The Portrayal of Hegemony and Patriarchy in Louise O’ Neill’s Only Ever Yours

This study analyzes patriarchal hegemony portrayed in a dystopian world where young girls are hegemonized to fulfill patriarchal interests written by Louise O’ Neill, Only Ever Yours. As a counter to utopian writing, dystopian literature emerged as a subgenre of speculative fiction. The objectives of this study are to elucidate the kinds of patriarchal structures and media operated in portraying patriarchal hegemony in the novel. This study employs Antonio Gramsci’s hegemony theory along with the concept of patriarchy by Sylvia Walby. This study is literary criticism as the researcher interprets and analyzes the literary work. It employs a sociological approach for the analysis and Sylvia Walby’s six structures of patriarchy theory along with Gramsci’s theory. The data are taken from the words, phrases, and sentences in Only Ever Yours published in 2015. The researcher took the data by identifying, classifying and analyzing the data by elucidating the data with the theories. The result of this study shows that there are three patriarchal structures portrayed in the novel which are patriarchal mode of production, patriarchal state, and patriarchal culture. On the other hand, patriarchal hegemony is portrayed through the medium of television.

Humanistic Intention of Dystopia in "The Giver" by Lois Lowry

Purpose. The aim of this piece is to study the manifestations of humanistic pursuits in a literary fiction work. The main interest is related to the interpretation of those existential and sociocultural concepts that underlie the dystopian novel by Lois Lowry. The theoretical basis of the study is based on works on phenomenology and the theory of reader reception. The method of phenomenology is a descriptive method: the phenomena of consciousness cannot be reduced to limited cognitive forms, and therefore language and means of description are important along with their ability to reveal consciousness through phenomena. Originality of the study lies in the investigation of the humanistic aspect of a dystopian society, depicted in the modern literary fiction. The main attention is focused on the phenomenological identification of existential ideas and their manifestation in the literary characters of the given work. The conclusions speak about the tendencies of humanization and dehumanization of a man and society in the context of philosophical, ethical and aesthetic issues, which are the most important and urgent problems of our time. The current study finds out that in the modern dystopian literature and philosophy, the main subject of attention is a human. This human is perceived and depicted as a phenomenon that cannot be grasped by the notions of intimation and essence. The human is a creature whose freedom presupposes a constant departure from nature and habitual reality to the realm of transcendent through the desire to comprehend his or her certain way of existence.

Closure in dystopia: Projecting memories of the end of crises in speculative fiction

In this piece, I approach the relationship between the paradigm of imbricated crises pertaining to the second decade of the twenty-first century and its contemporaneous dystopian literature. I focus particularly on how dystopian literature forges a sense of closure that attempts to give meaning through the construction of imaginary memories of how crises came and went, or came and stayed. Dystopian tales provide the troubled reader of its time with a sense of narrative continuation and a substitute for closure. For my analysis, I draw on a corpus of literary works from around the world, which includes The Queue, by Basma Abdel Aziz; Station Eleven, by Emily St John Mandel; The Emissary, by Tawada Yōko; Severance: A Novel, by Ling Ma; China Dream, by Ma Jian; Ansibles, Profilers and Other Machines of Wonder, by Andrea Chapela; and The Ministry for the Future, by Kim Stanley Robinson.

Egyptian Dystopias of the 21st Century

During the first two decades of the 21st century an increasing amount of narratives termed as Arabic dystopian fiction appeared on the Arabic literary scene, with a greater part authored by Egyptian writers. However, what characterises/marks a work as a dystopia? This paper investigates the dystopian nature of a selection of Egyptian literary works within the frame of the dystopian narrative tradition. The article begins by introducing the features of the traditional literary dystopias as they will be used in the analysis. It then gives a brief overview of the development of the genre in the Arabic literature. The discussion that follows highlights common elements and identifies specific themes in six Egyptian novels selected for the analysis, thereby highlighting differences and similarities between them and the traditional Western dystopias. The article calls for a categorisation of Arabic dystopian narrative that takes into consideration social, political, historical and cultural factors specific for the Arabic in general, and Egyptian in particular, literary field. Keywords: Arabic literature, dystopia, dystopian literature, contemporary literature, Egypt, fiction, speculative fiction.

(Re)Writing Canadian Space: Dystopian Geographies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia

This paper examines how dystopian fiction opens up a productive space for disrupting naturalized assumptions, and shifting our understanding of taken-for-granted spaces. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) proposal that space must be seen as the product of constant interrelations, I argue that dystopian literature can similarly prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Using the concept of the “critical dystopia,” I examine how dystopian frameworks are operationalized in the Canadian context through a comparative analysis of two novels that speculate distinctly Canadian dystopian futures: Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016). By applying Massey’s theorization of space—its multiplicities, complexities, and political potentialities—to an examination of how Canadian spaces are transformed in the dystopian context, I then analyze how those representations challenge the spatial ideologies associated with globalization, and resist the neoliberal view of space as a surface to be crossed and conquered (Massey, 2005).

(Re)Writing Canadian Space: Dystopian Geographies in Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia

This paper examines how dystopian fiction opens up a productive space for disrupting naturalized assumptions, and shifting our understanding of taken-for-granted spaces. Drawing on Doreen Massey’s (2005) proposal that space must be seen as the product of constant interrelations, I argue that dystopian literature can similarly prompt us to reconsider our relationship to the spaces we inhabit. Using the concept of the “critical dystopia,” I examine how dystopian frameworks are operationalized in the Canadian context through a comparative analysis of two novels that speculate distinctly Canadian dystopian futures: Larissa Lai’s Salt Fish Girl (2002) and M.G. Vassanji’s Nostalgia (2016). By applying Massey’s theorization of space—its multiplicities, complexities, and political potentialities—to an examination of how Canadian spaces are transformed in the dystopian context, I then analyze how those representations challenge the spatial ideologies associated with globalization, and resist the neoliberal view of space as a surface to be crossed and conquered (Massey, 2005).