Past Events
Brave New Worlds: The Dystopic in Modern and Contemporary Culture
- Venue: Newcastle University
- Start: Wed, 29 Apr 2015 09:00:00 BST
- End: Thu, 30 Apr 2015 19:00:00 BST
The Dystopic in Modern & Contemporary Culture
Old Library Building, Newcastle University
Wednesday, 29th April
8:45-9:15 Registration
Research Beehive Foyer, Old Library Building
9:15-10:45 Session One
Panel 1A – The Early Twentieth Century (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Fran Bigman
- Sarah Cullen (Newcastle), ‘“a book explodes a thousand times”: Soviet Futurists and Literary Heretics in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We’
- Margery Palmer McCulloch (Glasgow), ‘Karel Čapek and Early Twentieth-Century Dystopian Writing’
- Nathan Waddell (Nottingham), ‘Classical Music, Fascism, and Dystopia: Katharine Burdekin and Storm Jameson in the 1930s’
Panel 1B – Innocence & Youth (Research Beehive 2.22)
Chair: Antony Mullen
- Gul Dag (Hull), ‘Inverting the Bildungsroman: The Child and the City in Jack Womack’s Random Acts of Senseless Violence’
- Ronan Hatfull (Warwick), ‘Carrying The Fire’: Cormac McCarthy and William Shakespeare’s Optimistic Apocalypse’
- Jonathan Mitchell (East Anglia), ‘The Empty Child: Dystopian Innocence in Samuel Delany’s Hogg’
10.45-11.15 Refreshments
11:15-12:45 Session Two
Panel 2A – Fragments (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Stacy Gillis
- Fiona Anderson (Edinburgh), ‘Wild Boys on the Waterfront: David Wojnarowicz and Bill Burroughs’ Recurring Dream’
- Mark Johnson (York), ‘Dusk Hour: Depictions of Ecological Collapse and Posthuman Survivalist Ideologies in Command and Conquer: Tiberian Sun’
- Niek Turner (Liverpool), ‘Etching an Influential Imaginary Space from the Real: Piranesi and Eisenstein’
Panel 2B – Apocalypse & the Human (Research Beehive 2.22)
Chair: Marc Hudson
- Kanta Dihal (Oxford), ‘Diseased Dystopia: The Apocalyptic Outbreak Narrative in Margaret Atwood’s MaddAddam Trilogy’
- Simon Mernagh (QUB), ‘Inhuman Condition: Dystopia, Apocalypse, and Arendtian Phenomenology’
- Sarah Paterson (Glasgow), ‘Can a Song Change a Nation? Music and Verse in Dystopian Fiction’
12:45-13:30 Lunch
Research Beehive Foyer
13.30-15:00 Session Three
Panel 3A – Emotion & Society (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Ronan Hatfull
- Asami Nakamura (Liverpool), ‘The Function of Nostalgia in Dystopia: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go’
- Prayag Ray (QUB) and Trisha Ray (Independent), ‘Dystopic Science Fiction and Social Change: Narrative Strategies in Social Science Fiction’
- Maaike Zoelman (Hull), ‘From Hopelessness to Hopefulness: Comparing the Dystopias Anthem with The City of Ember’
Panel 3B – Subjectivity & Existentialism (Research Beehive 2.22)
Chair: Sarah Paterson
- Maren Conrad (Munster), ‘Reinventing the Last Man: Rewriting Romantic Utopias within the Dystopian Settings of Post-Apocalyptic Films’
- Andrea Dietrich (Birkbeck), ‘Uncovering the Golden Thread: Existential Agency as Driving Force of Dystopian Narrative’
- Adam Welstead (St Andrews), ‘Dystopia and Dissensus: Reading Rancière in Contemporary British Dystopian Fiction’
Panel 3C – Crisis & Malevolence (Research Beehive 2.20)
Chair: Rosie Lewis
- Dorothy Butchard (Edinburgh), ‘Malevolent Elevators in Dystopian City Spaces’
- Marc Hudson (Manchester), ‘Louder than War: The Carbon Diaries 2015/2017, Teen Fiction and the Apocalpyse’
- Louise Squire (Surrey), ‘Imagining the Unimaginable: Dystopia, Sustainability, and Contemporary Environmental Crisis Fiction’
15:00-16:00 Keynote Address (Research Beehive 2.21)
Dr Keith Williams (Dundee)
‘Seeing the Future: Urban Dystopia in H.G. Wells and Fritz Lang’
Chair: Andrew Shail
16:00-16:30 Refreshments
16:30-18:00 Session Four
Panel 4A – Landscape I (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Maxim Shadurski
- Paul Dobraszczyk (Manchester), ‘Dystopian Ruin: Genealogies of London’s Imagined Destruction’
- Martin Schauss (Warwick), ‘On the History of Natural Destruction: an Apocalyptic Reading of W. G. Sebald’
- Madeleine Scherer (Warwick), ‘The Construction of a Dystopian Landscape: Marina Carr’s Midland Tragedies’
Panel 4B – Authorship & Afterlives (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Gul Dag
- Ben Clarke (North Carolina), ‘The Return to Airstrip One: Nineteen Eighty-Four, Dystopian Fiction, and Edward Snowden’
- Gareth Proskourine-Barnett (Independent), ‘Frankenstein and the Remix’
- Simon Stevenson (Doncaster), ‘Xenofiction: Dystopic Narrative in Philippe Vasset’s ScriptGenerator©®™’
18:30- Conference Dinner (Bar Loco, Newcastle) (delegates must pre-book –£15 per head)
Thursday, 30th April
9:00-10:30 Session Five
Panel 5A – YA Fictions (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Madeleine Scherer
- Bill Hughes (Sheffield), ‘Genre Mutation and the Dialectic of Dystopia in Holly Black’s The Coldest Girl in Coldtown’
- Nicole Shipley (Newcastle, Aus.), ‘“Blood is a strange color. It’s darker than you expect it to be”: Female Adolescence and the Lack of Menstruation in Dystopian Young Adult Fiction’
- Alison Tedman (Buckinghamshire), ‘Moving Mazes: Genre, Hero and Place in Young Adult Dystopian cinema’
Panel 5B – Landscape II (Research Beehive 2.22)
Chair: Fiona Anderson
- Sameerah Mahmood (Huddersfield), ‘The Pesthouse: A Futurescape Post-apocalyptic Craceland’
- Daniel Schlaber (Kiel), ‘The Textuality of Materiality: Will Self’s The Book of Dave’
- Luana Barossi (Sao Paolo), ‘Airgela: The Poetics of Dystopia in The Boy and the World’
Panel 5C – Culture & Civilisation (Research Beehive 2.23)
Chair: Andrea Dietrich
- Antony Mullen (Newcastle), ‘Dystopia After Thatcher: The Case of Never Let Me Go’
- Mark West (Glasgow), ‘A Future Without History: Lauren Groff’s Arcadia’
- Diletta De Cristofaro (Nottingham), ‘Anti-Apocalypses, or Why Is Dystopia So Prevalent in Post-Apocalyptic Fiction?’
10.30-11.00 Refreshments
11.00-12.30 Session Six
Panel 6A – Reading & Resistance (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Shelby Derbyshire
- Anna Holt (Newcastle), ‘Dystopian Final Girls – Feminism in The Hunger Gamesand Divergent Films’
- Rebecca Hursthouse (Lincoln), ‘The Past as Power: The Control and Emulation of History in the Fallout Game Series’
- Rosie Lewis (Durham), ‘Re-envisioning Female Subjectivity, Aesthetics and Collective Resistance in Lizzie Borden’s Born in Flames’
Panel 6B – Conservatism & Capitalism (Research Beehive 2.22)
Chair: Martin Gleghorn
- Amy Bride (Manchester), ‘Apocalypse Now: Commodity Capitalism and Dystopic Currency in Bret Easton Ellis’ Glamorama’
- Adam Bristow-Smith (York), ‘Market Futures: Devaluation as Violence and Self-Justifying Self-Myths in Richard Morgan’s Market Forces’
- William Fingleton (Dublin), ‘Super-Cannes and the Spirit of Terrorism’
12:30-13.15 Lunch
13:15-14:45 Session Seven
Panel 7A – Aldous Huxley (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Reanne Crane
- Michael O’Brien (Glasgow), ‘A Post-Lacanian and Postmodern Interaction with the Utopian Project of Modernity: Ideology and Power in Brave New World’
- Maxim Shadurski (Siedlce), ‘Aldous Huxley’s Utopian Conservatism: between Tradition and Imagination’
- Aleksandra Wawrzyszczuk (Newcastle), ‘“The beauty of tidiness [can] merely [be] an excuse for despotism”: The Implications of Over-organisation for the Modern Legal System’
14.45-15.15 Refreshments
15:15-16:45 Session Eight
Panel 8A – Technology & Resistance (Research Beehive 2.21)
Chair: Dorothy Butchard
- Fran Bigman (Cambridge), ‘Mother Machines?: Technophobia in Recent British Repro-dystopias’
- Martin Gleghorn (Durham), ‘The “Blade Runner Outcome”: The Technological and Temporal Dystopia of Will Self’s Walking to Hollywood’
- Adam Stock (Newcastle), ‘The Social Anatomy of Robots’
16:45-17:45 Keynote Address (Research Beehive 2.21)
Professor Andrzej Gasiorek (Birmingham)
‘”Mischievous Little Animals”: On Thinking Utopianly’
Chair: Katy Madgwick
18.00 Close of Conference