Suchergebnisse

By discussing several of the issues that complicated the Christian's cohabitation and political participation in "this wicked world," as Augustine saw them, the remainder of this contribution will garrison the ground we have gained collecting the bad news he conveyed in his city. We shall inquire whether the assorted "consolations" he enumerated compensated for the corruption. And we shall consider one reason he might have had for composing his tome as a massive disorienting device. Of course, certainty about authorial intent is impossible to pocket, yet one can make the case that Augustine dropped City of God into the post-410 conversation about empires, conquest, glory, and cupidity to put such ephemera in perspective. Might he have wanted to give pause to colleagues who too readily acquiesced in the hot pursuit of trifles in their terrestrial cities? Before attempting to answer, we ought to ask if "dystopia" is the right term to characterize Augustine's city where trifles and the desire to possess them dominated the practice of politics - a city of gaud - or, to be precise, to characterize his depiction of his terribly flawed and "wicked world."

Autocratic regimes, democratic majorities, private platforms, and religious or professional organizations can achieve social control by managing the flow of information about individuals' behavior. Bundling the agents' political, organizational, or religious attitudes with information about their prosocial conduct makes them care about behaviors that they otherwise would not. The incorporation of the individuals' social graph in their social score further promotes soft control but destroys the social fabric. Both bundling and guilt by association are most effective in a society that has weak ties and is politically docile. (JEL D64, D72, D83, D91, K38, Z13)

What will it mean for free expression when the box in the corner can supply rolling newsbites, hard-core, the weekly shopping and the National Curriculum?

This essay seeks to add a set of novellas written by Raphaël Confiant between 1994 and 1997 to the ongoing conversation surrounding the Éloge de la créolité and its controversial legacy. In the nearly thirty years since its publication, the Éloge and its authors have been dispraised for their monomaniacal concern for the past and their phallocentric disregard for women's critical role in the transmission of Antillean culture. Far from suggesting that these accusations are ill-founded, this essay contends that Confiant responded to the critiques and confronted the Éloge's blindspots in his Trilogie tropicale. These exuberant works, which think through the effects of modernity, globalization, and cultural domination on contemporary Martinique, have been largely ignored, perhaps because they do not follow the poetic principles outlined in the Éloge. Rather than treating them apart from other créoliste writings, this essay proposes that they constitute a self-reflexive moment in Confiant's oeuvre.

This is a response to Tom Moylan's article on my Dystopia: A Natural History. There are some serious misapprehensions about my arguments in Moylan's treatment, as well as a failure to engage with some of the central themes of the book. Substantial differences also clearly exist between my approach and Moylan's approach to the subject of dystopia and indeed to scholarly engagement in general. Illuminating these further might well assist students of the subject to further explore the relevant issues.

Unlike Utopia,dystopia represents a city full of poverty, frustration and misery in fiction; it is a new phenomenon motivated by human failures and various historical disasters, such as World Wars, the Cold War, the nuclear war, which have led famous writers, like Aldous Huxley and George Orwell, to depict devastation in their novels instead of portraying utopian contexts in the twentieth century. Dystopia has emerged recently in Arabic literature, especially after the events of the Arab Spring, and the complication of various social and political problems in some Arab countries. Ahmed Khalid Tawfik, a contemporary Egyptian writer, was one of the most prominent contemporary writers in the horror genre and, generally, fiction. His Utopian novel, in contrast to his title, depicts a dystopia. The present study was conducted in order to examine, relying on social criticism, especially the views of Lucien Goldmann, the dichotomy of the image of self and others in contemporary Arabic novel and the worldview reflected in this novel.

The dystopian genre in literature is not a happy genre. We are not drawn to works of dystopian fiction because we expect to be satisfied: there are no "fuzzy feelings" in books like Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, George Orwell's 1984, or Yevgeny Zamyatin's We. Rather, we are fascinated by the thought processes and the questions that these nightmarish societies inspire. This thesis explores one such question, namely: what is the relationship between language, the individual, and society at large? Through an analysis of the three pivotal dystopian books above, I show how this relationship plays a key role in the development of any dystopia, and that these governments' exploitation of this relationship is the root of what we find most disturbing in dystopian literature.