Tag: Dystopia

Free Download Valentina Romanzi, "American Nightmares: Dystopia in Twenty-First-Century US Fiction "
English | ISBN: 180079715X | 2022 | 304 pages | PDF | 6 MB
Valentina Romanzi’s study is a welcome addition to the body of scholarship on dystopia, utopia science fiction, and speculative fiction. It provides a comprehensive and updated review of the complex and rich debate on the question of genres and subgenres, while at the same time offering a fresh perspective. Eloquent and very well written, this volume reveals America’s fascination with catastrophic future scenarios, including the post-apocalyptic, delving into the issues that surround critical dystopia, progress, hope and fear. The close readings offer lucid, insightful interpretations of texts that range from SF literary ancestor, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein to Margaret Atwood’s award winning The Testaments, sequel to the acclaimed The Handmaid’s Tale.

Free Download Edyta Materka, "Dystopia’s Provocateurs: Peasants, State, and Informality in the Polish-German Borderlands"
English | 2017 | ISBN: 0253028965, 0253028876 | EPUB | pages: 248 | 3.2 mb
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.

Free Download Daniel Cojocaru, "Violence and Dystopia: Mimesis and Sacrifice in Contemporary Western Dystopian Narratives "
English | ISBN: 1443876135 | 2015 | 335 pages | PDF | 1348 KB
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).

Free Download Robert T. Tally Jr., "The Fiction of Dread: Dystopia, Monstrosity, and Apocalypse"
English | ISBN: 1501375857 | 2024 | 184 pages | EPUB, PDF | 318 KB + 2 MB
A history and examination of dystopia and angst in popular culture that speaks to our current climate of dread.