Mohsin Hamid’s novel, Exit West (2017) takes place in a world where magical doorways allow refugees passage between countries. Following the couple Saeed and Nadia – refugees from an unnamed city ...undergoing fundamentalist insurrection – the novel explores their grappling amid different political tensions. While commentators have discussed the way Hamid re-frames migration as form of connectivity, and the portals as utopian forms of escape, this article investigates the economic specificities of such connectivity, through three near-future communities that Hamid imagines for Nadia and Saeed: a Kensington townhouse reclaimed by refugees, the “London Halo” work-for-housing program, and the shanty city of Marin, San Francisco. These collectives defy the logic of capitalist realism (Fisher). In this way, utopian potential exists within the novel both in terms of magical thinking against the system (Adorno) and as embodied forms of solidarity amid crisis (Žižek and Jameson).
From its inception in Plato’s Republic and revival in Thomas More’s Utopia, the concept of a perfect (or as More originally put it in a qualification often lost, “best”) form of a republic has been ...dogged by the spectres of hypocrisy, contradiction, and authoritarianism. However, the matter is more complicated than a simple declaration that utopias provide a vehicle for totalitarian fantasy, that totalitarian governments inevitably portray themselves as creating a utopia. While today’s readers, at a comfortable distance from the early sixteenth century, may bridle at the lack of privacy, or at the ideological coerciveness in More’s Utopia, that does not eradicate how, in Walter Kendrick’s words, “what for us are problems are for them solutions.” It can be argued that the negative elements are a response to social ills. The same goes for Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Dave Eggers’s The Circle. While the negatives in all three fictions undermine or put into question the positives, our realization that the authors also intended the negatives as genuine attempts at resolving genuine problems that cause untold misery invites us to complicate our judgments. The undermining is itself undermined.
With Beckett's breath as form and text as content, with inhalation and exhalation the minimal, "radically economic representation of human life," Gaynor foregrounds what he calls the "cold music from ...which the messy, dreadful doings of the text are excluded, even if one cannot exist without the other." ...Phillip E. Wegner is the Marston-Milbauer Eminent Scholar and Professor of English at the University of Florida. What strikes this reader as most compelling about Wegner's essay are three things: the way the author works with, on, and against Jameson's well-known use of the term post-modernism; his uniquely two-fold version of performatives that are both grounded in history and tethered to the imaginative experience of reading science fiction; and finally, the pressure necessarily placed on singularity in all of this. Besides the innumerable insights he gleans from the translation of the X-Men comic books to the big screen, his instructive thoughts on method, the symptom and superstructure, and beyond the temporal chiasm engineered by science fiction make it clear that futurity today is in short supply for as many reasons as there are singular souls to think it.
In Aldous Huxley's science fiction entitled Brave New World (1932) presents a Utopian future based on science and technology. He presents the future world governed by the progress of science and its ...discoveries. In this world babies are produced in laboratories and are so conditioned that they are devoid of emotions and morality. He warns us by presenting the production of babies in laboratories, who grew without any moral values in them. In this world, there is no crime, no immorality. Science has destroyed all the evil elements in man. The novel presents two worlds. One is the ideal scientific world and other is the ideal primitive world. Man has to choose between these two worlds. The novelist seems to be on the side of the primitive world and opposes the scientific world.
Un mundo feliz Mars, Sergio
Espacio abierto,
10/2017, Letnik:
26, Številka:
4
Journal Article
Recenzirano
Clasificada a menudo tentre las obras más importantes de la historia de la ciencia ficción, “Un mundo feliz” (“Brave new world”, 1932), de Aldous Huxley, supone un título ciertamente ...singular.Obradeunautorquepodríaconsiderarse ajeno al género (en contraposición, por ejemplo, con su contemporáneo Olaf Stapledon), la novela constituye sin embargo una de las muestras más extraordinarias de literatura especulativa, tanto desde un punto de vista sociológico como tecnológico, merced de una sólida formación tanto en el campo científico (la familia Huxley destacó por producir grandes biólogos, desde su abuelo Thomas Henry Huxley, “el Buldog de Darwin”, hasta sus hermanos Julian y Andrew Huxley, receptor este último del premio Nobel de Fisiología o Medicina en 1963) como en el humanístico, graduado con honores en literatura inglesa por el Balliol College de Oxford.
...a metaphysical perspective comes as natural to McCarthy's characters, who to a man possess a dim view of creation and rely upon experience rather than a religious intermediary to know the ...spiritual world. ...McCarthy's work seemingly occurs in a world without divine benevolence, wherein characters strive to gain knowledge of their absent and indifferent creator. Chapter Two, for instance—"Suzerain of the Earth"—explores the mysterious Judge Holden, who has been a wellspring of curiosity for readers of Blood Meridian. More than the dozens of critical analyses that have been published regarding Holden, Mundik's chapter exposes the undergirding elements of his character, back to the B. C. E. era, even, linking him with the ancient and atavistic violence inherent to Blood Meridian.
A published writer, sexually kinky player, adventurous traveler, one-time supposed cannibal and coiner of the word "zombie," he is a made-to-order comic-book or pulp-fiction hero. Seabrook could even ...be charming and witty, which Ollmann captures with strong artistic skill and imagination, but his portrait of Seabrook loses the reader's interest intermittently.
La relación de Lacan con Huxley es casi desconocida. Sin embargo, existe un indicio que permite entrever la recepción en el psicoanalista de algún tipo de influencia recibida del escritor. Con el ...recurso de la verosimilitud del intercambio, a partir de una sola mención de Lacan a Huxley, intentaremos despejar una de las líneas más herméticas de la versión de 1949 del “El estadio del espejo”, la que hace referencia a los efectos de la fetalización. Siendo esta condición una temática común entre ambos autores, el aspecto dramático del estadio del espejo –proyectado en historia subjetiva– podría llegar a captarse con una versión novelada del retardo en el desarrollo humano.
Lacan’s relationship with Huxley is almost unknown. However, there is an indication that allows us to glimpse the reception in the psychoanalyst of some type of influence received from the writer. Using the verisimilitude of the exchange, from a single mention by Lacan to Huxley, we will try to clear one of the most hermetic lines of the 1949 version of “The Mirror Stadium”, which refers to the effects of the fetalization. As this condition is a common theme between both authors, the dramatic aspect of the mirror stage –projected in subjective history– could come to be captured with a fictionalized version of the delay in human development.
Public discussion of "the authoritarian personality" returned with the election of President Trump. This article traces the rise of that concept and broader study of mass society in American social ...science, with adaptations into composition studies from the 1960s to the 1990s—followed by their lamentable eclipse under a lethal combination of forces since then.
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