The possibility of reconciliation between the two Koreas and a potential change of the political regime in North Korea raises the question of the urban futures of North Korean cities, which at the moment serve as a stage for power consolidation through the monumental propaganda of the present regime. This paper examines an urban design project that imagines urban future of Pyongyang in 2050 and its colossal socialist era monuments after an assumed unification. Instead of erasing the socialist past of the city by removing the existing monuments (which was the practice in other socialist countries), this project proposes adding new layers of monuments that would represent and commemorate the new political and economic realities of ‘unification,’ and at the same time preserve the identity and legibility of the city. This alternative strategy was made possible by combining design thinking with the scenario technique utilized in Future Studies. Within the framework of the established scenario and politico-economic circumstances it compels, the method of writing History of the future was developed as a tool for envisioning an urban reality of 2050 Pyongyang, from which the Grid of Moments project would arise. The resulting project, conceived within the fictional story, allows historical and future ideologies, represented by the historical and new monuments, to coexist in Pyongyang through concurrent and respective acknowledgement. In this way, the role of architecture is shifted from serving the political regime towards acting as a social critique, as well as inducing a social transformation. These thought strategies were enabled by approaching design through scenario and storytelling method developed within it, as it left space for more imagination and creativity, and introduced a degree of objectivity to the design process by allowing different ideologies to be considered.
an English novelist, short-story writer and screenwriter, whose ravishingly refined prose style intensifies his own subversive humour and disquieting subject matter, has published more than ten novels. His work falls into two distinct periods: an early one, culminating in the publication of his short story collections First Love, Last Rites (1975) and In Beh\>een the Sheets(\91'S), earns McEwan the reputation o f a controversial writer who is obsessed with "the perverse, the grotesque, and the macabre"; his later works display, as David Malcolm puts it, "a more mature engagement with the wider world of history and society," focusing much more on psychological and moral complexities. Although these later novels reveal considerable growth in the range and depth o f his work, they are still laced with a sense of dread and suspense. Also, they deal with a number o f recurring themes using a range o f self-reflexive forms, the relationship between fact and fiction, intertextual references and historical context. Adopting an "overtly political approach," while, at the same time, emphasizing the private psyche o f individuals, McEwan underlines the distinction between subjective and objective realities. He often plays with these differences, prompting readers to reconsider their critical assumptions about literature. It seems that he enjoys playing tricks and his new novel is certainly another one. M cEwan's latest novel Sweet Tooth is a story o f Serena Frome, a "quite gorgeous" Cambridge math student who meets Tony Canning, an older history professor, that secures a position for her with MI5, the domestic counterespionage service. She takes part in a secret operation which recruits and funds anticommunist writers, and thus, embarks on the cultural front o f the Cold War. Being a quick and voracious reader, Serena is given the task o f enticing a young novelist, Tom Haley, into this program. She becomes infatuated with Haley's short stories and then, after meeting him in person, with Haley himself. As the novel progresses, this romantic affair blossoms and evolves into real love, making Serena feel more and more uncomfortable with her subterfuge. How long is she to maintain her cover story? Is she to reveal that she works for MI5? And how are her superiors to react when they discover she has taken her mark as her lover?The novel does not only deal with the social turmoil o f the early 1970s -the strikes, the IRA terrorist attacks and espionage intrigues, the hippie culture and its false optimism -but it also explores the boundary between reality and fiction, the relationship between the storyteller and the reader. This subject matter McEwan has examined in his previous novels, perhaps most obviously in The Innocent (1990) and Atonement (2001). While The Innocent is primarily concerned with the disastrous effects o f history on individual's life, Sweet Tooth, although dealing with the politics o f culture, centers more on the process o f writing and the nature of
Faculty of Philosophy is paper centers on the politics of fear and paranoia in omas Pynchon's no el The Crying of Lot 49 and David Lynch's lm Blue Velvet. ese artists posit narrative critiques of American culture of consumption and history of imperialism, complicating traditional ideas of race and nationhood.ey pro oke the very roles, rules and institutional practices that shield oppression and unfairness, enable displacement and alienation, deny subjectivity and personal identity. By underscoring a sense of uncertainty and conspiracy, Pynchon and Lynch attempt to understand paranoia as a symptomatic condition of postmodernity. ey approach it in terms of the psycho-cultural processes that induce paranoid anxiety within the depthlessness and agmentation in postmodern society. roughout their work, they explore the notions of fear and terror, suggesting that America has become a world of paralysis, cultural exhaustion and death. e society's rubbish and its waste, the contact with the disadvantaged, a series of objects which, like the hieroglyphic streets, have to be decoded, represent the path typically chosen by Pynchon and Lynch's major characters. ese authors produce images imbued with the apocalyptical chaos and nihilism, referring to the erosion of values, the decline of civility, the denial of truth.Pynchon, Lynch, postmodernism, fear, terror, paranoia.
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