This edited collection examines the effects that macrosystems have on the figuration of our everyday-of microdystopias-and argues that microdystopic narratives are part of a genre that has emerged in contract to classic dystopic manifestations of world-shattering events. From different methodological and theoretical positions in fieldworks ranging from literary works and young adult series to concrete places and games, the contributors in Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment sound the depths of an existential sense of shrinking horizons - spatially, temporally, emotionally, and politically. The everyday encroachment on our sense of spatial orientation that gradually and discreetly shrinks the horizons of possibilities is demonstrated by examining what the form of the microdystopic look like when they are aesthetically configured. Contributors analyze the aesthetics that play a particularly central and complex role in mediating, as well as disrupting, the parameters of dystopian emergences and emergencies, reflecting an increasingly uneasy relationship between the fictional, the cautionary, and the real. Scholars of media studies, sociology, and philosophy will find this book of particular interest.
Asbjorn Gronstad is professor of visual culture in the Department of Information Science and Media Studies at the University of Bergen. Lene M. Johannessen is professor of American literature in the Department of Foreign Languages at the University of Bergen.
Table of Contents Acknowledgments Preface Henrik Gustafsson Chapter 1: Microdystopias Asbjorn Gronstad and Lene Johannessen Chapter 2: Toward a Diagnostics of the Present: Popular Culture, Post-Apocalyptic Macro-Dystopia, and the Petrification of Politics Holger Poetzsch Chapter 3: The Electronic Superhighway Collapses: The Silences of Don DeLillo's The Silence Oyvind Vagnes Chapter 4: Microdystopias and the Encoded Uncanny in Ira Levin and Rick and Morty Michael J. Prince Chapter 5: Unfeeling the Future: Euphoria, Teen Angst and the Micro-dystopic Anders Lysne Chapter 6: 'Heavenly Days' and Everyday Dystopia in Superstore Lene Johannessen Chapter 7: Nomadland, Neoliberalism and the Microdystopic Asbjorn Gronstad Chapter 8: Micro-dystopia and the Question of Wilderness Knut Rio Chapter 9: Cultural Appropriation or Cultural Appreciation? Unpacking the microtopias of Beyonce's Black is King Nahum Welang Chapter 10: 'It's our secret, right?': An Investigation of Homelessness in HBO's Mare of Easttown Janne Stigen Drangsholt About the Contributors
"Have we become exhausted by mass culture's indulgence in exorbitant spectacles of apocalyptic destruction and civilizational collapse, and turned instead to more modest and nuanced portrayals of the on-going "microdystopias" of everyday life? This scintillating collection of essays by a team of astute Norwegian cultural critics makes a strong case for the transition from fearing the world will end with a bang to experiencing it as an endless series of desperate whimpers." -- Martin Jay, University of California, Berkeley
