Search results for "dystopia"
showing 10 items of 39 documents
Me, My Bot and His Other (Robot) Woman? Keeping Your Robot Satisfied in the Age of Artificial Emotion
2018
With a backdrop of action and science fiction movie horrors of the dystopian relationship between humans and robots, surprisingly to date-with the exception of ethical discussions-the relationship aspect of humans and sex robots has seemed relatively unproblematic. The attraction to sex robots perhaps is the promise of unproblematic affectionate and sexual interactions, without the need to consider the other&rsquo
Hope and equilibrium in the dystopian world of The Hunger Games
2021
This paper provides evidence of the fruitfulness of combining analytical categories from Cognitive Linguistics and Critical Discourse Analysis for the analysis of complex literary characterizations. It does so through a detailed study of the “tributes”, i.e. the randomly selected children who have to fight to death in a nationally televised show, in The Hunger Games. The study proves the effectiveness of such categories to provide an analytically accurate picture of the dystopian world depicted in the novel, which is revealed to include a paradoxical element of hope. The type of dehumanization that characterizes the dystopian society of Panem is portrayed through an internally consistent se…
Rewinding Frankenstein and the body-machine: organ transplantation in the dystopian young adult fiction seriesUnwind
2016
While the separation of body and mind (and the entailing metaphor of the body as a machine) has been a cornerstone of Western medicine for a long time, reactions to organ transplantation among others challenge this clear-cut dichotomy. The limits of the machine-body have been negotiated in science fiction, most canonically in Mary Shelley9s Frankenstein (1818). Since then, Frankenstein9s monster itself has become a motif that permeates both medical and fictional discourses. Neal Shusterman9s contemporary dystology for young adults, Unwind , draws on traditional concepts of the machine-body and the Frankenstein myth. This article follows one of the young protagonists in the series, who is en…
Polar Bear in 'Fortitude'. Affective Aesthetics and Politics of Climate Change
2021
In the first season of the television Eco Noir crime series “Fortitude” (2015) the polar bear appears as a sticky object that embodies an ambiguous affective charge as an icon of global warming. This article discusses the ways in which the polar bear evokes viewer affect in the series through two discourses. The first one relates to violence, essentially present in crime narratives, and how the human and nonhuman animal are positioned in relation to global warming, violence and each other. It raises questions of place and belonging in a local and global context and examines how the polar bear is constructed in terms of stranger danger and victimization in relation to human animals and the t…
Climate Fiction and its Narratives
2021
In the late 20th and early 21st centuries, the narratives about a possible environmental collapse and its consequences have multiplied. This is due to a growing awareness about issues such as climate change or the energy crisis. The so-called ‘climate science fiction’ or cli-fi has reflected these concerns in highly successful films, like the two analysed here: The Day After Tomorrow (2004) and The Day the Earth Stood Still (2008), a remake of the 1951 classic. In this paper, I approach both films through an analysis of their plot and narrative structure, focusing mainly on the evolution of their main characters and storylines. I argue that these mainstream productions avoid any examination…
Under Our Eye: Margaret Atwood's Variation on the Panopticon in "The Heart Goes Last"
2020
In her dystopian dark comedy The Heart Goes Last (2015), Margaret Atwood openly refers to Jeremy Bentham’s concept of the Panopticon. The future world depicted in her novel is filled with violence and deprived of both human bonds and hope. Hence, being contained, monitored and — after Foucault — disciplined and punished appears to be the characters’ last resort. Surveillance tempts both sexes as it is politically correct and universal, and it does not privilege one group of people over the other. The article discusses the dystopian vision of the near future as created by Atwood in her 2015 novel, with direct references to the conception of the Panopticon, both in its original meaning propos…
Nueve tesis introductorias sobre la distopía
2021
Nine introductory theses about dystopia
 
 Resumen: Este artículo proporciona una introducción actualizada a la distopía y una exégesis del apogeo ilimitado que esta vive. Y lo hace planteando nueve tesis. El supuesto de partida es que el término “distopía” no designa solamente una forma literaria. Sus premisas, metodologías y actitudes elementales son visibles en el pensamiento social contemporáneo y otras muchas expresiones culturales. En las dos primeras tesis diferencio el género distópico de otros géneros afines y sondeo las coincidencias temáticas que atesoran sus expresiones literarias y filosóficas. A lo largo de las tres tesis posteriores, señalo las causas sociales e ide…
Mediterranean Borders and Diaspora
2020
“And So Europe Dehumanized Itself”, the expression used by Toni Morrison regarding slavery, seems to have returned dramatically to current affairs. We seem to have plunged into a dystopian present in which the European Union, instead of governing the disruptive global migrations through appropriate policies, has expressed such nervousness – both at the popular and institutional levels – to give rise, in an unstoppable crescendo, to practices inspired by xenophobia and racism. It has led to the inhuman treatment of migrants (I refer both to shipwrecks at sea, a real massacre and to the torture and torture reserved for them in Libya with the complicity of European governments) and finally to …
The Double-Deviant Identity of the Mass-Foreigner and the Lack of Authority of the Crimmigrationist State
2019
Crimmigration has its breeding ground in dystopian and securitarian narratives. The anti-hero of these narratives is the mass-foreigner, a stereotyped version of the foreigner usually depicted, alternatively or cumulatively, as an enemy or as a parasite of host societies. But not only does crimmigration presuppose such narratives (and the deviant identity of the mass-foreigner, which is connected with them) as a source of legitimation, it also fuels these same narratives by providing them with an official sanction: by merging criminalization and irregularization on a legal level, it heavily contributes to making the social identity of mass-foreigners into a doubly deviant one. The overarchi…
The Rhetoric of Healthcare Inequality in Capitalist Classed Societies: Blomkamp’s and Romanek’s Dystopian Visions
2018
The future of democratic societies has been widely debated among futurologists, including the possible ways medicine could advance, changing the lives of individuals and communities. Yet, what seems a reasonable question to ask is – how the unequal access to healthcare might perpetuate social and economic divisions and turn democracy into tyranny. This paper advances a rhetorical analysis of the reciprocal relations between healthcare and the classed capitalist system as portrayed in two dystopian pictures: Mark Romanek’s Never Let Me Go (2010) and Neill Blomkamp’s Elysium (2013). The realities depicted in these movies, as well as their narratives, vary considerably; however, they both pres…