Microdystopias

In contrast to classic dystopia’s manifestations of world-shattering and -changing events, Microdystopias: Aesthetics and Ideologies in a Broken Moment introduces and develops the idea of microdystopia as the emerging genre for our times of imperceptibly shrinking horizons of possibilities in relation to film, series, and literature.

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 contrast 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 diminishes the horizons of possibilities is demonstrated by examining what the forms 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.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Preface

Henrik Gustafsson

Chapter 1: Microdystopias

Asbjørn Grønstad and Lene Johannessen

Chapter 2: Toward a Diagnostics of the Present: Popular Culture, Post-Apocalyptic

Macro-Dystopia, and the Petrification of Politics

Holger Pötzsch

Chapter 3: The Electronic Superhighway Collapses: The Silences of Don DeLillo’s The Silence

Øyvind Vågnes

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

Asbjørn Grønstad

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