Open research questions in Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
27 unresolved questions extracted from the limitations and future-work sections of 2,983 Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction papers in our library. Each links back to the study that raised it.
What the literature leaves open
Du Bois’s first novel, The Quest of the Silver Fleece (1911), which has been called a “spiritual epic of cotton,” was inspired by Frank Norris’s “epic of wheat” The Octopus (1901), though the connection is rarely explored.
Science fiction works that problematize misanthropy as a sociocultural category suggest that human society reflects human nature: human communities are a product of human mental and material organization, and thus the lack of agreement between proclaimed social and cultural values and corresponding behavior represents a product of human thought and actions.
Misanthropic Aspects of Science Fiction: The Examples of Battlestar Galactica and Borislav Pekić’s Atlantis · 2022 · DOIAbstract This essay will explore a different aspect of the meanings attributed to the activist group FEMEN that has hitherto been underexplored, the utopian.
Linking his genre and medium influences, and foregrounding themes which have not been addressed in previous criticism, I show that VanderMeer’s innovations in the novel have produced a post-critical or even post-political form of fiction.
Although there is a great deal of available material on using nontraditional resources for teaching sociology, the pedagogical uses of science fiction have not been examined for 20 years.
Republication of “Science Fiction and Introductory Sociology: The <i>Handmaid</i> in the Classroom” · 2020 · DOIIllustrating her argument with an analysis of Hard Times by Charles Dickens, the philosopher explains that the novel, quite JOANNA KLARA TESKE 106 this recognition of the moral significance of the novel is often limited to the “traditional” realistic novel, whereas it seems important to appreciate the less obvious achievement of the more experimental fiction.
Moral Commitment of the Realistic, Modernist and Postmodern Novel · 2013Rather than a choice between system or agent, he calls upon scholars to approach this dilemma an open question: how far have people actually been able to make their own history in this case or that, under these circumstances or those? According to Robbins, such approach will help us understand what can and can't be done about global injustice and thus how our interpretive puzzles do or don't contribute to that goal (50).
While the extent to which the scholarship will take up this expanded understanding of naturalism's work remains to be seen, the most important accomplishment in this impressively researched, theorized, and textually engaged study is its interjection of new life into a deeply contextualized vision of naturalism.
A colleague of Roland Barthes at the CNRS in the 1950s and cowriter and friend of Cornelius Castoriadis until the latter's death, Edgar Morin has until recently been too little known in the English-speaking world.
In their vivid depictions of late-19th-century New York life, both Cahan's The Rise of David Levinsky (1917) and Yezier-ska's Bread Givers (1925) detail in an especially dramatic fashion a story that had not been explored before in America's urban novel: the Eastern European Jewish immigrant's adaptation to America's consumer culture.
“Go, Make Yourself for a Person”: Urbanity and the Construction of an American Identity in the Novels of Abraham Cahan and Anzia Yezierska · 2001 · DOIThe movie heroes display their enviable forms for all to gaze upon, yet Nick, rather than reveal the consummate hero’s body, [End Page 988] remains elusive and shadowy, never far from the borderlands.
95 T h e continued agitation in behalf of and eventual pardon of T o m Mooney persuaded Freeman that democracy contained a possibility of eventual justice that was lacking under any other system.
In conclusion, science fiction, while a minor form, has valid literary merits which can and should be explored. The Fosterites began as a cult whose founder recognized the state of sexual repression and knew how to cash in on it: 952 JOURNAL OF POPULAR CULTURE The Reverend Foster, self-ordained-or ordained bv God.
<b>Stranger in a Strange Land:</b> Science Fiction as Literature of Creative Imagination, Social Criticism, and Entertainment · 1972 · DOIThe family’s utopia is powerful precisely because it reveals what mainstream society lacks; it is insufficient because it cannot replace society as a whole.
Conflict and Reconciliation between Spiritual Titanism and Mainstream Values in Captain Fantastic · 2026 · DOIWhile Hartman's work has become central to contemporary debates in Black Studies and beyond, its implications for the practice of critique—particularly in relation to Foucault—remain underexplored.
Ana Blandiana's literary prose acquires, in the sequence entitled Rochia de înger [The Angel's Dress], the particular relevance of a fantastical - oneiric writing in which the (supposedly) real data are mixed up to total confusion with the data of a dream version of the existing.
It was found that the outlook of his characters from the early period of the artist's work is limited by the framework of ordinary being and outlook, which leads to the lack of self-confidence, the impossibility to make decisions, the inability to think creatively.
The contradiction between Heinlein’s self-portrayal as broad minded and unbiased on issues of race and religion and the descriptions of East Asians as menacing and untrustworthy Others that suffuse his fiction has not been systematically investigated until now.
What should we call what we had been having?” What to call, how to refer, what to grasp—all open questions, in a milieu in which so very much is happening inside and outside what is and is not happening.
This article fills a gap in the literature of migration by examining how realist and fictional narratives of craft operate to reify and resist the institutionalized forms of oppression that intersect to produce precarity and migration.
The Philosopher’s Pupil provides an example of how a dystopian inner space can be created within a pedagogical relationship when attention of this kind is lacking.
By drawing on biographical and archival visual data, with a focus on the relatively underexplored live show, an elucidation is afforded of what is really monstrous about Lady Gaga.
While Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon are icons of the French existential movement—each being the influential progenitors of feminist theory and postcolonial studies, respectively—their names, lives, and works are rarely examined in concert.
These familiar oppositions, moreover, have been limited to a handful of notably masculinist texts; naturalism's reach has not been extended to fictions by Alice Dunbar-Nelson, Angelina Weld Grimké, or Gertrude Stein, nor, incidentally, to important nonfiction authors such as Sigmund Freud, G.
The moral component is lacking here, not because it is in any way inimical to Sammler, but because in the social world he inhabits it more and more assumes the barrenness of a gratuitous emotion.
Most-cited papers in Utopian, Dystopian, and Speculative Fiction
- Thinking with Trans Now · Social Text · 2020 · 59 citations
- The six scenario archetypes framework: A systematic investigation of science fiction films set in the future · Futures · 2020 · 47 citations
- The Logic of the In-Visible: Decolonial Reflections on the Change of Epoch · Theory Culture & Society · 2020 · 47 citations
- Pursuing “Wellness”: Considerations for Media Studies · Television & New Media · 2020 · 37 citations
- Black Insecurity at the End of the World · MELUS Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States · 2021 · 31 citations
- Writing sociological fiction · Qualitative Research · 2021 · 24 citations
- Stolen Life, Stolen Time · South Atlantic Quarterly · 2022 · 22 citations
- Literary Genealogies and the Kinship of Black Modernity · American Literary History · 2020 · 22 citations
- Everyday utopias and social reproduction · Current Sociology · 2023 · 19 citations
- “Sticking It to the Man”: r/wallstreetbets, Generational Masculinity and Revenge <b>in Narratives of our Dystopian Capitalist Age</b> <sup>1</sup> · Anthropology Now · 2021 · 17 citations
Most recent work
- Science Fiction as a Science Driver · Physics · 2026
- Posthuman Care and Liquid Dystopia in Klara and the Sun · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- PANOPTICONS OF THE DIGITAL AGE: SURVEILLANCE, BIOPOWER, AND THE POLITICS OF VISIBILITY IN ORWELL'S "NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR" AND EGGERS' "THE CIRCLE" · Zenodo (CERN European Organization for Nuclear Research) · 2026
- The Paradigm Divergence of Collective Redemption and Individual Awakening: The Ethical Narrative of Chinese and Western Science Fiction—A Comparative Study Centered on Liu Cixin’s The Three-Body Problem and Asimov’s Foundation · Studies in Linguistics and Literature · 2026
- AFROFUTURIST PROJECTIONS: CULTURAL IDENTITY AND SPECULATIVE FICTION IN NNEDI OKORAFOR'S WHO FEARS DEATH · ShodhKosh Journal of Visual and Performing Arts · 2026
- La science-fiction et le sublime: une réduction du style à l'objet? Note sur une réflexion de Claire Cornillon · OpenEdition (OpenEdition) · 2026
- Mapping Shadows: Eco-Dystopia in Margaret Attwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale · SMART MOVES JOURNAL IJELLH · 2026
- Conflict and Reconciliation between Spiritual Titanism and Mainstream Values in Captain Fantastic · Journal of Social Science and Humanities · 2026
- El abandono de la utopía y afirmación de la distopía: El paraíso perdido en la discusión filosófica Moderna · Euphyía · 2026
- Troubling dystopia in Octavia Butler’s <i>Kindred</i> · Textual Practice · 2026
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