By Mary E. Theis
Simply because advances made through technology and know-how some distance outstripped advancements in human nature, utopian goals of excellent societies within the 20th century fast metamorphosed into dystopian nightmares, which undermined person id and threatened the integrity of the relatives. Armed with technological and medical instruments, totalizing social platforms present in literature abolish the excellence among private and non-private lifestyles and therefore penetrate and corrupt the very middle of all utopian blueprints and visions: the schooling of destiny generations. on the center of the family members, moms as mom and dad transmit their diversified cultural traditions whereas socializing their kids and therefore compete with ideologically pushed platforms that usurp their position as educators. moms and Masters in modern Utopian and Dystopian Literature focuses, hence, at the thematic value of this and different maternal roles for prevalent metamorphosis: the shift to dystopia perpetually is signaled via the inversion of conventional maternal roles. The toughness of the utopian-dystopian literary culture and patience of the maternal version of human relationships function issues of reference during this post-modern age of relative cultural values. Meta-utopian exploration of this thematic rigidity among utopia and dystopia reminds us that «no place» is probably not domestic, yet we have to preserve going there.
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Additional info for Mothers and Masters in Contemporary Utopian and Dystopian Literature (Currents in Comparative Romance Languages and Literatures)
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Indd 44 12/26/2008 3:10:47 PM as archetypal representatives of nature 45 Country Cosmos Great technological skill in the hands of an ethically uninhibited power has another disadvantage, which Orwell fails to mention: it leaves nothing for the great number of highly evolved and intelligent people to do, as Ambien II, the narrator of Lessing’s The Sirian Experiments reports. Too proud for manual labor, the most advanced people of Sirius, for example, suffer from a sense of the superfluity of their existence.
Indd 38 12/26/2008 3:05:18 PM ·2· MOTHERS AS THE ARCHETYPAL REPRESENTATIVES OF NATURE Someday, either decades or centuries from now, people will have to decide about building extremely intelligent machines. Some will see this as a threat to our species’ survival while others will see them as a natural stage of our own development—not as them versus us but as a natural step of our own evolution. MARVIN MINSKY1 Given the tremendous potential of machines for continually increasing human control over nature and their increasing capacity to replace and control human nature, historically speaking, human beings have always been somewhat ambivalent toward technological progress.
Cried Parsons with a servile glance at the telescreen. ” . . ” said Winston. “It was my little daughter,” said Parsons with a sort of doleful pride. “She listened at the keyhole. Heard what I was saying, and nipped off to the patrols the very next day. Pretty smart for a nipper of seven, eh? I don’t bear her any grudge for it. In fact I’m proud of her. indd 35 12/26/2008 3:05:17 PM 36 mothers and masters Such perversion of the child-parent relationship is essential to the perfect stability of the totalitarian state first because it makes the individual emotionally insecure and dependent on it and second because it breaks the vital familial link essential to the transmission of a multiplicity of other traditions, resulting in the individual’s total dependence on the state for a knowledge of the past.