Utopian, Dystopian, and Post-Apocalyptic Fiction

Course Description:
What would happen if we were to examine literary texts through the lens of energy? That is, what if we approached William Wordsworth’s Romantic ruminations on the “sublime” crafts of “men’s arts” as a praxis for thinking about the material forces of the sublime—“motion and means...on land and sea” made possible first by the winds that would move commerce across the Atlantic Ocean in the long sixteenth century and soon thereafter by coal? What if we understood colonial occupation in the context of East Africa or throughout Latin America in terms of the transnational plantation economies that would also be fueled by wind or hydropower or coal, and thus conducted postcolonial critiques of novels like Gabriel García Marquéz’s Autumn of the Patriarch or Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat accordingly? Might we then understand energy not merely in terms of the “fuel-injected” American dream featured in a Bruce Springsteen song, but instead as the very means of fueling culture? Might we then appreciate that the conventional tropes of literary expression and critique are the products of the material forces contemporary to each work? That petroleum, for example, isn’t simply a theme, but is that which enables the very production of culture?

As a seminar on Petrocultures, and an introduction to the Energy Humanities, this course shall focus on the imbrications between energy and cultural production in order to understand the ways in which material forces like coal or petroleum literally fuel culture.  We shall explore a wide archive of cultural works that represent, in the words of literary scholar Patricia Yaeger, the “ages of wood…coal…oil” and ultimately alternative fuel sources like wind and solar power. Writers like Ursula LeGuin, Amitav Ghosh, Kim Stanley Robinson, Muriel Rukeyser, Nawal El Saadawi. ,Paolo Bacigalupi, Ken Saro-Wiwa, Herman Melville, and many others will guide us through our new geological epoch—call it the Anthropocene or the Thermocene—illustrating the intersections of cultural discourse, political ideology, and aesthetic expression.

As we also will come to learn, there is no “age of wood,” for example, without a correlative commitment to Enlightenment notions of “improvement,” whether of self or land. There is likewise no age of oil, nor of wind, without a persistent commitment to such notions of civilizational progress as we see in the paeans to industry and “enlightenment” that generally characterize popular political thought. Thus, while we end with an exploration of alternative energy—alternatives, that is, to fossilized carbon—we likewise question whether a simple shift in fuel is sufficient to the task of averting the sorts of apocalyptic scenarios presented in novels like Bacigalupi’s Ship Breaker. Ultimately, we will follow the After Oil collective in asking how aesthetic forms represent (and often reinforce) energy regimes and how, in the face of an overwhelming commitment to disaster porn, we might “frame the unimaginable,” which is to say life after carbon.

Contemporary Paganism’s emphasis on sacred story and narrative has led to an interdependent relationship with popular media. Pagans draw inspiration from fiction and also bring their practices to life in popular novels. Robert Heinlein’s 1961 Stranger in a Strange Land has had a major impact on the practice of ethical nonmonogamy in the Pagan community, an impact that is reflected in Starhawk’s 1993 The Fifth Sacred Thing. Along with liturgical echoes from Stranger, Starhawk’s novel contains sacred sex practices similar to those Heinlein describes. Unlike Heinlein, however, Starhawk is writing from life; The Fifth Sacred Thing reflects the developing real-life norms of her San Francisco-based Pagan community. Both novels also follow the generic conventions of the American utopian novel, a literary form that has influenced communal and millennial movements of the past. Together, Heinlein and Starhawk’s novels demonstrate how fiction can inspire religious practice that then appears again in fiction.

Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves presents a post-apocalyptic world in which Canada's government hunts the native populations to extract their ability to dream. As outlined in Tuck and Yang's "Decolonization is not a metaphor," settler colonization seeks to obtain land above all else. However, Dimaline reimagines imperialism when the land has corrupted beyond value. This reorganization of Canadian priorities to native genetics facilitates a reconnection with the land.

Automata (2014), is a dystopian film that reveals postmodern tendencies around the materialization and conceptualization of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s  philosophical notions like territority, deterritorialization, reterritorialization. Deterritorialization becomes the key element of the film as it describes displacement, emplacement and replacement of human and automata in both geographical and individual aspects. Humans emigrate from radioactive places to narrow zones, also from human to automaton which becomes more human than human. On the other hand automata move over inversely from narrow zones to radioactive places, from slavery to freedom and from automata to human.
This paper discusses the future design of Automata, in which human beings and automata, the innate and design reciprocate roles, focusing on its content built by many deterritorializations and reterritorializations between biological, geographical, intellectual and ideological territories. It explores the film as a cultural text revealing a postmodern discourse through its transitions between territories and searches the meaning of this transition as a postmodern fact both in positive and negative aspects. It searches viability and importance of these notions in a postmodern reality and analyzes how Automata uses them through its content.

Student Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to—
1. Demonstrate familiarity with Plato’s concepts of the ideal society as described in his Republic
2. Demonstrate familiarity with the Socratic method of inquiry
3. Argue whether or not the society portrayed in Genesis is “ideal” (why or why not)
4. Construct a definition of what it means to be “human” and argue whether or not animal life or artificial intelligence can ever approach that definition (why or why not)

George R. Stewart’s Earth Abides (1949), in which a global pandemic decimates the world population, is a classic American post-apocalypse novel, but it is also a thought experiment examining humanity’s changing role on Earth that closely reflects the shift from a deterministic paradigm of ecological succession to one emphasizing contingency and human impact. Enmeshed in a community of scientists involved in the debate, Stewart creates a theory of environmentally embedded history in which human agency is understood as a partnership with the natural environment. By attending to Stewart’s network of scientific influences, this article seeks to transcend the “antagonistic wilderness” reading of post-apocalyptic ecologies.

Student Learning Outcomes
At end of this class students will be able to…
1. Identify & Discuss some of the classical mythology & history that inspired Suzanne Collins’ novels.
2. Discuss the major themes and ideas in the novel, such as dystopias, totalitarianism, oppression, scapegoating, death games, PTSD and reality television
3. Identify and discuss parallels in the students’ own and other world cultures.

L’une des visées de la littérature est l’analyse critique des évènements et des faits politiques et sociaux, moyennant une réflexion poétique, philosophique, pathétique, satirique ou allégorique. Au cours des siècles l’engagement, la dimension socio-politique de la littérature a reçu des formes d’expression variées qui ont abouti à l’élaboration de différents genres littéraires. Notre recherche se mène dans le cadre du discours du genre littéraire de l’engagement, relativement nouveau – celui de la dystopie ou de la contre-utopie, qui a connu son plein épanouissement dans le courant de deux siècles récents.

Si, à l’origine, les anti-utopies, devenus ensuite classiques, anticipaient, dénonçaient et prévenaient contre les extrémités que les utopies politiques et sociales de l’époque couvaient, après les catastrophes des guerres mondiales, les romans sont parus qui dressaient un bilan des évènements funestes vécus par l’humanité. Parmi ces derniers, il est nécessaire de citer le roman de Georges Perec W ou le souvenir d’enfance, qui fait d’ailleurs l’objet de notre recherche.

Let me sketch out here my vision of the cloistered cornucopia of AD 2100: Management of Planet Earth is entirely rationalized. Nature still nurtures. Artificial intelligence is history. The Machine has met its Master. The rich are enraptured. The poor are happy. The ducks of demography are all in a row. Never more is heard the discouraging word. Welcome to my sanguine vision of our future totalitarian utopia.
~
Climatologist Kent M. McGregor reviewed the entire book favorably in: AAG Review of Books. 2 (2) 2016, pps 84-86. He writes of my chapter: "David Nemeth's chapter is an incredibly idiosyncratic personal monologue in which the future becomes a kind of totalitarian dystopia. Using several parables, he elucidates an unusually positive view of a future wherein increasing happiness abounds and human desires and needs are satisfied. An elitist oligarchy uses a carefully designed code of best practices to manage the earth's resources. The result is a productive socioeconomic society in which the lower class has been dumbed down and now live happily in a kind of fool's paradise. He included a frank discussion and comparison to the social situation in North Korea, where citizens are required to appear to be happy."

Dr. McGregor's synopsis is accurate, but the futuristic society I describe is not a "totalitarian dystopia." It is instead -- and significantly -- a "totalitarian utopia."

In the light of the psychoanalytic approach, The Road can be read as a novel about a boy’s growing up in a devastated and barren post- apocalyptic world. The novel reveals that having lost his mother and facing the dead wherever he goes with his father, the boy struggles to overcome his fears of death and loss. What is more, in questioning his father’s decisions, he
questions the morality of the world that existed and the one he lives in. Finally, the readers are faced with the boy’s gradual becoming an individual, thus distinguishing himself from the
shadow of his father.

Keywords: fear, Freud's personality theory, psychoanalysis

Feed (2002) is a satirical novel portraying the not-so distant future where citizens of the United States of America are given the option to implant a transmitter device into their heads and the heads of their children known as the “feed.” These people are living in a dystopian society, unaware of the planetary disasters or world affairs because they are consumed with personal pleasure and the “good” of consumer America. From an ethical standpoint the life these people live through the feed is a bastardization of John Stuart Mill’s utilitarian ethics.

Out on the road, no one speaks, everything talks.

Hard-drinking, foul-mouthed, and allergic to bullshit, Jean is not your usual grandma. She’s never been good at getting on with other humans, apart from her beloved granddaughter, Kimberly. Instead, she surrounds herself with animals, working as a guide in an outback wildlife park. And although Jean talks to all her charges, she has a particular soft spot for a young dingo called Sue.

As disturbing news arrives of a pandemic sweeping the country, Jean realises this is no ordinary flu: its chief symptom is that its victims begin to understand the language of animals — first mammals, then birds and insects, too. As the flu progresses, the unstoppable voices become overwhelming, and many people begin to lose their minds, including Jean’s infected son, Lee. When he takes off with Kimberly, heading south, Jean feels the pull to follow her kin.

Setting off on their trail, with Sue the dingo riding shotgun, they find themselves in a stark, strange world in which the animal apocalypse has only further isolated people from other species. Bold, exhilarating, and wholly original, The Animals in That Country asks what would happen, for better or worse, if we finally understood what animals were saying.

Yönetmenliğini Fransız Marc Caro ve Jean Pierre Jeunet ikilisinin üstlendiği 1991 yılı Fransa yapımı “Delicatessen” (Şarküteri) filmi, sürrealist bir tarzda hazırlanarak günümüze ulaşmış kült statüsünde eşsiz bir eserdir. Caro ve Jeunet ikilisinin ilk uzun metrajlı filmi olan “Delicatessen”, 1991 yılında Fransa’nın en ünlü film ödüllerinden 17. César Ödülleri’nde en iyi senaryo ve en iyi yönetmen dahil dört dalda ödül alarak büyük başarı elde etmiştir

E. M. Forster is a writer few would associate with either science fiction or the short story, but in 1909, he published a remarkable example of both.  Entitled ‘The Machine Stops’, Forster’s story describes a dystopian future in which humankind has ravaged the surface of the earth, and retreated underground, where it has grown more and more dependent on ‘the Machine’ for its survival - with ultimately disastrous consequences, as Forster’s title signals.  The prescience of Forster’s story is, perhaps, self-evident, given humankind’s growing dependence on technology, and the extent and nature of its impact on the environment; yet it has, to date, attracted surprisingly little critical attention, and still less attention from eco- or environmental critics.  Alf Seegert’s article (2010) is a notable exception.  The aim of this paper is, therefore, to extend Seegert’s analysis (with its focus on the ‘Fleshly Interface’ in Forster’s story) and emphasize the dimensions of space and place.  Thus, it considers the role of technology, not only in mediating our relationship to the more-than-human world (culminating in a process of disembodiment), but its role in dissolving place into space, in a totalizing process of deterritorialization or displacement.  It also considers how and to what extent this two-fold but interlinked process – this overall effect of dissociation – is implicated in the destruction of the more-than-human world which the virtual has supplanted.  It concludes with the unsettling possibility that, as Forster’s story also implies, ‘the Machine’ is not, after all, the cause of our undoing, but simply a symptom of a deeply human process of disengagement - or alienation - from the world of which we form a part.

The paper analyzes the dystopian apocalyptic vision of human civilization in the novel The Stone Gods by a contemporary British writer Jeanette Winterson. This postmodern narrative blends the world’s colonial past with its potentially colonial future, as mankind is attempting at colonizing a new planet. While Winterson’s novel is not innovative when it comes to the formal aspects of dystopias, she manages to create a sense of fluid and omnipresent history that is constantly blended into the present, bringing into focus men’s self-destructive tendencies. The narrative is not linear or chronological and consists of several stories set in various times and spaces which are interconnected not only by the common theme of human greed and irresponsible economic and anti-ecological behavior, but also by the central character Billie/Billy Crusoe. Following the main gender-bending motif of Virginia Woolf’s cult novel Orlando, Billie chooses her partners according to their personality, not gender or biological sex. The dystopian, nonlinear and often didactic tone of the novel is interwoven with poetic passages depicting romantic love that is, as is common in Winterson, solely homosexual. And it is a romance and emotions that are presented as the basis of humanity, even when it concerns love between a human and a robot.

For all its promise of unlimited connetivity, Apple´s design seems to leave almost everything out. Apple has built a style on impenetrability, providing us with sleek, polished technological gizmos that are not only a product of design, but a symbol of designed obsolescence. Looking like an alien mothership hanging gently in the middle of Arcadia, the new Cupertino campus speaks of a dream of ascetic-aesthetic plenitude that goes back to modern utopianism.

A Juan Antonio Ramírez, in memoriam "Entre las especulaciones arquitectónicas de los sesenta debemos concentrar una cierta preeminencia a las de Paolo Soleri. Imagina que la única salvación humana consiste en concentrar el hábitat, racionalizando el espacio permitiendo que una nueva con-ciencia colectiva armónica surja como suma integrada de muchas conciencias individuales. La ciudad, por tanto, debe ser compacta, tridimensional y vertical: un sólido, no una superficie" 1. Resumen: determinó su concepción arquitectónica hacia una investigación del hombre y su entorno a partir de ciudades meta-ciudad ideal y laboratorio urbano, fruto de sus investigaciones, cuyos principios están determinados por la sosteni-bilidad y el respeto medioambiental. Palabras clave:-L a implosión de la filosofía de la sostenibilidad y su masiva presencia en los panoramas contemporáneos ha modificado las disciplinas de creación productivas del diseño y la ar-quitectura. Si nos referimos a una historia de la arquitectura alejada del planteamiento he-gemónico, podemos establecer una narración crítica más allá de las lecturas de la innovación. En este sentido, fueron determinantes las cualidades de regeneración de los materiales sobre los que se articulaban los productos de consumo. Richard Buckminster Fuller fue pionero en plantear un diseño realizado con materiales económicos y reciclables, que iniciaba, a partir de los años cincuenta, una crítica a la estética funcionalista y a planteamientos alternativos posteriores como 1. J. A. Ramírez, "Prospectiva y ciencia-ficción (ciudades y edificios del futuro)", Construcciones ilusorias. Arqui-tecturas descritas, arquitecturas pintadas, Madrid, 1983, pp. 217-247.

Hunger Games author Suzanne Collins has acknowledged that her series was significantly influenced by classical mythology and history. Readers can see echoes of potential sources in the timely descent of those little silver parachutes – each one delivering life-saving food, medicine, or tools – of the gifts and aid the Olympian gods sent to their chosen heroes in Greek mythology. Likewise, the manipulation of the arena’s environment by the all-powerful Gamemakers is reminiscent of the way the gods used weather and other natural elements to help or hinder mortal champions.

The paper inquires, from a philosophical point of view, the Italian writer Guido Morselli’s last novel (1973): Dissipatio H. G. Its main question is if a philosophically understanding of the relation between utopia and dystopia may be obtained working not directly on the two concepts (taken as separated), but working on their crossing, typical of literature domain.
In this quite original Italian novel, build on the absurd of a last-man schema, the anti-hero who is the unique survivor to a totally unexpected humanity disappearance. Living on without “the others” means from the one hand living with machines still working and, from the other hand, experimenting renewed relations with flora, animals and, generally speaking, nature.
The result is that subjectivity is completely redefined, but it is not clear the axiology of that alteration. The empty world shows, at the end, the constitutive ambiguity of every world and, at the same time, of every subject living-in-the-world: it reveals itself as an utopia as well as a dystopia.

Fourierist utopianism really took root in nineteenth-century Spain. The original focal point in Cádiz had echoes in Cartagena, Granada, Madrid, and Valladolid. Apart from spreading Fourier's ideas, these Spanish Fourierists tried to set up several utopian communities (known as phalansteries) and published books and newspapers, in which—among other things—we find the first signs of feminism in the Spanish language. For all these reasons, Spanish Fourierism may be considered an important chapter in the history of utopian socialism. As it had to do with a drive for freedom and daring in thought, the movement could be very flexible and was capable of associating with other doctrines, such as romanticism, feminism, and spiritism. Whereas the most political branch of Spanish Fourierism is related to the Democratic Party, republicanism, and the roots of Marxist socialism (Partido Socialista Obrero Español, the Spanish Socialist Party, founded in 1879), the libertarian drive implicit in setting up utopian communities lived on in anarchism.

El presente artículo argumenta que Melancholia (Lars von Trier, 2011) puede constituir una ocasión privilegiada para pensar seriamente en la muerte en los términos que Søren Kierkegaard propone en "Junto a una tumba", generando en el espectador el mismo efecto que el discurso pretende producir en el lector.

Mythic and religious narratives that envision the end of the world position the apocalypse in a futuristic time where certain events would sequentially occur finally building up to the inevitable end. Speculative fiction that depicts near-apocalypses do not however, prefer unconceivable futures but favour the current time of the narrative, depicting them as events happening now. Operating within the apocalyptic chronotope, science fiction bonds present day concerns with possible catastrophes. One such narrative is Harry Bates' short story "Farewell to the Master" (1940) which also generated two film adaptations entitled The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951, 2008). While Bates' short story relates how humanity is prone to act imprudently during a relatively peaceful period, the 1951 film turns to that of the Cold War and its repercussions, and the 2008 remake of The Day the Earth Stood Still centres around the theme of nature. As environmental concerns dominate our era the 2008 film reflects humanity's ever-growing consumption and destruction of its natural surroundings. As the source text and its adaptations provide possible apocalyptic visions or scenarios adjusted to their respective audiences, this essay analyses these narratives through the apocalyptic chronotope, exploring and building on Bakhtin's theory. In doing so, this essay attempts to discern the ways in which adapted near apocalyptic scenarios shift and change to accommodate contemporary concerns within a temporal and spatial framework.

Eschatological jouissance is defined here as a grim pleasure in the failure of the world. It is a feature of J. G. Ballard's prescient ecological disaster fiction of the 1960s as well as of the sardonic treatment of ecological idealism in his later fiction. Expressions of pleasure in the end of the world can be seen as forming a counter genre to utopia and, in philosophical terms, as a refusal of humanism. Humanism is defined here as the insistence to see the world from a human point of view. Anti-humanism and a concurring openness to eschatological jouissance are elements of existentialism and of poststructuralism, together with Marxism the main alternatives to humanism proposed in the twentieth century. Ecocriticism, in some of its strands, is another such replacement of humanism in which eschatological jouissance plays a significant role. Humanism may not seem a promising attitude for dealing with the ecological disasters we face, concerned as it is in the first place with the comfort of human beings. Still, it is argued here that humanism includes an awareness of the parochialism of human sympathies and that an appeal to the need to extend its sympathies to non-human sharers of the planet might well be heeded. Eschatological jouissance, as a feature of dystopian fiction and imagination, will provide the needed shudder to nudge us into such an extension of our sympathies.

This booklet is comprised of three brief essays:

* Opening the Gates of Hell Upon the Earth:  Prelude to Armageddon               
* A Nation of Witches and Sorcerers
* New Insights in Amillennial Eschatology

The first two of these three essays are new, and the last one—“New Insights in Amillennial Eschatology”—is from the book, A Great and Terrible Love:  A Visionary Journey from Babylon’s Sorceries to God’s Paradise (a couple of links herein lead to free digital versions of this book).  The present booklet, Our Sorcerous Age, is about drugs—the recreational psychedelic drugs, including LSD, mescaline, DMT, psilocybin mushrooms, peyote, marijuana and its derivative hashish, &etc—and their part, strange as it may initially seem, in eschatological events, i.e., those happenings prophesied to occur at the end of the present age.

There may be some slight redundancy—passages repeated—in the three essays; please excuse these. 

The purpose of what is in this booklet is to alert its readers to the significance of the remarkable emergence, a global phenomenon, of these drugs and their affect within the collective consciousness of humankind—the zeitgeist, or spirit of the age.  In case they seem alarmist to some—particularly one of the chapters in the larger, A Great And Terrible Love, “The Fate of Babylon, a study in determining the identity and demise of Babylon in John’s Apocalypse”, it really is appropriate we should be alarmed.  Perhaps in the jadedness of our minds, what with the excesses of apocalyptic super-hero movies and like fare, we ho-hum the writing on the wall:  The Day of Judgment is just around the corner and nearing, its preliminary catastrophes even nearer, while our “civilization” is falling apart before our eyes.  Things are not well.  We should be taking God’s word very seriously, and learning to draw near to Him, the one safe place in all creation.