U/Dystopia —
So I’m writing my paper on the dystopian future presented in the Mike Judge (Office Space, Beavis and Butthead, King of the Hill) film Idiocracy. A lot of people probably haven’t heard of this film, since it was buried by Fox, its distributor, because Judge and Fox executives disagreed about a lot of the [...]
There has been some discussion about Baudrillard’s “Spirit . . .” as perhaps excusing terror; the idea has been floated that Baudrillard would have that America “asked for” 9/11. As I mentioned in class, I don’t think that reading is “wrong,” but that’s not how I’ve read him. He does say that it is [...]
The subject of “race” plays an interesting and largely unacknowledged role in the novel Children of Men. The term gets used without explanation or explication, but runs like a thread throughout the narrative, and I think plays an unexpectedly central role in the novel (which is overtly centralized in the film – but [...]
The Prisoner is stylistic precedent for later dystopian films: especially Brazil. The last episode of The Prisoner reminds me a lot of the end of Brazil. I am thinking of making this the final exam: watch the last episode of The Prisoner. Literary Interpretation? Interpret this: number six and the little butler guy machine gun [...]
Susan, in an older post, wrote that science fiction seems to lack strong females, much less strong femaleprotagonists. This post brought to the surface of my head my own observation that runs sort of counter to hers: science fiction male characters may be “blatantly male,” but in the dystopian fiction I’ve encountered, the male protagonists are in [...]
Here are some half-formed thoughts:
Desire and Dystopia in Dick’s “Wholesale” and LeGuin Lathe of Heaven
If Utopia is largely political, then politics is about competing narratives. Competing narratives are different instantiations or competing outgrowths of desire.
How is desire expressed as possible existence(s) in PKD, “Wholesale”:
The desire or will to live (the narrative about the aliens [...]
Episode one (”The Arrival”) and two (”Free for All”) of The Prisoner are now online at http://etv.pomona.edu.
Log in with your PO ID, and go to Video Library->Classes->ENG 67
I seem to be having decent results on Macintosh with Firefox. Windows users should try IE. You may asked to install a plugin before using it for the [...]
[I'm using this orthographic monstrosity "u/dystopia" as a lexeme that denotes the inseparability of utopias and dystopias]
It’s taken me an inordinately long time to formulate some thoughts on u/dystopia, freedom and collectivity, and post-modernity in Huxley. Why, I am not sure. Not because they are anything particularly profound, that much is certain.
The idea of Utopia [...]
Being a huge science fiction junkie, I noticed something that was glaringly obvious in this short story that I see as being true of the genre as a whole. There is very little room for a strong female protagonist in science fiction stories; the few exceptions being stories written by a female author. [...]
I just wanted to reorganize the idea I said in class about utopias and power. In Brave New World, complete power is in the hands of the Controller, Mustapha Mond, or I guess in a handful of Controllers for the different regions of the world. A utopian society would be impossible if [...]