Dystopian Reality Research Articles

READING THE BOOK OF REVELATION THROUGH THE LENS OF DYSTOPIA

Christianity is one of the most influential religions in the world and there are numerous sacred texts that are closely associated with it, particularly the Holy Bible. The Book of Revelation, which is a significant part of the bible, is well regarded as one of the essential texts in Christianity that has been studied extensively from theological and historical standpoints over the years. The book is attributed to Apostle John and contains discussions related to the apocalypse and a new beginning. Meanwhile, dystopia is a literary concept that focusses on harrowing societies with a bleak and depressing atmosphere. Served as the direct oppositional term for Utopia, dystopian themes revolve closely around the notions of oppression, destruction, and pandemonium. This study aims to investigate the relationship between the two by examining various dystopian themes and motives including environmental destruction, corruption of moral values, and governmental control. Besides, this study also probes into the dualistic nature of God and his angels through their portrayal of the necessary evil in order to warn people of the danger of a possible dystopian reality. By examining the text through the lens of Dystopia, it intensifies the impact of the warnings, compelling people to pay attention to the possibility of a bleak dystopian future filled with pain and suffering. This perpetuates the relevance of the book of Revelation with modern readers, as dystopia is a concept closely studied at present. Finally, this study also expands the discourse related to dystopia and the book of Revelation by highlighting that the former can be read as a text of secular social commentary rather than merely a religious text referred to for spiritual guidance and prophecies.

Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Realities: Contrasting Visions in 21st Century Literature

Utopian Dreams and Dystopian Realities: Contrasting Visions in 21st Century Literature

No Blank Slates

In this roundtable discussion, the interlocutors interrogate the settler utopian logics underlying apparently liberatory movements within a North American context—such as radical queer and trans movements—to examine how these identities and politics tell narratives of liberation that reinscribe the aims of the settler colonial project under new names. Visions of radical utopias as yet to be realized (or, as yet to be colonized) discount the ongoing presence of Indigenous alternatives to the current settler colonial dystopian reality, and instead preserve a view of geographic and social space as blank and ready to be “improved” with a “new” model. In this discussion, the interlocuters argue against linear narratives of societal and environmental collapse that promise to bring about a future idealized world and instead propose ways for radical politics, particularly those espoused by non-Indigenous people, to disavow settler colonial mindsets.

Motherhood – The Quiet Rebellion of Utopia in Megan Hunter’s The End We Start From

The blurring of the boundaries between utopia and dystopia and the weaving of utopian hopes and possibilities into narratives seen as belonging to the genre of the dystopian novel has been a characteristic of the latter for a long time. Overviews of developments in dystopian literature in the twentieth and the twenty-first century have noted instances of this phenomenon ranging from works in which pockets of resistance to dystopian worlds carry with them hopes for a utopian future to ones in which utopian hope is read in the faces of a handful of survivors who have heroically emerged from among the ruins of a world struck by ecological disaster. The present article offers a reading of Megan Hunter’s debut novel The End We Start From as a daring act of not just hopefully pointing toward but of actually growing a utopian world in the midst of an environmental catastrophe, of creating a utopian Noah arc that successfully navigates the dystopian world of apocalyptic deluge and chaos. The analysis will map the ways in which the account of the experience of motherhood pushes that of the catastrophe and its impact on the world to the periphery of the narrative. The emotional experience of motherhood thus textually foregrounded in the novel is seen as enacting a quiet rebellion against dystopia as it expands into a space in which a Levinasian notion of utopia contained within the care for the Other is fleshed out, while dystopian reality is reduced to distant, random, fragmented echoes.

A Poetic and Dystopian Quadrilateral: Mayakovsky and Frank O'Hara, Essenin and Jim Harrison

The Soviet Union, the perfect example of a dystopia, presented itself as a paradise for the proletariat. The United States, on the other hand, was, at the same time, a land of technical progress and capitalist hell from the Communist point of view. Separated by the Atlantic Ocean, these two best enemies dreamed of and confronted each other. But this is above all a tragic quadrilateral where Mayakovsky and O'Hara, Essenin and Harrison meet. For their poetic utopia will collide with dystopian reality.

Literary Criticism Based on the Theory of Information Dissemination-The Spiritual Recasting of Cast Swords in Moonlight Chopping

Abstract By reading and analyzing Moonlight Chopping and Cast Swords meticulously, this study reveals the polysemous textual world constituted by these two works, covering the mockery of dystopian realities, the inheritance of the spirit of vengeance, as well as the profound reverence for the essence of life. Web crawler technology is employed to obtain the textual content of Moonlight Chopping and Cast Swords, and the data is pre-processed. A corpus is constructed using a lexical algorithm. The in-depth extraction of thematic linguistic features of the two works is realized by combining Gibbs sampling and EM algorithm to accurately estimate the parameters of the LDA topic model. It is found that Moonlight Chopping and Cast Swords show significant correlation on the story and ideological level, but apparent differences in story focus, expression form and aesthetic style. Specifically, the average sentence length of Moonlight Chopping is only 1.18 units longer than Cast Swords. At the same time, its STTR value is only about 4.3% higher than Cast Swords, indicating that Moonlight Chopping has successfully achieved subtle thematic differences while maintaining the vengeful narrative style of Cast Swords, demonstrating a profound transformation of traditional culture and historical continuity.

Un’ibrida progenie semi-mostruoso-eroica. La non-rigenerazione e la metamorfosi del male nel "Beowulf" di Robert Zemeckis

Among the rewritings of the Old English epic of Beowulf, Ze-meckis’ homonymous film departs from the poem in its rein-terpretation of the themes of otherness and parenthood. The director and screenwriters come up with the lethal hybridi-sation between two incompatible lineages: monsters are the result of the carnal union between Grendel’s mother and a hero. From the adulterous encounter with Hrothgar was born Grendel and from that with Beowulf the dragon was con-ceived. In returning the Old English epos to a contemporary audience, the film presents a dystopian reality in which lust-ful parents lost their heroism by succumbing to the seduction of evil conveyed by Grendel’s Mother. From that fatal union shape-shifting creatures are born and raised in a thirst for re-venge against their parent who disowned them. For Zemeck-is, it is an inevitable catastrophic cycle that will ever endure in non-regeneration.

Art of Dystopia: Why Edward Hopper Paintings Haunt the Present Moment

ABSTRACT The concept of “boring dystopia,” a term coined by Mark Fisher, describes the banal and mildly coercive signs that are prevalent in contemporary neoliberal society. It is characterized by a pervasive sense of boredom, banality, and total alienation, which arises from the depletion of social connections caused by free-market fundamentalism and consumer culture. For the author, Edward Hopper’s paintings embody this sense of dystopia, as they depict deserted cityscapes and isolated figures, creating a vision of a society where human connection and interaction have broken down. The COVID-19 pandemic response has further highlighted the erosion of empathy and compassion under neoliberal capitalism, making Fisher’s call for collective action and the creation of new forms of community and solidarity even more urgent. Edward Hopper’s haunting art reminds us that we are already living in a dystopia, and that it is crucial to confront this dystopian reality and imagine new possibilities for the future.

On the request for an advisory opinion on climate change under UNCLOS before the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea

Abstract Sinking Islands form part of the dystopian reality faced by a world increasingly affected by climate breakdown today. As reported, around the world, ‘many islands are slowly but surely being submerged’. This article enquires into the potential role that the International Tribunal for the Law of the Sea (ITLOS) may have, in its advisory capacity, in tackling the effects of climate change. In particular, this article deals with two broad issues: (i) it identifies the potential benefits and risks of an ITLOS Advisory Opinion on the issue of climate change under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS) and (ii) it examines the questions that COSIS recently posed to the tribunal, a number of sub-questions and relevant provisions under UNCLOS are further identified, and whether the Commission on Small Island States on Climate Change and International Law has complied with the procedural rules of ITLOS to trigger its advisory functions.

Womanimality and Gender Polarity in Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments

This article focuses on the Western philosophical traditions responsible for objectifying women and animals. It looks at how Margaret Atwood has engaged with these issues in The Testaments, which is the sequel of The Handmaid’s Tale. The purpose of this study is to use a deconstructive approach to analyse sexual differences through animal differences. Animals and women have been standing at the periphery since the start of western civilisation. Animal and gender metaphors play a significant role in creating these differences. In Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, handmaids have a problematic relationship with this androcentric classification of women as animals. The reason behind this animal objectification is to make them realise their inferiority as women. The marked differences have utopian and dystopian characteristics; both parallel each other. Compared to these bifurcated images of life, Atwood imagines a post-utopian and dystopian reality that she names utopia. It connotes an idea of gift, love and democracy; there is no separation based on animal and sexual differences. The importance of language in the bifurcation of sexuality cannot be ignored, significantly when the name of handmaids is redefined according to the patriarchal perspective. The politics of naming is connected with the myth of creation; commanders and aunts consider naming women a patriarchal prerogative. Significantly, these sexual differences discourage multiplicity and promote singularity in the dystopian state of Gilead.

Emerging from the global syndemic crucible: Finding belonging in a post corona future

The covid-19 global syndemic has upended societies worldwide and concomitantly united the world in a shared experience of lockdowns, social distancing, and economic upheaval. In the face of great uncertainty, dystopian realities, and binding government edicts, people's everyday lives, sense of agency, actions, and interactions changed forcibly. Importantly, it has disrupted many practices and routines essential for (re)constituting a sense of belonging, an important element of personhood and individual wellbeing. Using the “Letters from the Future” method, we investigate how individuals imagine and present themselves in the future to navigate this social change. We ask “How do letter writers construct a sense of belonging in a future of their own imagining?” To answer this question, we combine discourse- and text analysis with network analysis to examine 47 letters that Greek participants wrote during the Spring 2020 lockdown. We explore how individuals present and introduce their future self, what topos this self inhabits and what expressions, values, and practices they perform and negotiate as they reflect on and navigate their relational worlds. By and large, Greek letter writers recognize that inequities and injustices paved the way for the syndemic and express a pressing need for societal transformation.

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

Utopian Ruins: A Memorial Museum of the Mao Era

A Study on National Identity in Dystopian Society of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games Trilogy

This article tries to explore the theory of nationalism and its significance in dystopian fiction through the study of Suzanne Collins' The Hunger Games trilogy. It investigates how dystopian elements are linked to nationalism, as well as how frequently dystopian narratives blow warnings against nationalistic sentiment. In Collins' speculative narrative, the article examines the ambiguity of the belief that a liberalized economy, globalized media, and communication will lead to a perfect society in the future. Panem is a fine example of a dystopian nationalist country that deprives people of their rights and resources while being dominated by rulers that are only interested in money and power. The examination of The Hunger Games trilogy aims to highlight that national identity, as it is imposed on people, pushes the entire society into a dystopian reality.

Urban Apocalypse, Global Precarity, and Uncanny Liminality in Colson Whitehead’s Zone One and Ling Ma’s Severance

ABSTRACT This paper will examine the representation of zombie apocalypse in Zone One (2011) by Colson Whitehead and Severance (2018) by Ling Ma. Whitehead and Ma both situate their narratives in New York City, a contested setting oscillating between utopian possibilities of progress and dystopian realities of alienation. The novels reveal the zombifying impact of capitalism that permeates local and global networks of exploitation, and perpetuates what Judith Butler identifies as precariousness and precarity of life. The representation of New York as a metonymic urban space, which displays the arrested development of global capitalism through a zombie apocalypse, renders Zone One and Severance critically relevant today. Whitehead and Ma articulate the catastrophic consequences of uneven development as well as the reader’s ontological proximity to the liminal category of zombies. I argue that the authors’ narrative choice of total collapse over survival in and of New York, albeit the discursive privilege of urban growth, is a powerful gesture of “creative destruction” toward unsettling, if not breaking, the detrimental cycles of capitalist repetition. Whitehead and Ma reflect the anxiety of the contemporary moment by subverting problematic assumptions about cityscapes and civilization with their innovative combination of urban fiction, zombie tropes, and apocalyptic discourse.

Gender Stereotypes as a Manifestation of Culture in the Original and Translation (Based on the Dystopian Novel “The Testaments” by M. Atwood)

The article focuses on the issue of gender stereotypes whose presence in a literary text constitutes a powerful factor in the translator’s activity and enables the target reader to learn more about the source culture as well as about their own. While analyzing the original, the translator must look into each literary image as the characters’ personality traits, their actions and their speech reveal the gender stereotypes of the society they belong to. The research was based on a dystopian novel by M. Atwood, “The Testaments”. The study was targeted at the image of one of the protagonists on whose behalf the story is being told – Agnes. The girl becomes a vivid embodiment of the distorted worldview imposed by Gilead. In Gilead, women are prohibited to have any feelings except for those that are regarded socially acceptable. She considers a woman’s body a trap, a source of danger, while relationships between a man and a woman provoke nothing but fear and disgust. The image of Agnes is constructed on the basis of a wide range of artistic devices rather masterfully recreated by the translator. However, depicting the dystopian reality which is aimed at warning against expansion of gender discrimination, the author recurs to informal, sometimes even vulgar language means aimed at underlining misrepresentation of the way Agnes perceived her own femininity and marriage. Nevertheless, in the Ukrainian culture where it is not so natural to openly speak about gender-related problems, where a woman’s speech cannot be rude or inappropriate, the translator, a woman herself, feels the need to euphemize such elements replacing them with more stylistically neutral ones or even completely omitting them. Thus, the degree of gender awareness, stereotypical views of what is acceptable or unacceptable in a woman’s speech determines perception of a literary text intended to draw increased attention to gender problems within a different cultural environment

The Omnipresent and The Omnipotent – Surveillance and Power

The objective of this paper is to trace the derivation of power through imperious surveillance upon the citizens of Panem and the consequent denial of citizen rights. The paper also analyses the nature of people’s fear of being watched and how the overbearing surveillance system in action can violate individual privacy. The act of being continuously watched or monitored and the knowledge of being under the control of power, a 'watchful eye', can create a huge impact upon the people under surveillance. In the modern world, people are being watched continuously and closely and are tracked through economic activities and electronic media. The paper aims to prove that surveillance in any form is a constraining force limiting people from being themselves. The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins portray a dystopian post-apocalyptic land of Panem where the Capitol uses surveillance and the people’s fear of being watched as tools to assert their power over the citizens. After years of being watched and controlled, the people of Panem have forgotten basic citizen birthrights and the beauty of freedom in their lives. These people lose their real identity in this cage where they are devoid of any individual preferences. If the citizens are not completely aware of the value of privacy which is an inherent human right and much required for individual growth and development, the possibilities of losing the contemporary world to such a dystopian reality are high.

Kamaugawar and the creation of a dystopian reality: A study in hassan Blasim's "Crossword" and Ambrose Bierce's "Chi

The study shows how war can create a dystopian reality worse than the reality depicted in the dystopian stories. War creates a circular or enclosed world that has no exit where people cannot see the end of the tunnel. The study discusses two short stories, one is for the Iraqi writer Hassan Blasim entitled "Crosswords" and the other for the American writer Ambrose Bierce entitled "Chickamauga". These two short stories fit one of the categories of dystopian fiction where the society witnesses the effects of war and civilians and soldiers become the victims. Though the two stories do not adhere to the futuristic perspective of dystopian fiction, they could express the thought of their writers' that what is going on in the society though it is real but it is at the same time, dystopian.
 Key Words: Dystopia, War, Defamiliarization, Hassan Blasim, Ambrose Bierce.

Schooling at the Doorstep of Dystopia: On Educating for Unsustainable Futures

The lifespans of North American public school students are on course to intersect with emerging dystopian realities of human pain and suffering brought about by climate change and its effects. Are schools well-disposed to engage students earnestly about the worlds that scientific consensus advises us they will encounter? This essay of critique suggests that they are not. It suggests that a set of interrelated tendencies, fundamental to the philosophy and functioning of schools, precludes their doing so. It names and discusses these tendencies as the problem of overwhelming school allegiances to a self-help ethos of vacant positivity, the structural infantilization of young people as a function of school power relations, and the allegiance to short term economic imperatives and individualism over environmental sustainability and communitarianism in determinations of the meanings and purposes of education. The essay concludes that on the current course, schools are miseducating students and encouraging them on a path toward unsustainable futures.

Ludus, World Building, and the Prescience of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One

Ludus, World Building, and the Prescience of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One Tom Ue (bio) The COVID-19 pandemic has transformed the face of education. Joyce Lau, in Times Higher Education, is not alone in wondering whether we are currently experiencing a version of the future of postsecondary education.1 As a report reprinted in University Affairs indicates, some 1.6 billion students worldwide migrated to virtual learning in March 2020, and education, as we know it, is expected to change forevermore: the "return" to normalcy will almost certainly witness increases in "blended learning," in the "use of open educational resources," and in the "use of technology for components of learning."2 In this climate, Ernest Cline's New York Times bestseller Ready Player One (2011) is right at home. Set in 2045, the novel sees many characters pivoting from their dystopian reality to the Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation (OASIS), what the central protagonist Wade Watts, in the very first page, characterizes as "a massively multiplayer online game that had gradually evolved into the globally networked virtual reality most of humanity now used on a daily basis."3 My own journey into Cline's worlds began shortly after the release of Steven Spielberg's feature film adaptation (2018). I read the novel in preparation for an upper-year undergraduate seminar, on dystopian fiction, that I was to teach at the University of Toronto Scarborough. Through close reading of texts by Jonathan Swift, H. G. Wells, Yann Martel, and others, this course investigates and responds to the resurgence of the genre's popularity in our own times and contextualizes this movement in relation to a number of historical, theoretical, and critical frameworks. My interest in Ready Player One arises out of its hospitality to so many different kinds of interpretations, from Marxist to ecocritical readings, and its insights into critical issues ranging from counterfactual narratives to participatory culture. The novel can productively be read for its contribution to the histories of children and young adult, genre, and science fiction. Since that course, Cline has been at the centre of my teaching and research. I revisited Ready Player One in my first-year classes on reading popular culture (2018–19), writing for the arts (2020), and reading and writing about the economy (2021) at Dalhousie University, NSCAD [End Page 149] University, and Cape Breton University respectively. I have written and co-written, with my brilliant former student James Munday, a number of essays on both the book and the film; and we are presently at work on The Worlds of Ernest Cline's Ready Player One, the first book-length study of Cline. I have explored the insights that Spielberg's film offers for life after the pandemic.4 My aims here are to examine Cline's portrayal of Ludus and, in so doing, to suggest some ways in which he envisions our negotiations with virtual realties. By drawing key support from Cline's descriptions of this planet of schools, I argue for the novel's resonance in this historical moment as we capitalize on the affordances and grapple with the challenges of virtual learning. Wade introduces us to the OASIS by way of his school.5 Apparently "the most boring planet in the entire OASIS," Ludus "had been designed as a place of learning," and so it lacks "a single quest portal or gaming zone anywhere on its surface."6 Wade attends OASIS Public School (OPS) #1873, seemingly a close approximation of a real thing. Short of stopping to examine one's surroundings, one cannot discern much that is out of place: My virtual surroundings looked almost (but not quite) real. Everything inside the OASIS was beautifully rendered in three dimensions. Unless you pulled focus and stopped to examine your surroundings more closely, it was easy to forget that everything you were seeing was computer-generated. And that was with my crappy school-issued OASIS console.7 When Wade returns to the OASIS, he finds his avatar Parzival right where he left him the night before, "in front of my locker on the second floor of my high school": "I touched my locker door and it popped open...

Data protection in Hong Kong

How does a law turn society on its head? How does technology keep a movement alive? Through the lens of her home, Hong Kong, the author discusses legal loopholes in a new national security law that might bring about a dystopian reality, and how tomorrow's secure and private tech can fight back.