Dystopian Spaces Research Articles

РОМАН ДЖ. ОРУЭЛЛА «1984»: АУДИАЛЬНОЕ НАПОЛНЕНИЕ ПРОСТРАНСТВА И СЕМАНТИКА КОЛОКОЛЬНОГО ЗВОНА

The article deals with the audial content of the literary space of G. Orwell’s novel “1984”, in which it is the sound patterns that determine the audial-dynamic structure of the entire text. The analysis reveals the ontological significance of the audial code in the novel. The semantization of central themes by audial images is established. The participation of sound patterns in the formation of the opposition “dystopian space - alternative space” is described. The author emphasizes the semantic audial constants of the text and studies the semantics of the song “Under the Spreading Chestnut Tree” and the poem about the bells. It is found out that the sound pattern of the bell ringing, represented both in the musical ekphrasis (song) and in the poem, is isomorphic to the content-semantic structure of the text.

‘You Need to Learn to See Yourself through the Fathers’ Eyes’: Feminism, Representation, and the Dystopian Space of Bitch Planet

‘You Need to Learn to See Yourself through the Fathers’ Eyes’: Feminism, Representation, and the Dystopian Space of <i>Bitch Planet</i>

A Bittersweet Recipe: Spaces of Utopia and Imagination in "Harry Potter" Meals

My purpose with this paper will be to analyze how food contributes for the creation of relationships between Harry Potter characters and how it helps readers to evaluate certain spaces and moments within the series itself. The existence of food helps to determine some of the most important interactions between characters of the saga and can be seen as part of the narrative device that makes the plot evolve (for example, the very first encounter of the main characters). In order to demonstrate this circumstance, I will be focusing on the imaginative properties of Harry Potter meals, particularly in the final book of the saga, and also how they can be used for the characterization of Utopian and Dystopian spaces in certain moments of the story. The moments before and during the reign of Voldemort, the series main antagonist, may not only be analyzed through contrasting adjectivation or positive and negative emotions, but also through the existence and quality of the food that is presented to the characters. Finally, what I wish to emphasize is that food is a strong psychological component that contributes not only for the happiness or bickering between characters, but it also assists the readers in assessing certain situations and in making their reading of the series a more appealing and delicious activity, confirming the words of George Bernard Shaw that “there is no sincerer love than the love of food.”

Spectacles of Dystopia: Lauren Beukes and the Geopolitics of Digital Space

Lauren Beukes’ latest novels—The Shining Girls (2013) and Broken Monsters (2014)—present forays into new generic and geopolitical spaces, shifting from the Joburg and Cape Town-based “allegorical apartheids” of the science-fictional texts Moxyland (2008) and Zoo City (2010) to supernatural crime novels set in dystopian American cities. This paper explores the productive tension between the global and the local in her body of work, framed within the concepts of “developing world” science fiction and the figure of the hybrid. I argue that the esthetics and generic conventions of “cyberpunk” often associated with Beukes animate a seemingly ubiquitous dystopian space. Her writing explores the dissemination of commercial icons, visual fads, and digital pop-objects around and within global bodies: networked, linked electronically, and sometimes physically in what I suggest comes to form the illusion of a digital, dystopian everywhere, relentlessly performing transcendence of locality.

Dystopian future visions in Afrikaans novels published after 1999: A relationship between past and future

Viljoen identifies an engagement with history and “dystopic views” as separate trends in recent Afrikaans literature. In investigating characteristics of recent Afrikaans dystopian futurist novels it becomes apparent that the past also plays an important role in the visions of the future that is created. The past is an important premise in dystopian literature in general. It can be linked to the protagonist’s search for identity and meaning in the dystopian space. This article explores the relationship between the past and future in Afrikaans dystopian futurist novels published after 1999. Specific reference is made to the following dystopian novels by established Afrikaans writers: Oemkontoe van die nasie (2001) by P. J. Haasbroek, Raka die roman (2005) by Koos Kombuis and Horrelpoot (2006) by Eben Venter. The self-published dystopian novels Die Nege kerse van Magriet (2006) by Barend P. J. Erasmus and Beslissing in die Karoo (2011) by Sebastiaan Biehl, which lie outside the mainstream of Afrikaans literature, are also discussed. These novels by Erasmus and Biehl are written from an extreme right-wing perspective and differ from the more mainstream novels in their portrayal of a future South Africa. In this paper I explore the role of references to South African history in the construction of the future in the Afrikaans dystopian novels published after 1999. I discuss how the Afrikaner characters use the past in their search for identity in a postcolonial and post-apartheid context.

Entropy and Loss: Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things

Abstract This paper aims at understanding the postmodern victim's struggle for survival in a post-apocalyptic, unnamed metropolis depicted in Auster's novel In the Country of Last Things. It is a story about the loss of a known, recognizable world and the struggle to stay alive in a dystopian space. On the city streets, Auster's characters experience loneliness, disconnection and personal disintegration; individual memory is of no consequence in a place where everything is constantly shifting. With his depiction of a city in ruin, Auster offers a critique of Western civilization: this country of last things is what remains of an affluent society. The ruins, the inhumanity, the gradual disappearance of language all create a sterile urban landscape which is the result of hundreds of years of civilization. The lives of these urban individuals do not belong to them anymore, but to ‘the city being’ which has given up on its dwellers, on its history and on its language; everything is left to chance and the outcome can be surprising: the beginning of nothingness or of utopia. This article will explore issues such as the (post)apocalyptic paradigm, the entropy of space in an urban novel, the labyrinth as ‘central metaphor of postmodern fiction’ and the loss of identity through the loss of words.

City, identity and dystopia: Writing Lagos in contemporary Nigerian novels1

This article aims to explore the poetics and politics of urban spaces and identities in an African metropolis by studying how novels such as Chris Abani's Graceland (2004), Sefi Atta's Everything Good Will Come (2005), Helon Habila's Waiting for an Angel (2002), and Okey Ndibe's Arrows of Rain (2000) map the geography of the city and portray its people and the myriad of ways they negotiate selves and identities in the spaces they inhabit. The article demonstrates how the novels of the city configure urban identities as woven not only through the rich cultural textualities that people live in but also through emerging subjectivities of crisis that configure responses to contemporary realities experienced as dystopian. Within these dystopian spaces, shaping identities becomes fundamentally political: the article traces how, across the range of the novels studied, disillusionment with received imaginings of postcolonial nationhood and identity engenders a mood of inertia and complacency, but also contains a potential for shaping re‐configurations of identity and spaces of critical response to the urban crisis.

Traveling Urban Utopias and the Birth of Suburbia

Abstract This article argues that the development of American-style suburbia is related to the European utopian longing for openness as expressed in William Morris's News from Nowhere. This European desire is here shown to be a reaction to an American utopian literary tradition, exemplified by Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward, a novel that celebrates dense urbanity. After having traveled back and forth across the Atlantic and reversed their respective visions of urbanity, utopian writings ultimately materialized as dystopian urban spaces.

Spaces of utopia and dystopia: landscaping the contemporary city

Some of the most recent literature within urban studies gives the distinct impression that the contemporary city now constitutes an intensely uneven patchwork of utopian and dystopian spaces that are, to all intents and purposes, physically proximate but institutionally estranged. For instance, so–called edge cities (Garreau, 1991) have been heralded as a new Eden for the information age. Meanwhile tenderly manicured urban villages, gated estates and fashionably gentrified inner–city enclaves are all being furiously marketed as idyllic landscapes to ensure a variety of lifestyle fantasies. Such lifestyles are offered additional expression beyond the home, as renaissance sites in many downtowns afford city stakeholders the pleasurable freedoms one might ordinarily associate with urban civic life. None–the–less, strict assurances are given about how these privatized domiciliary and commercialized ‘public’ spaces are suitably excluded from the real and imagined threats of another fiercely hostile, dystopian environment ‘out there’. This is captured in a number of (largely US) perspectives which warn of a ‘fortified’ or ‘revanchist’ urban landscape, characterized by mounting social and political unrest and pockmarked with marginal interstices: derelict industrial sites, concentrated hyperghettos, and peripheral shanty towns where the poor and the homeless are increasingly shunted. Our paper offers a review of some key debates in urban geography, planning and urban politics in order to examine this patchwork–quilt urbanism, In doing so, it seeks to uncover some of the key processes through which contemporary urban landscapes of utopia and dystopia come to exist in the way they do.

Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: sierra leone as ‘the white man's grave’

This paper explores the power of dystopian imaginations. It does so by examining the form and function of dystopias in colonial contexts, both in general and through one particularly salient and significant colonial dystopia, which was known widely in imperial England as ‘the white man's grave’. A detailed analysis of the form and function of dystopian accounts of Sierra Leone, with particular attention to Richard Burton's negative appraisal of the colony, illuminates a particular form of geographical colonial discourse, and clarifies some of the power relations more generally associated with dystopian representations and interventions.

Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: Sierra Leone as 'the white man's grave'

Dystopian space in colonial representations and interventions: Sierra Leone as 'the white man's grave'

The Pen Is Mightier than the Whore: Imperialism and Cultural Authority in Spenser and Swift

The view of the state of Ireland does not seem to change much in the century that intervenes between the documents bearing that same name produced by Edmund Spenser and Jonathan Swift. Spenser's A View of the Present State of Ireland (1596) and Swift's A Short View of the State of Ireland (1727) agree that the condition of Ireland is dismal in roughly the same ways: poverty, starvation, unemployment, ignorance.' Furthermore, both locate the roots of +these problems in English imperial rule. Here, however, the similarities would seem necessarily to end, because while Spenser faults English rule for not being strict enough to contain what are native Irish problems, Swift argues that its greedfuelled strictness has created these problems. Their respective positions on this issue reflect the larger political trends that mark each writer's career: Spenser is an apologist for English imperialism, and Swift is famous for exposing its social and political injustices.' In spite of this difference, I want to make a case for a fundamental similarity between the two indicated by their use of a common form and metaphor. Both men were part of the English imperial presence in Ireland, and they both channeled their frustration from that experience into the construction of Utopian and dystopian spaces in which whoredom becomes one of the operative metaphors for the empire/colony relationship. My argument will suggest that these parallels stem from the larger assumptions about the power of writers and writing that Spenser and Swift hold in common. In making it, I will look beyond what these writers are saying in order to concentrate on how they say it and more importantly, why they feel they have the authority to do so. Swift may indicate in his writings a greater awareness than Spenser demonstrates of the inequalities created by imperial rule. However, in the act of publishing his views, Swift actually amplifies and extends the argument implicit in Spenser's publication of his advice to Elizabeth in both the View and The Faerie Queene: the arts create the defining characteristics of a culture, including ultimately its political institutions. Although this statement reverses conventional wisdom, both then and now,