![]() Dystopias, on the other hand, depict a society recognizably worse than another one that is used as a point of reference, and describe a situation that can, and often does, deteriorate even further as the plot unfolds.Ī useful distinction is the one between anti-utopia, which aims to criticize utopianism or a particular utopian position and is therefore the true inheritor of the tradition of satire mentioned above, and dystopia, which describes a worse social arrangement than the one we currently live in. Because they are already as good as can be, most utopias are static, the apex of a given civilization. In other words, utopias function by contrasting the status-quo with a social arrangement that is perceived to be more perfect. Rather, dystopias are often utopias gone wrong or utopias that work only for a very limited segment of the population ( GORDIN TILLEY PRAKASH, 2010, p. Michael Gordin, Helen Tilley and Gyan Prakash note that dystopia is not simply the opposite of utopia, i.e., an imagined society, which is completely unplanned or planned to be deliberately awful. This proximity between the two notions has led scholars to define dystopia as utopia’s “shadow” ( KUMAR, 2013, p. Many canonical utopias of the past have features that most modern readers would clearly identify as dystopian: the strict social control in Thomas More’s Utopia the incipient eugenics of Tommaso Campanella’s City of the Sun, among countless other examples. And, as Gregory Claeys points out, someone’s utopia might well be someone else’s dystopia ( CLAEYS, 2017, p. To begin with, utopia shares the same goal as dystopia, namely, that of criticizing the negative features of a certain society by comparing it to another, fictional one. ![]() ![]() Are dystopias primarily cautionary and reactive, telling us what not to do, while utopias are forwardlooking, showing us the way onward? The separation between the two genres is not so clear-cut. 19), the difference between the two former concepts is not easy to pinpoint. If both utopia and dystopia can easily be distinguished from their literary cousin, science fiction, for their focus on social and political critique ( BOOKER, 1994, p. The term “dystopia” itself appears to have been coined in the mid-eighteenth century, but was not widely used until the nineteen hundreds ( SARGENT, 2013, p. 58ss.), the dystopian literary genre began as satire of utopian aspirations, and therefore is very much entwined with the flourishing of utopian thought and writings from the seventeenth century onwards. With more recent antecedents in disaster writings and discourses on monstrosity ( CLAEYS, 2017, p. With its roots in Greco-Roman accounts of the human fall from a Golden to an Iron Age in authors such as Hesiod and Ovid, and in narratives of the expulsion from Paradise, of the Apocalypse and of Hell in the Judeo-Christian tradition, dystopias also draw on imagery associated to historical phenomena such as torture, slavery, the militarization of societies, the ostracism of diseased populations, prisons and death camps ( CLAEYS, 2017, p. True, this purportedly dystopian attitude hinges upon the definition of the term, a heavily contested territory that has given rise to a copious literature. 17), the past one hundred years or so have witnessed the rise of dystopianism as the predominant zeitgeist. Apart from a brief resurgence in utopian writings in the 1960s and 70s, fuelled by the counter-culture movements and political activism of those decades ( MOYLAN, 2000, p. Much has been written about the shift from utopia to dystopia in the twentieth century, a trend that seems to have deepened in the first decades of the new millennium. Keywords: Utopia, Dystopia, Anthropocene. The final section of the chapter turns to Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam trilogy as a fictional example that plays out the prospect of a world in which humans have all but become extinct. I discuss the shift from utopia to dystopia (and back) as a result of regarding humans as a force that does more harm than good, and I consider the possibility of human extinction within the framework of dystopian and utopian visions. ![]() Rather than commenting on humanity’s inability to build a better society, current dystopianism betrays the view that the human species as such is an impediment to harmonious life on Earth. In this paper, I argue that the predominantly dystopian outlook of the past century or so marked a move away from former views on human progress. Fuente: Grant from the Portuguese Foundation for Science and Technology (FCT)Ī product of Modernity, utopian and dystopian thought has always hinged upon an assessment as to whether humanity would be able to fulfil the promise of socio-economic, political and techno-scientific progress. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |