A recent genre study by Erika Gottlieb (2001) divides dystopian literature into two temporal categories, which she calls West and East. Within this framework, Gottlieb places Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (1921) within her Western framework comprised of authors primarily concerned with envisaging future totalitarian societies. Conversely, she places Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930) within her Eastern framework of authors concerned with providing descriptive works of those totalitarian societies come to pass in the present. It is with these classifications that this thesis takes issue. It is my contention that in We Zamiatin was actually centrally concerned with providing a description and critical account of both the volatile, repressive socialist system of contemporary Leninist Russia and the claim that post-revolutionary Russia now inhabited a post-historical epoch. I further argue that in The Foundation Pit Platonov was as concerned with questions of the future as he was with the society of the present: in his implied criticism of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, he engages not merely with the political policies of a particular moment in time, but with the larger view of how the present relates to the future which underlies them.

A recent genre study by Erika Gottlieb (2001) divides dystopian literature into two temporal categories, which she calls West and East. Within this framework, Gottlieb places Evgenii Zamiatin’s We (1921) within her Western framework comprised of authors primarily concerned with envisaging future totalitarian societies. Conversely, she places Andrei Platonov’s The Foundation Pit (1930) within her Eastern framework of authors concerned with providing descriptive works of those totalitarian societies come to pass in the present. It is with these classifications that this thesis takes issue. It is my contention that in We Zamiatin was actually centrally concerned with providing a description and critical account of both the volatile, repressive socialist system of contemporary Leninist Russia and the claim that post-revolutionary Russia now inhabited a post-historical epoch. I further argue that in The Foundation Pit Platonov was as concerned with questions of the future as he was with the society of the present: in his implied criticism of Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, he engages not merely with the political policies of a particular moment in time, but with the larger view of how the present relates to the future which underlies them.

Michel Foucault is a celebrated post-structuralist theorist that has helped shape gender and sexual theory. In A History of Sexuality Volume 1 Foucault dismantles many longstanding sexual traditions and morals by exposing them as societal constructs. According to Foucault, anonymous yet fully invasive power sources have shaped and continue to shape sexual culture and more importantly, individual beliefs about sexuality. However, Foucault's obsession with the influence of power limits his sexual theory in three particular ways. First, he disregards the female sexual experience; second, he undermines individual agency; and third, he undermines the innate desire for love and family. The first half of the paper focuses on his dismissal of the female experience and individual agency. This section of the thesis relies heavily on other feminist scholars, social studies, and the work of historians. The second half of the paper focuses on the human desire for love and family and looks to dystopian literature to help critique Foucault. Dystopian literature has often been paired with modern cultural criticism, including psychoanalysis and post-strucutralism as both act as critiques of the permeating effects of societal control at a community and individual level. However, even dystopian literature leaves some room for individual agency and explores the innate desire for love and family.

This paper will discuss the making of my thesis film, Past the Darkness. I will describe the entire process including story conception, film production, and post-production stages. I will also evaluate the merits, flaws, and outcome of this project.

Since William Gibson includes a Rastafarian Enclave and a theological compass in <i>Neuromancer</i>, this can be used to examine the troublesome natures of the two Artificial Intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. The Rastafarian's beliefs and interpretations of Babylon and Zion, the oppressors and the liberated, add political significance to the Tessier-Ashpool's and their enslaved Artificial Intelligences. Since the Artificial Intelligences are both created of Babylon the Tessier-Ashpools and also wanting to be free of them, they are something outside of both. In the Artificial Intelligences, then, Gibson collapses the straightforward dichotomy of Babylon and Zion.

Since William Gibson includes a Rastafarian Enclave and a theological compass in <i>Neuromancer</i>, this can be used to examine the troublesome natures of the two Artificial Intelligences, Wintermute and Neuromancer. The Rastafarian's beliefs and interpretations of Babylon and Zion, the oppressors and the liberated, add political significance to the Tessier-Ashpool's and their enslaved Artificial Intelligences. Since the Artificial Intelligences are both created of Babylon the Tessier-Ashpools and also wanting to be free of them, they are something outside of both. In the Artificial Intelligences, then, Gibson collapses the straightforward dichotomy of Babylon and Zion.

Utopian literature has typically viewed the body as a pitfall on the path to social perfectibility, and utopian planners envision societies where the troublesome body is distanced as much as possible from utopia's guiding force-Reason. However, after two world wars, the failure of communism, and a century of corrupt "utopian" projects like Hitler's social engineering, dystopian societies justified on the grounds of "rational planning" fail to convince us, and the body has risen as the new locus for identity and agency, a point of stability in a dangerous and unstable environment. In this dissertation, I argue that utopian literature in the late twentieth century has identified the body as key to imagining new alternatives and re-connecting with an increasingly jeopardized sense of immediate, embodied experience. Protagonists in utopian literature looking to escape dehumanizing and bureaucratic worlds find their loophole in the sensual rush of adrenaline and instinct and the jarring rejuvenation of nerve and muscle, experiences which are much more immediately real and trustworthy than the tenuous dictates of institutions that tumble easily into absurdity and terror. Survival necessitates a raw and transformed identity that transgresses the tightly regimented boundaries of civilization and embraces the tumultuous chaos of the fringes and countercultures. Here, utopia thrives. I ground this study in theoretical and sociological texts which recognize the centrality of the body in society and the dynamic potentiality of utopian thinking, and then examine how these developments unfold in utopian literature since the mid twentieth century. The body as utopia surfaces in a variety of ways: as the longing for movement in Kurt Vonnegut's Player Piano; as the creation of alternative spaces defined by embodiment in Angela Carter's Heroes and Villains and Chuck Palahniuk's Fight Club; as the exuberant immersion in the modified body in Chuck Palahniuk's Rant; and as the search for perfection in a detached and corporate world in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. I conclude with an assessment of utopia in the twenty-first century, referring to Cormac McCarthy's The Road as a barometer of the grim state of utopian possibility as we head into the next century.

In this paper, I discuss the modern socio-technological state of global social control and its representation in my stop motion animated film P19. I will compare the ways in which social control has changed and remained the same from September 11, 2001 to the present. I will discuss the surveillance and control grids permeating all communication networks and how humans are interacting with them. I will conclude with an analysis of some of my techniques and processes in stop motion animation.

This master’s degree thesis exists in two parts: a critical introduction and an original novella entitled Side Effects. The critical introduction introduces and explains the theories on, literature surrounding, and literary uses of dystopian fiction, the novella format, and drug-based psychotherapy. Current opinion on dystopian fiction sees it characterized by a seemingly perfect societal setting that ultimately contains hidden or suppressed moral flaws. The ultimate purpose of dystopian fiction is commentary on contemporary society through a defamiliarized setting. The novella format is shown to exist in a middle-ground state between the short story and the novel, yet the format manages to maintain positive literary elements of both. Finally, a discussion on drug-based psychotherapy illustrates the use of chemical compounds to treat or cure psychological conditions, a topic of much debate amongst current psychology practitioners. The section on drug-based psychotherapy focuses largely on memoirs for purposes of first-hand experience and character creation for the original novella. The novella, entitled Side Effects, follows the character Edward, a middle-aged man who creates and tests serums that suppress by mandate the emotions that his society deems toxic to the human condition. Edward remains ignorant of any life outside the symmetry and order of the Company, the corporation responsible for the maintenance of the society. That is, until a chance encounter with a young woman named Gabrielle causes Edward to explore a world outside the confines of his carefully crafted city and lifestyle. She introduces him to a community of people who reject the mandates of the Company and exist as the extreme opposition to its ideals. As Edward spends more time with this group, known as Splicers, he must confront his long-held standards and finally choose for himself what life he will live.

This dissertation offers a reappraisal of twentieth-century dystopian fiction in the roughly thirty years after World War II by identifying the environmental dimensions of many of the most genre-defining authors and novels of this period. Given the escalating climate emergency and the growing popularity of climate fiction (“cli-fi”), it would be difficult to imagine critical conversations about twenty-first-century dystopian fiction that overlook environmental anxieties in the genre. Yet, in scholarly discussions of postwar dystopian fiction, there is a limiting sense that environmental “themes” emerge only periodically, or are of secondary importance to the genre’s more typically “Orwellian” themes like totalitarianism, propaganda, the Cold War, automation, censorship, and conformism. In contrast, my dissertation shows how dystopian fiction from this period develops in conversation with emerging conceptions of environmental degradation in the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements. By developing a history of dystopian fiction’s mutual imbrication with growing anxieties about ecological degradation, my dissertation shows that texts in the genre have grappled for decades with socioecological questions that still perplex us today: can nuclear energy power a safe and abundant future? Should there be hard limits to humankind’s population? How should humans interact with/in non-human nature? If there are ecological limits to economic growth, is humankind (a problematically capacious term) approaching ecological limits? If so, are we (another problematically capacious term) courting disaster? Over three chapters, I trace the co-emergence of dystopianism and environmentalism in the roughly three decades after World War II as major Western cultural heuristics for thinking about the future. In this historical context, my dissertation puts dystopian novels like George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), Kurt Vonnegut’s Player Piano (1952), Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Harry Harrison’s Make Room! Make Room! (1966), John Brunner’s Stand on Zanzibar (1968), and Ursula Le Guin’s The Lathe of Heaven (1971) in conversation with trailblazing environmental texts like Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring (1962) and Paul Ehrlich’s The Population Bomb (1968). As I will show, dystopian fiction produced during this period was influenced by and participated in debates about nuclear weapons and nuclear energy, overconsumption and overpopulation, and the degradation and disappearance of non-human nature. At the same time, the anti-nuclear, anti-population growth, and modern environmental movements borrowed rhetorical strategies from dystopian fiction to warn about the (in)habitability of the future. In developing these arguments, I draw heavily from primary sources and historical accounts of these movements, utopian and dystopian studies criticism, Marxist ecology and Critical Theory, and a growing collection of scholarship in the Environmental and Energy Humanities that emphasizes the centrality of energy to modern societies. This history will contribute to a better interdisciplinary understanding of how modern environmental thinking is influenced by dystopianism, and how dystopian fiction warns readers about what John Brunner calls environmental “survivability” in an age when the spectre of climate breakdown looms large in the public’s imagination.