Children’s books should not only be in coherence with language and style; at the same time it should be able to contribute to children’s mental and imaginary world with their subjects, heroes, implicit and indirect messages. In this study, the elements of violence in twenty books (decided by random sampling) of 100 Basic Works prepared by the Ministry of Education for Primary and Secondary Schools have been examined. In the analysis of these works, documental analysis among qualitative analysis methods has been used. “Sentence” is accepted as the starting point of the analysis of works in terms of violence. Each work has been analyzed on the basis of sentences and the sentences containing violence have been classified quantitatively. To analyze the outcome of the obtained data, Content Analysis Method has been used. At the end of the study, it is indicated that many works including child heroes such as “The Prince and The Beggar, A FifteenYear-old Captain, The Treasure Island, The Kidnapped Child” frequently refer to “violence”. Children books should be evaluated from the view of messages of it, characteristics of heroes, usage and aim of violence. © 2014 IOJES. All rights reserved

I sing the body dystopic: Utopia and posthuman corporeality in P.D. James’s The Children of Men

The resurgence of novels dealing with dystopian cosmogonies since the 1990s may reveal a new trend in Utopian Studies. If classical dystopia was defined by the imposition of collective political and social structures upon the individual and out of which there was no escape (as constructed, mainly, by Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four), these contemporary dystopian novels critically construct posthuman societies where the focus is on the development of the dystopian body, which questions and reinvents the very definitions of humanity. This article aims at examining the effects of posthuman critique upon the construction of the dystopian body in P.D. James's novel The Children of Men.

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe

Reading for Our Future

In dystopian novels the future is often imagined as a place where to read is a disappearing art. For the oppressed women in Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale, for example, reading is something close to a ‘sin’ and only during an affair is the heroine, Offred, permitted to engage in such ‘illicit’ activity. In George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, to read is fraught with difficulties because books are subject to a process of ‘continuous alteration’: ‘All history was a palimpsest, scraped clean and re-inscribed exactly as often as was necessary’. Perhaps most dramatically, in Doris Lessing's The Story of General Dann and Mara's Daughter, Griot and the Snow Dog, set after a future ice age, an ancient library is destroyed when it is exposed to the air: ‘The scribes were trying to sort the books into languages they knew, but … as each was opened, it began to crumble. Dann, desperate, grief-stricken, grabbed up book after book and saw it disintegrate in his hands.’1

Racialized Things

Racialized Things Sarah E. Chinn (bio) Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. By Robin Bernstein. New York: New York University Press, 2011. 318 pages. $75 (cloth). $24 (paper). Troubling Vision: Performance, Visuality, and Blackness. By Nicole R. Fleetwood. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011. 296pages. $75(cloth). $25(paper). Racial Indigestion: Eating Bodies in the Nineteenth Century. By Kyla Wazana Tompkins. New York: New York University Press, 2012. 288pages. $75(cloth) $24(paper). Consider the topsy-turvy doll. An invention of enslaved women in the nineteenth century, the doll is a potent image of the inextricability of American whiteness from its black counterpart, and vice versa. If you have never seen one, it is a fascinating object: the doll is a fusion of two half-dolls, one black and one white. What would normally be the legs and feet of one doll is the torso and head of the other. As one turns the doll upside down, the skirt attached to its waist flips over, revealing the face and body of the other doll. It is a short commute from playing with a white doll to playing with a black doll: a quick flip, and the doll’s racial other emerges. The topsy-turvy doll can never fully show both its black and white ends: for one to be visible, the other must be hidden beneath the doll’s skirts. The black and white dolls are joined at their nonexistent crotches, which instead become the beginning of the other doll. Each doll, then, is in a way giving birth to even as it smothers the other; each doll emerges from the nonexistent genitals of the other.1 As Robin Bernstein shows in her eye-opening book Racial Innocence, the topsy-turvy doll is one of the most illuminating and poignant enactments of segregation we have. Black and white figures are joined literally at the hip but never genuinely interact. While each becomes visible through the same mechanisms, the terms in which that visibility occurs are very different: the [End Page 873] white doll is more often than not identified as “Eva,” the innocent martyred child hero of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, while the black doll, as its name suggests, is named after Topsy, the enslaved child whose soul Eva sets out to save. On occasion, the black doll is a mammy figure, the caring subordinate to the white girl to whom she is set in anatomical opposition. As in the segregated United States, black and white girls and women occupy the same space but under terms of profound inequality. To say that the topsy-turvy doll naturalizes racial difference is not quite accurate. No one would argue that dolls are products of nature, after all. Rather, the doll filters understandings of how race operates through an everyday object, and, most importantly for Bernstein’s purposes, a product designed for and played with by children. All three books under consideration here are fascinated by what we might call racialized things: things that bear, communicate, and reproduce regimes of racialization even as that is not their sole or even primary purpose.2 They all ask, in different (and differently overlapping ways) the question posed by Nicole R. Fleetwood in Troubling Vision: how does a certain kind of racial identity—which in Fleetwood’s work is blackness, in Bernstein’s is blackness and/or whiteness, and in Kyla Wazana Tompkins’s is blackness, whiteness, and Chineseness, among other identities— “get attached to bodies, goods, ideas, and aesthetic practices,” and how do those practices get disseminated on various registers in popular culture (20)? Fleetwood, Bernstein, and Tompkins are all part of a new generation of scholars in American and African American studies. Heirs to the anti-essentialism of the 1990s and the efflorescence of affect theory in the twenty-first century, they see blackness as both fungible and deeply rooted in lived experience. They are as indebted to Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s formulation of racial formation as they are to queer theories of performativity and the emotionally resonant while theoretically sophisticated work of current scholars such as Robert Reid-Pharr, Sara Ahmed, and Heather Love.3 This olio...

One step too far – about WADA's whereabouts rule

This article attempts to demonstrate the potentially dehumanizing and counter-productive nature of the World Anti-Doping Agency's whereabouts rule, which came into force with the World Anti-Doping Code in 2004, and to show that the rule may run counter to basic ethical and human rights principles. It begins with a critical review of an article by Dag Vidar Hanstad and Sigmund Loland regarding the defence of the whereabouts requirements. Then it presents the rationale and logic behind the surveillance regime and it is argued why the French historian Michel Foucault's classical analysis of the panopticon is unhelpful for the attempt to understand the kind of surveillance the whereabouts rule represents before it moves on to the more fruitful perspective of George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. Orwell's novel demonstrates in artistic form the dehumanizing effect of stringent surveillance and this article concludes with the Danish theologian and philosopher K.E. Løgstrup who argues that trust is an essential condition of human living and society.

The Contribution of the Polish Intelligentsia to the Breakthrough of 1989

In his recollections of the events of June 1979, the former Solidarity advisor Adam Michnik has described this moment in history as a time of three Polish miracles. First, John Paul II returns triumphantly to Poland as the Pope, making a mockery of Stalin's jibe about the Pope having no divisions; then the second miracle occurs a little more than a year later in August 1980, when Lech Walcsa leads the shipyard strike and the first non-communist trade union is formed within the Soviet Bloc. The third miracle occurred some two months later when the exiled poet Czeslaw Milosz was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Michnik wrote: John Paul II became the emblem of Poland's Catholic Church at its best. The Gdansk strike and Lech Walcsa became symbols and the crowning point of the Polish workers' rebellion and Czeslaw Milosz symbolized the defiance of Poland's intelligentsia. Those three symbols marked the three trends within Solidarity. One of them stressed the movement's national and Catholic character, another followed the working class vindication line, another still concentrated on democratic and humanist values. These tendencies were neither inconsistent nor conflicting; for us they were complementary.1 This chapter will focus on the humanist values of the Polish intelligentsia, which were not only significant for the third miracle of 1980 but greatly contributed to the final breakthrough of the summer of 1989. For a whole decade, they offered sustained intellectual critiques of existing Marxism and reflections on the alternatives available in Western political thought. Included within this body of work were the contributions of Karol Wojtyla (Pope John Paul II), who was both a Polish intellectual and a powerful world figure. While members of the Polish intelligentsia were offering critiques of various forms of totalitarian government from the 1930s onwards, the work of anticommunist scholars and writers became more organised in the 1970s with the formation of the Workers' Defence Committee (Komitet Obrony Robotnikow), known by its initials KOR. KOR was distinctive in that it was an initiative of intellectuals to assist workers and their families, particularly those prisoners detained after labour strikes in 1976. It raised money through the sale of its underground publications, through fundraising groups in Paris and London, and grants from Western institutions. KOR sent open letters of protest to the communist government as well as organising legal and financial support for the families of detainees. The group also smuggled in printing machines to produce its underground publications such as Robotnik, a biweekly that had a circulation of about 20 000 by 1978, and to publish books under the banner of its own publishing house called NOWA.2 The latter were often Polish translations of works published in Western countries that were regarded as politically dangerous by the communist authorities. George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, with its esoteric critique of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and Gunter Grass's The Tin Drum were prominent in this category. Jan Jozef Lipski concluded that the achievement of NOWA was 'truly impressive', with more than 100 publications including political and economic works, which were 'indispensable to an understanding of intellectual and political culture'.3 In 1977, KOR leaders collaborated with intellectuals in the Warsaw community to establish the 'Flying University' (Uniwersytet Latajqcy), a series of lectures organised by unofficial student groups to discuss political topics that could not be debated in public. The concept was revived from a similar organisation that had operated between 1885 and 1905 in the context of Imperial Russian domination of the Polish capital.4 As a consequence of their collaboration with the organisers of the Flying University, KOR members were harassed by the secret police, beaten up and in some cases jailed. KOR, however, became an inspiration for the nation when the Polish government declared amnesty for jailed workers in the spring of 1977. …

Truth and Freedom in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four

Did Orwell regard truth as a political virtue? Yes, and the case Orwell makes for truth is a subtle one. Truth, he suggests, can never be adequately theorized - hence the different and rival descriptions of truth provided in Nineteen Eighty-Four are either empty or mistaken. For Orwell, truth will always elude our theories, but it must serve as the ground and even the goal of our freedom nonetheless.

RAF revivalism in German fiction of the 2000s

The last decade has seen a resurgence of interest among German novelists in the political violence associated with the Baader-Meinhof Group or RAF in the 1970s. Much of this has been from writers who were young adults during the student movement and its aftermath. A trio of writers born between 1956 and 1973, Ulrich Peltzer in Teil der Lösung (2007, Part of the Solution), Thomas Weiss in Tod eines Trüffelschweines (2007, Death of a Truffle Pig), and Thilo Bock, Die geladene Knarre von Andreas Baader (2009, The Loaded Shooter of Andreas Baader), depict, in very different ways, politically motivated violence or planned violence in the present. Each time the cause is globalized capitalism and each time links are made with the 1970s. There the similarities between them end. In Peltzer’s highly accomplished novel, whose plot echoes Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four , what the ‘solution’ might be is left open. Weiss, in contrast, appears to justify the murder of an American investor, who furthermore may be Jewish, whose company’s purchase of a formerly German firm will result in profit for him and job losses for the Germans. Bock, on the other hand, shows terrorism to be a dark fantasy, for which his narrator pays with his life.

The Modern Novel From A Sociological Perspective: A Re- Reading Of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four And William Golding’s "Lord Of The Flies"

In this paper, an effort is made to read two paradigmatic modern English novels with the framework of sociological theory. This is with a view to deconstructing the erroneous claim that the modern novel and sociological theory are strange bedfellows. Thus, two canonical modern novels, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four and William Golding’s Lord of the Flies, are used as textual exemplifications. Both texts are subjected to sociological scrutiny by isolating the nexus between the respective stories and the modern world that they depict. In the main, it is critically argued that the two novels reflect and refract the mood and vices of the modern world. It is also established that the selected novels are not mere socio-political comments; rather, they imaginatively chronicle the socio-political impasse in the modern world and the impact of industrialization on the traditional way of life. The novels also depict the unfortunate negative effects of the growth of commercialization in the modern world. It is concluded that the two novelists have looked at the ugly face of much of the modern world, without flinching but with frankness and satirical underpinnings.Key words: The modern novel, George Orwell, William Golding, Industrialization, Modern world

Orwellian Language and the Politics of Tribal Termination (1953–1960)

From 1953 to 1960, the federal government terminated sovereign recognition for 109 American Indian nations. Termination was a haphazard policy of assimilation that had disastrous consequences for Indian land and culture. Nonetheless, termination cloaked latent motivations for Indian land within individual rights rhetoric that was at odds with Indian sovereignty. Termination highlights the rhetorical features of social control under capitalism portrayed in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), in which opposing principles are fused and inverted. This essay critiques termination's Orwellian language to show how ideographs of social liberation are refashioned by the state to subvert Indian sovereignty and popular dissent.

<i>Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative</i> (review)

Reviewed by: Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative Jorge Bastos da Silva Miguel López-Lozano . Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares: Globalization in Recent Mexican and Chicano Narrative. Purdue Studies in Romance Literatures, Vol. 42. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press, 2008. ix + 294 pp. Paperback, ISBN: 978-1-55753-484-2. Miguel López-Lozano's Utopian Dreams, Apocalyptic Nightmares sheds light on a hitherto relatively unknown area within the territory of the utopian imagination. It is a study of the contributions of four Mexican/U.S. Chicano authors of narrative fiction to the ecocritical current of dystopian writing, which "addresses the effects of industrialization on the environment, proposing alternative worlds in which humankind lives in harmony with nature" (26). It focuses on works published in the last two decades of the twentieth century that for the most part amount to imaginative representations of Mexico City: Carlos Fuentes's Cristóbal Nonato (1987); Alejandro Morales's The Rag Doll Plagues (1992); Carmen Boullosa's Cielos de la Tierra (1997); and two novels by Homero Aridjis, La Leyenda de los Soles (1993) and its sequel, ¿En quién Piensas cuando Haces el Amor? (1996). López-Lozano postulates a genre for these works by suggestively comparing them (albeit in passing) with Zamyatin's We, Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, and [End Page 360] Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451. The point is more argumentative than analytic: it is not so much that there are specific textual correspondences to be detected as that those earlier works can function as a background by way of (apposite) historical analogy. López-Lozano's main interest lies in "cautionary tales of ecoapocalypses" and "the excavation of the history of exclusion" (5—the notion that history is indeed rewriting being at the core of his project). This he proceeds to do by providing a context that allows him to interpret his canon of works within the larger dynamics of South American social and political history. The introduction very much focuses on what may be described as the utopian invention of the Americas, taking two dates as symbolic: 1492, the arrival of Columbus, and 1992, the signing of the North American Free Trade Agreement. Going back to the colonial period, López-Lozano examines the utopian projections that were made to bear upon the New World as the earthly paradise, briefly considering how "the discovery of the Americas . . . provided Europe with a locus upon which to project its own preconceived myths and desires" (7). After independence, he points out, "Latin American elites began to conceptualize modernization as a new kind of utopia, one that encapsulates the desire to achieve the levels of productivity, comfort, and consumption associated with the nations and economies of the First World" (5-6). Both conceptualizations of South American identity are perceived to entail the establishment of a sense of domination over the peoples, the territories, and the cultures of the Americas, and both are challenged by the authors López-Lozano has chosen to study as they explore the potential of dystopian science fiction to question prevailing assumptions. Specifically, their work is seen to reflect the obvious ambivalence—in a country that was left behind in the process of modernization—between a striving for progress and the cultural and psychological dangers of life in industrialized society. López-Lozano describes the process of Mexico's belated industrialization, which took place only decisively after World War II, and traces the story of industrialized capitalism through several political and economic crises, seeing modernization itself as the utopia par excellence of Mexican elites (see 26-40). In such conditions, López-Lozano submits, art emerges "as a viable form of resistance to the rules of the market, since local artists can create awareness of social issues and problems, thereby forming a critical voice that questions the illusory logic of unlimited progress that supporters [End Page 361] of neoliberalism propose" (40). Does this mean, one wonders, that all relevant works stand in direct opposition to the establishment as a whole, or do they connect to significant social or ideological movements that remain within the accepted rules of the states...

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — A retrospective and prospective twenty-five years later

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four — A retrospective and prospective twenty-five years later