New Books In Literary Studies

Are we already living in some kind of fascist or technocratic dystopia? How do we avert the AI dystopia? These are the types of things that you'll see thrown about in op-eds and analysis pieces all over the net and the press. Dystopia is doing some kind of work in our political vocabulary that goes beyond a reference to those iconic dystopian novels or their sort of contemporary successors. … Sometimes politics seems to be so absorbed in the train of fantasy and the imaginary that it becomes worrying. But like it or not, or like specific expressions of the political imagination or not, the political arena is an arena of the imagination. Habermas once said that people don't fight for abstractions, but they do battle with images.                                                                                                                    – Matthew Benjamin Cole, NBN interview 2025 After centuries of contemplating utopias, late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century writers began to warn of dystopian fut