Dystopia S Provocateurs

Oral histories on life in the eastern German region annexed by Poland following World War II. Toward the end of the Second World War, Poland’s annexation of eastern German lands precipitated one of the largest demographic upheavals in European history. Edyta Materka travels to her native village in these “Recovered Territories,” where she listens carefully to rich oral histories told by original postwar Slavic settlers and remaining ethnic Germans who witnessed the metamorphosis of eastern Germany into western Poland. She discovers that peasants, workers, and elites adapted war-honed informal strategies they called “kombinacja” to preserve a modicum of local agency while surviving the vicissitudes of policy formulated elsewhere, from Stalinist collectivization to the shock doctrine of neoliberalism. Informality has taken many forms: as a way of life, a world view, an alternate historical text, a border memory, and a means of magical transformation during times of crisis. Materka ventures beyond conventional ethnography to trace the diverse historical, literary, and psychological dimensions of kombinacja. Grappling with the legacies of informality in her own transnational family, Materka searches for the “kombinator within” on the borderlands and shares her own memories of how the Polish diaspora found new uses for kombinacja in America. “Rare and exceptionally well-researched analysis of an invisible practice.” —Alena Ledeneva, University College London “Materka has produced an eloquently written, exciting, and meticulously analyzed ethnographic history that marks an alternative to the vast majority of strictly archival-based historical literature on the German-Polish borderlands. Within the field of Polish history, this book is also an important contribution as the first extensive work on the critical role of informality in the politics, society, and economy of People’s Poland.” —H-Poland “By concentrating on the local strategies of combination in the areas of uprootedness, Materka has made an interesting and valuable contribution to our knowledge of human behavior. References and the use of Polish words for important concepts are exemplary. . . . [H]er collection of narratives provides food for thought on the relation between formal regulation and human ingenuity.” —Baltic Worlds

This meticulously edited dark future collection includes the greatest dystopian novels and post-apocalyptic stories - for you to compare with your own prediction based on present events: George Orwell: 1984 Animal Farm Aldous Huxley: Brave New World Sinclair Lewis: It Can't Happen Here C. S. Lewis: That Hideous Strength Yevgeny Zamyatin: We Jack London: Iron Heel H. G. Wells: The Time Machine The First Men in the Moon When the Sleeper Wakes Jonathan Swift: Gulliver's Travels Edward Bulwer-Lytton: The Coming Race Edgar Allan Poe: The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion Owen Gregory: Meccania the Super-State Hugh Benson: Lord of the World Edward Bellamy: Looking Backward: 2000–1887 Equality Mary Shelley: The Last Man William Hope Hodgson: The Night Land Stanley G. Weinbaum: The Black Flame Fred M. White: The Doom of London Series The Four White Days The Four Days' Night The Dust of Death A Bubble Burst The Invisible Force The River of Death Ignatius Donnelly: Caesar's Column Ernest Bramah: The Secret of the League Arthur Dudley Vinton: Looking Further Backward Richard Jefferies: After London Samuel Butler: Erewhon Edwin A. Abbott: Flatland Anthony Trollope: The Fixed Period Cleveland Moffett: The Conquest of America

Stories, essays, and interviews explore dystopias that may offer lessons for the present. As the recent success of Margaret Atwood's novel-turned-television hit Handmaid's Tale shows us, dystopia is more than minatory fantasy; it offers a critical lens upon the present. “It is not only a kind of vocabulary and idiom,” says bestselling author and volume editor Junot Diaz. “It is a useful arena in which to begin to think about who we are becoming.” Bringing together some of the most prominent writers of science fiction and introducing fresh talent, this collection of stories, essays, and interviews explores global dystopias in apocalyptic landscapes and tech futures, in robot sentience and forever war. Global Dystopias engages the familiar horrors of George Orwell's 1984 alongside new work by China Miéville, Tananarive Due, and Maria Dahvana Headley. In “Don't Press Charges, and I Won't Sue,” award-winning writer Charlie Jane Anders uses popularized stigmas toward transgender people to create a not-so-distant future in which conversion therapy is not only normalized, but funded by the government. Henry Farrell surveys the work of dystopian forebear Philip K. Dick and argues that distinctions between the present and the possible future aren't always that clear. Contributors also include Margaret Atwood and award-winning speculative writer, Nalo Hopkinson. In the era of Trump, resurgent populism, and climate denial, this collection poses vital questions about politics and civic responsibility and subjectivity itself. If we have, as Díaz says, reached peak dystopia, then Global Dystopias might just be the handbook we need to survive it. Contributors Charlie Jane Anders, Margaret Atwood, Adrienne Bernhard, Mark Bould, Thea Costantino, Tananarive Due, Henry Farrell, JR Fenn, Maria Dahvana Headley, Nalo Hopkinson, Mike McClelland, Maureen McHugh, China Miéville, Jordy Rosenberg, Peter Ross, Sumudu Samarwickrama

Violence and Dystopia is a critical examination of imitative desire, scapegoating and sacrifice in selected contemporary Western dystopian narratives through the lens of René Girard’s mimetic theory. The first chapter offers an overview of the history of Western utopia/dystopia with a special emphasis on the problem of conflictive mimesis and scapegoating violence, and a critical introduction to Girard’s theory. The second chapter is devoted to J.G. Ballard’s seminal novel Crash (1973), Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club (1996) and Rant (2007), and Brad Anderson’s film The Machinist (2004). It is argued that the car crash functions as a metaphor for conflictive mimetic desire and leads to a quasi-sacrificial crisis as defined by Girard for archaic religion. The third chapter focuses on the psychogeographical writings of Iain Sinclair and Peter Ackroyd. Walking the streets of London the pedestrian represents the excluded underside of the world of Ballardian speed. The walking subject is portrayed in terms of the expelled victim of Girardian theory. The fourth chapter considers violent crowds as portrayed by Ballard’s late fiction, the writings of Stewart Home, and David Peace’s GB84 (2004). In accordance with Girard’s hypothesis, the discussed narratives reveal the failure of scapegoat expulsion to restore peace to the potentially self-destructive violent crowds. The fifth chapter examines the post-apocalyptic environments resulting from failed scapegoat expulsion and mimetic conflict out of control, as portrayed in Sinclair’s Radon Daughters (1994), Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) and Oryx and Crake (2003), and Will Self’s The Book of Dave (2006).

Authoritarianism is on the march—and so is dystopian fiction. In the brave new twenty-first century, young-adult series like The Hunger Games and Divergent have become blockbusters; after Donald Trump’s election, two dystopian classics, 1984 and The Handmaid’s Tale, skyrocketed to the New York Times best-seller list. This should come as no surprise: dystopian fiction has a lot to say about the perils of terrible government in real life. In Survive and Resist, Amy L. Atchison and Shauna L. Shames explore the ways in which dystopian narratives help explain how real-world politics work. They draw on classic and contemporary fiction, films, and TV shows—as well as their real-life counterparts—to offer funny and accessible explanations of key political concepts. Atchison and Shames demonstrate that dystopias both real and imagined help bring theories of governance, citizenship, and the state down to earth. They emphasize nonviolent resistance and change, exploring ways to challenge and overcome a dystopian-style government. Fictional examples, they argue, help give us the tools we need for individual survival and collective resistance. A clever look at the world through the lenses of pop culture, classic literature, and real-life events, Survive and Resist provides a timely and innovative approach to the fundamentals of politics for an era of creeping tyranny.

This book examines the recent popularity of the dystopian genre in literature and film, as well as connecting contemporary manifestations of dystopia to cultural trends and the implications of technological and social changes on the individual and society as a whole. Dystopia, as a genre, reflects our greatest fears of what the future might bring, based on analysis of the present. This book connects traditional dystopian works with their contexts and compares these with contemporary versions. It centers around two main questions: Why is dystopia so popular now? And, why is dystopia so popular with young adult audiences? Since dystopia reflects the fears of society as a whole, this book will have broad appeal for any reader, and will be particularly useful to teachers in a variety of settings, such as in a high school or college-level classroom to teach dystopian literature, or in a comparative literature classroom to show how the genre has appeared in multiple locales at different times. Indeed, the book’s interdisciplinary nature allows it to be of use in classes focussing on politics, bioethics, privacy issues, women’s studies, and any number of additional topics.

Dystopia and Education: Insights into Theory, Praxis, and Policy in an age of Utopia Gone Wrong provides an as-of-yet unexplored critical perspective for examining contemporary educational theory, praxis, and policy with particular reference to the current state of dehumanizing and often oppressive policy and practices that have come to demarcate the era of NCLB and RTT. The authors in this collection employ dystopian themes found in literature, film, visual art, and video games as the lens for that critical inquiry. As such Dystopia and Education: Insights into Theory, Praxis, and Policy is an essential contribution to the philosophical/critical tradition in educational scholarship. It is especially valuable because the inquiry undertaken is from a new perspective—one that will extend the critical tradition into a yet unexplored arena. Given the educational climate established by NCLB and RTT, this collection is especially important to the ongoing critical analysis of such policy mandates. There is also a significantly important timeliness to this book given NCLB’s utopian expectation of universal academic proficiency among American schoolchildren by the year 2014: as educators race to achieve such a noble yet naïve goal, this collection of essays examines the educational environment that has been enacted to achieve such ends, and describes our current state as a utopia-gone wrong.

In a "feudal Europe seven centuries into post-Hitlerian society, Burdekin's novel explores the connection between gender and political power and anticipates modern feminist science fiction."--Cover.