From Ideal City to Cyberspace: Architecture and Urban Space in Utopian/Dystopian Literature and Film
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The Technical City and The Destroyed City as Symbols in Paul Tillich and Stig Dagerman. Eric Kristensson, University of California, Los Angeles
Paul Tillich's early (1920s) writings see the urban ideal in terms of it’s possible downfall, while Stig Dagerman's travelogue of post-war Germany reads the ruins of war-torn urban space as symbols of positive possibility. This paper juxtaposes these opposing approaches as symmetrical arguments for utopian thought.
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Artistic Bodies: Queer Space and Reproduction in Ishiguro's Never Let Me Go. Rachel Wolf, University of Hawai'i, Manoa
This essay claims that Ishiguro’s novel, Never Let Me Go, equates urban space with heteronormative bodies and rural space with nonheteronormative bodies, representing the queer experience, and argues that the novel uses queer bodies to explore modes of production that produce goods and (re)produce heteronormativity.
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Caves of Steel, Space Colonies, and Biosphere 2: The Fantasy of Extensive Constructed Space. John D. Schwetman, University of Minnesota, Duluth
Asimov’s The Caves of Steel and other science fiction works entertain by fulfilling fantasies of the gargantuan urban hive, whereas the failure of Biosphere 2 in Arizona evokes a more dystopian constructed space. Hyper-urban fantasies cannot ultimately displace the reality of our dependence on the natural world.
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Alien Cities: Anxieties about Race, Space and Embodiment in Alex Proyas' Dark City and China Miéville's Perdido Street Station. Julie Ha Tran, University of California, Davis
I examine the intersection of the (racialized) alien other and the city in Alex Proyas’ Dark City and China Miéville’s Perdido Street Station: cities that are monstrous or alien in their spatializing practices both affirm and undermine the analogy of the city as closed-off, inviolate body.
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