Dystopian Literature

In the dystopian novel Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, a major issue is displayed over the extreme obsession with society’s stability created by fear of humanity’s flaws. Huxley’s novel shows that a government controlled society often becomes too controlling, resulting in loss of freedom in the people. This control can only be prevented by awareness and free-thinking. Huxley develops this political issue through tone, symbolism, and metaphor.

If you were forced to live with faith, or without, which would you choose?

England. 1986. The Church controls the country, and all members of the Secular Movement have been expelled to the Island.

On the Island, religion is outlawed. A gang of boys patrols the community, searching for signs of faith, and punishing any believers.

When an English girl arrives – intent on finding her mother who disappeared, mysteriously, ten years ago – she is swept up in the dangerous games of the gang. But while one boy falls in love with her, the other wants revenge for the wrongs of the past, and, as the violence escalates, the English girl becomes their pawn.

The Godless Boys is a book about faith, and life without faith; about love, and its absence. But above all, it's about power, and how dangerous it can be to stand out from the crowd. Both violent and tender, it’s a remarkable debut, and clearly marks Naomi Wood as a name to note.

Ben Winters’ latest mystery/thriller, Underground Airlines, is set in an America that never fought its Civil War. In the novel, a long series of political compromises between North and South allow slavery to continue to the present day. This is counterintuitive, to say the least. The novel requires that readers imagine a Confederacy that responds to the 1861 assassination of President-elect Abraham Lincoln by abandoning its rebellion and seeking a compromise that would place hard limits on the legality of slavery. Winters’ characters inhabit a world in which assassinations have the effect of cowing those politicians who would oppose slavery into softening their positions. This violence emboldens slaveowners, but never to the point that they consider negotiations to be a zero sum game. They accept that slavery will be profitable enough with mild regulatory oversight.

Cherie Dimaline's The Marrow Thieves presents a post-apocalyptic world in which Canada's government hunts the native populations to extract their ability to dream. As outlined in Tuck and Yang's "Decolonization is not a metaphor," settler colonization seeks to obtain land above all else. However, Dimaline reimagines imperialism when the land has corrupted beyond value. This reorganization of Canadian priorities to native genetics facilitates a reconnection with the land.

Taking up the challenges by literary heroes may be varied in nature and involve a variety of experiences. One of them, which places extraordinary demands before the individual, is the experience of limits, called - after Karl Jaspers - border situation.
Border situation is a moment in which there is a reevaluation of a whole life: according to Bartłomiej Dobroczyński it is coming to one’s own borders - mental, emotional, self-knowledge boundaries, the boundaries of your former world. Border situation makes it necessary to make a choice: surviving it is combined with the loss of original identity, so that places the individual before a special challenge - to build anew their life, bearing in mind what had already happened, on the "the ruins" of the existing, recognized as safe, world. It seems that the border situation appears particularly often in the anti-utopian novels - such are certainly We by J. Zamiatin, Brave New World by A. Huxley, R. Bradbury’s 4510 Farenheit, And came the blissful age by J. Mark, Face to the earth by M. Parowski, This wonderful day by I. Levin and Paradise, the World in Orbit by J. Zajdel. Their heroes at some point are being confronted with a reality other than they imagined it. They have to cope with the knowledge that their previous life was a fiction - in this moment they also have to make a decision, knowing that their whole life depends on that decision, and often - also the existence of others. Whatever they decide, their life changes forever. Regardless of the results of their efforts, their heroism is to build a new identity based not on the utopian (often built on fiction) but on objective reality. Regardless of whether they win this battle, or for their choices they pay the highest price - they win if only they remain faithful to what they had learned about themselves when they had experienced border situation.

The subject of this essay is to, with as many facts as possible, explain, how, throughout the actions of the countries after post- Cold War period, have created both mixture of the over secured and super watched upon everyone world of the “Big Brother”1, and the world of Mustapha Mond and his world government. And also, how those two fictional worlds, have intertwined in today’s securitization practices and the society’s respond to it.

Following the worldwide popularity of Suzanne Collins’s The Hunger Games trilogy (2008-2010), dystopian narratives took the young adult publishing world by storm. The  subsequent dystopian boom in young adult literature offered readers dreadful new worlds that emerged from the ashes of contemporary society after it was destroyed by violent wars, climate change, deadly contagious diseases, and the like.As is widely understood (and some people still pretend to ignore), our society is currently facing an infectious disease that is straining the social order. Young adult dystopian literature has often represented the consequences of a pandemic – some of which consequences we are currently facing as a society today. From novels published at the beginning of this century, such as The Way We  Fa l l by Megan Crewe (2002) and The Last Dog on Earth by Daniel Ehrenhaft (2003), to works like The Eleventh Plague by Jeff Hirsch (2011), Masque of the Red Death by Bethany Griffin (2012-2013), and This Mortal Coil by Emily Suvada (2017-2020), to highlight a few, this literature has explored the loss of human life, the paranoia caused by the fear of being infected, the struggle to find a cure, and how the infection (or the cure) can alter the human body – the body might evolve or retrogress, changing in ways such that it is no longer defined as human.This essay discusses how pandemics and their effects on the human body are represented in recent young adult dystopian texts through the lens of posthuman studies. My analysis will focus on three young adult series: James Dashner’s The Maze Runner trilogy (2009-2011), Marissa Meyer’s The Lunar Chronicles (2012-2015), and Rory Power’s Wilder Girls (2019). In these works, the characters are confronted with the consequences of a viral outbreak, including zombie-like creatures and “unnatural” bodily changes. Due to these bodily changes, one can affirm that the infection provoked by the viral outbreak and/or cure creates posthuman bodies – bodies that threaten social norms by being different from the rule—forcing the reader to rethink what it actually means to be human and deconstructing the dominant idea implemented by the humanist worldview, where humanity is disconnected from the surrounding world.

asserts that it is impossible to know if a machine is intelligent, "cognizant? Conscious? Sentient?" (414). How do we, as end users at the keyboard, know that the person on the other end of the line, that we have never met, is intelligent? By what standards do we judge that? How do we know if they are indeed human? (414). Does intelligence equal human?

Notably, Margaret Atwood prefers to call her future-oriented novel, The Handmaid’s Tale (1985), “speculative fiction” rather than “science fiction,” in order to foreground its characteristic as a cautionary tale extrapolated from things and events in the past. In this sense, prediction is deeply connected with history and nostalgia; the future is something already embedded in the past, and Atwood’s task is to (re-)discover it, not to create it. Meanwhile, criticisms of Atwood’s dystopia tend to evaluate the protagonist’s resistance to authority either as defeatist or militant. Yet what is lacking from these lines of argument is a close re-examination of the concept of resistance itself, which could be achieved by the analysis of nostalgia. As working models for exploring various aspects of nostalgia in The Handmaid’s Tale, the following types are presented: forbidden nostalgia, mythophilia and inhibited nostalgia. The analysis of nostalgia will be combined with that of the notion of trauma; although it appears to be an opposite concept, Offred’s narrative proves that they can be dialectically intertwined. In particular, what is striking in Offred’s nostalgia is that it is rather repetition compulsion than a longing, and homesickness is presented as a chronic condition; this characteristic can be traced back to Atwood’s more explicitly nostalgic novel, Surfacing (1972). Offred is always/already a refugee; her resistance is centred on her refusal of the one-dimensional conception of time and space, yet at the same time, Offred remains as “a blank […] between parentheses. Between other people”.

Written in 1974, the American writer Ursula K. Le Guin's The Dispossessed revolves around the central character Shevek's self-appointed mission to improve the relationship between two planets, Anarres and Urras, by breaking down the walls that are separating these ideological enemies. The novel, in that sense, can be read as one man's search for an ideal state, rather than a description of a utopian/anti-utopian state. Literary scholars generally focus on various aspects of The Dispossessed in terms of its anarchist politics, ecological politics, and revolutionary politics. This article; however, aims to approach the novel from a Lacanian perspective by addressing the protagonist's psyche and his relation to the socio-symbolic orders in the novel. By focusing on the characterization of the relations between the subject and the other in an anarchist (as well as a capitalist culture) in The Dispossessed, this article aims to analyze how the novel provides a path towards an ideal state.

The article Worlds of Lords of Logos. Dystopian Narratives in Literary Fiction revisits fundamental terminological discrepancies functioning within utopian studies in order to propose a world-centered model for analyzing (e)u-/dystopian narratives. First and foremost, the text proposes to focus on utopian storyworlds rather than storylines and to determine their axiolog-ical attribution (i.e. whether they are ideal, eutopian, or non-ideal, dystopian) not by follow-ing a specific genre pattern, but by interacting with them as if they were not separated from the empirical reality. Utopia would, therefore, become eutopia or dystopia only when judged as such by the reader or focalizer, in their hermeneutic meeting with the text. Secondly, it will be argued that utopias and dystopias prove striking similarity from the world-building per-spective, as they either utilize a travel narrative to guide the protagonist from empirical to counterempirical world, or shape an equivalent heterotopia, translating this dual-world opposi-tion into a topography of the walled off asylum and a surrounding wasteland. Since there is nothing positive nor negative in such a way of world-building, any axiological valorization (and, thereby, a recognition of either eu-, or dystopia) would appear only when provided by the character narrator, who can either come from within (in an inclusive type of utopian narra-tive), or from without (in an adaptative type of utopian narrative) the (e)u-/dystopian world. Consequently, the paper will provide tools for interpreting utopias as eutopias or dystopias, along with a selection of world-building and philosophical categories potentially helpful at describing the imagery of dystopian storyworlds comprising the artificial paradise, “todetitis”, conjuration of reality, the fouding lie, anamorphotic illusion of ideal reality, or the eponymous lordship of logos.

SYNOPSIS Literary Dystopia and Attempts to Define It in the International and Czech Contexts This article deals with anti-utopian and dystopian literature, development of the genre and attempts at its definition. The first part contains a description of attributes characteristic of the genre: newspeak, the petrified world, and the division of the world into two fields (Us vs. Them). The author then devotes attention to previous theoretical definitions of dystopia and anti-utopia, including an historical mapping of research in foreign, mainly English studies: works by George Woodcock, Fred Polak, Mark Hillegas, Krishan Kumar, Lyman Tower Sargent and others. The survey of research in the Czech academic field is based on texts by Milada Genčiová, Daniela Hodrová and Petr Hrtánek. In conclusion, the author describes the differences between anti-utopia and dystopia, their delimitation as specific genres, proceeding primarily from the theory of petrified worlds. She also stressess the imp...

İkinci Dünya müharibəsindən sonra təqribən 1950-ci illərdə yaranan və hələ də davam edən çağdaş Amerika ədəbiyyatı dövrü XX əsrin ikinci yarısı-XXI əsrin əvvəllərini əhatə edir. Müasir Amerika ədəbiyyatının meydana gəldiyi zamanda bir çox tarixi hadisələrin baş verməsi ədəbiyyata da öz təsirini göstərdi. Müharibələr, inqilablar, siyasi rejimlər, yeni texnologiyanın təkmilləşdirilməsi və bu kimi dəyişikliklər bir daha sübut etdi ki, utopiya real ola bilməz, lakin antiutopiyalar mövcuddur, daha çoxu da ola bilər. Qlobal siyasi hadisələrin yaranması vətəndaşlar arasında yeni bir qorxuya

This article discusses how utopian and anti-utopian literatures offer alternate visions to find connecting links between the control of space, power and happiness. The focus is on three classics of utopian and dystopian literatures: Thomas More's Utopia (1516), Aldous Huxley's Brave New World (1932), and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949). Through the analysis of these works it is pondered how utopian and anti-utopian societies offer freedom or restrict inhabitants moving and acting in their worlds, and how this is portrayed as a means to measure the quality of life. The article contributes to socially critical literary geography by envisioning various options to imagine the relationship of space and power. The starting presumption in the article is that both utopian and anti-utopian imaginations suggest that freedom to use space is a key factor when defining human happiness.

When mentioning the role of language in characterisation in the dystopian novel, we must remember that little has been written on this. It is almost as if there is general consensus that characters in dystopia are in themselves uninteresting, that they only serve an ideological/philosophical/political role, and that characterisation here is not elaborated, i.e. that these characters are psychologically “incomplete” for the simple reason that their authors see no need for this. The origins of this are found in the prejudice that “complete” and psychologically motivated characters are found in literary Realism, or at least something that resembles the style of Realism. Yet nothing could be further from the truth – it results from a transformation of aesthetic procedure, and it is required of the reader that he or she put in more effort in the novel’s reception.

The Iron Heel has attracted the attention of literary critics and revolutionaries alike for its prescient insights into 20th-century politics, including the rise of fascism in Europe. In his critique of the novel, Leon Trotsky praises Jack London’s “historical foresights,” concluding “we cannot help inclining before the powerful intuition of the revolutionary artist.” However, despite Trotsky’s admiration for London, his claim ultimately limits the novel to a work of speculation without fully acknowledging its purpose as speculative fiction: to form a literary model of political conversion and preservation. Using what Trotsky calls “artistic qualities,” London aims to convert audiences by merging socialist ideology with storytelling not only to spread what he deems “excellent propaganda,” but also to demonstrate fiction’s capacity to preserve political memory. London expands Trotsky’s “intuition” notion to encompass the novel’s speculative elements, such as the recovered-manuscript frame, that enable its political messages to remain timely beyond the early 20th-century. In doing so, London redefines Trotsky’s “revolutionary artist” claim by using speculative fiction to enact artistic and political action through future revolutionaries who took inspiration from The Iron Heel, namely George Orwell.

Student Learning Outcomes
Students will be able to—
1. Demonstrate familiarity with Plato’s concepts of the ideal society as described in his Republic
2. Demonstrate familiarity with the Socratic method of inquiry
3. Argue whether or not the society portrayed in Genesis is “ideal” (why or why not)
4. Construct a definition of what it means to be “human” and argue whether or not animal life or artificial intelligence can ever approach that definition (why or why not)

The novel Herland written by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, known as "A Lost Feminist Utopian Novel", is is published in 1915, at the time when women did not have the same rights as men. In early life of the author, she had a difficult childhood affected by the fact that her father left the family to her mother to raise the children on her own. She lived in poverty and she had to move around a lot which results in the limited education. When she grew up, she suffered from depression and separated from her husband, which is quite a rare case in the time, and became "active in social reform movements and was an advocate of the Nationalist movement, which began with the publication of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), a novel depicting a Socialist, Utopian future." (Gagnon) This utopian novel of Bellamy might be one of the inspiration for Herland, the feminist utopia. However, one of her most famous work is not a fiction, but a non-fiction called Women and Economics, which is a work suggesting for economic independence of women. Many of her other works had influenced greatly on the construction of Utopia in Herland. For example, "Her notions of redefining domestic and childcare chores as social responsibilities to be centralized in the hands of those particularly suited and trained for them reflected her earlier interest in the Nationalist clubs advocated by Edward Bellamy" and "The Man-Made World (1911), in which she distinguished the characteristic virtues and vices of men and women and attributed the ills of the world to the dominance of men." (Encyclopedia Britannica) She believed that both domestic environment and men oppress women. (Gagnon) In general, she dedicated herself to the idea of feminism and women's rights activism.

In many patriarchal cultures, women have generally been equated with home: a private, safe and secure place, in which women function as the primary caregiver and nourisher for their husbands and child(ren). Those material and domestic roles implemented by men have gradually confined women into their homes in favor of magnifying and glorifying male desires; thereby, women cannot establish their sense of personal identity and freewill. Considering those issues, feminist scholars and writers have focused on the relation between home/space and the construction of gender roles and patriarchal ideologies. They struggle to show how women are oppressed and transformed into ‘docile bodies’ by those patriarchal private spheres. They, furthermore, seek to find the ways of de(con)structing the normative gender relations emanated from the spatial arrangement of houses and creating a new female space where women manifest their potential. Among those women is Charlotte Perkins Gilman, a first-wave American feminist, activist and sociologist. Aiming to create an alternative, feminocentric world, Gilman wrote Herland (1915), one of the first women’s utopias of the twentieth century. It is an idealized space of female self-realization and social harmony. However, through the lens of today, Herland is far from being a peaceful matriarchal paradise. To the contrary, it is just a reproduction of patriarchal dictations and binary oppositions in an-all-female world. Hence, basing its arguments on recent discussions on the meaning of home in the contexts of gender-construction and feminist literary writing, this paper will focus on how even a female-oriented home can morph into a dystopian place and imprison women within the fixed and hierarchical structures of patriarchal discourse.

This teaching practice covers up to four hours’ lessons: the first hour will be devoted to the Introduction (Step 0: visualization and comment on a clip from the film Gattaca); the second hour will be spent dealing with Pre-Reading (Step 1: provision of specific details on the author, A. Huxley, his context, his novel Brave New World); the third one will be employed in Skimming and Scanning the extract from the novel (Steps 2 and 3: general meaning comprehension and text structure analysis); the last hour will be destined to the link to another text (Step 4: hints on Never Let me Go by K. Ishiguro, sharing the same issues developed diacronically).

Within the first chapter of the final section of his novel 1984, Orwell creates a climatic sense of terror which is felt not only by Winston, but by the other prisoners in the ministry of love. By examining specific descriptions within the chapter, it become apparent that a sense of fear is created and felt by Winston from his lack of understanding of the environment of the prison he is in, causing him to have a growing sense of forbearing realisation he is soon to face torture, and extremely physically challenging conditions. The depiction of physical weakness and powerlessness is illustrated through Winston's hunger, as well as the other prisoners in the ministry which create dramatic tension which aids the increasing atmosphere of terror within the chapter. When Winston inevitably first arrives in the Ministry of Love, he becomes immediately and progressively uncomfortable in the prison of which he is quite ignorant of. Orwell describes Winston as being 'in a high-ceilinged windowless cell with walls of glittering white porcelain. This sense of surgical cleanliness is predominant in Winston's cell, which ironically portrays the cell as being pleasant, clean and safe. However, Winston is used to living in much less extravagantly and mechanically clean areas that he begins to feel overwhelmed, loosing clarity as to where he is, and in the 'cold light' he 'moved himself mentally from place to place and tried to determine whether he was perched high in the air or buried deep underground.' The phrase 'cold light' aims to trick Winston into feeling he has a sense of security, whilst equally creating tension from the lack of knowledge as to what will happen next. Winston clearly does not know where he is, or how long he will be kept imprisoned, left only with his mind to explore the possibilities of where he may be. The reference to there being 'no windows' in the Ministry of Love also develops Winston's sense of being isolated and trapped from the outside world, as it not only restricts his ability to see where he is being kept, but he cannot see who is coming into the Ministry, and is fully unaware of what will happen to him, increasing his internal terror and panic. Whilst in the waiting room, the concept of time is also lost, as the text reads 'he did not know how long he had been there… with no clocks and no daylight.' The Ministry is a cold and inhumane atmosphere, where prisoners have no natural concepts of anything external to the Ministry, including time, which develops Winston's lack of concept as to where he is or how long he has been there, making him feel powerless and without any form of control. Winston's personal encounters with other prisoners in The Ministry of Love within the first chapter of the final part of 1984 also are a window which creates an atmosphere of terror. Winston observes the difference in behaviour between political criminals and 'common' criminals, noticing 'the astonishing difference in demeanour' between both groups; 'Party prisoners were always silent and terrified, but ordinary criminals seemed to care nothing for anybody.' Winston begins to recognise that the prisoners seen as political criminals had a reason to be afraid, and were given 'all the dirty jobs', however the other criminals did not fear physical abuse or torture. Winston witnesses the attack of another thought criminal, as 'a kick from a guard's boot had broken the fingers of one of his hands' and begins to realise the physical torture he has to face for his crime. Tension and fear is increased in this chapter also from the repeated mention of the words 'room 101', by prisoners. At this point, Winston has not been to this room and is unaware of its uses, however the sense of terror greatly increases as the prisoner's whisper about it in fear, and when prisoners were called to the room their reactions frightened Winston. One woman 'seemed to shrivel and turn a different colour when she heard the words.' By specifically stating 'when she heard the words', Orwell is exaggerating the ability of even the suggestion of room 101 to induce hysteria and fear in people. A second prisoner is instructed to return to the room one prisoner and screamed; 'Do anything to me!

Książka prezentuje nowatorskie podejście do tematyki zombie w literaturze. Miejsce centralne zajmują w niej rozważania genologiczne i antropologiczne, których celem jest zdyskontowanie powszechnego wyobrażenia o narracjach zombiecentrycznych jako tekstach wyłącznie horrorowych czy niezaangażowanych w istotne dyskursy. Popkultura stanowi bardzo czuły rezonator wszelkich przemian, kryzysów czy paradygmatów, co oznacza, że znajdują one odbicie w jej artefaktach. Dlatego istotnym aspektem zawartych w książce rozważań staje się prezentacja zaangażowania literatury zombiecentrycznej w przepracowywanie doświadczeń konfliktów współczesności. Wszystkie te kwestie są boleśnie niedostrzegalne dla wielu badaczy, przyjmujących a priori, że wytwory nienależące do mainstreamu czy niezakorzenione w tradycji literackiej nie odznaczają się wysokoartystycznością bądź reprezentują wyłącznie walor rozrywkowy. Książka "Narracje zombiecentryczne..." ma na celu wskazanie czy podpowiedzenie nieco innej drogi bądź sposobu oglądu tekstów wpisujących się w popkulturę i obudowanych wokół bardzo symbolonośnej figury zombie.

In this paper I will attempt to examine cases of emotional appropriation and manipulation within a political context as portrayed in the classical myth of Theseus and the Labyrinth which, I propose, serves as a model for Suzanne Collins’ trilogy, The Hunger Games (2008-2010). I will engage in a comparative reading of the common ground these two narratives share through the theories of Louis Althusser, Guy Debord and Michel Foucault arguing that Collins rewrites the mythical Labyrinth, a symbol of political and divine power, as a panoptical technological dispositive which functions as a televised arena of multilayered interpellations and emotional manipulation. This new labyrinth utilizes the penetrative gaze of the camera in order to mould the emotions of its subjects and perpetuate its sovereignty. Moreover, I will explore how both Theseus and Katniss are placed in this labyrinthine structure of power and how they appropriate the tools of sovereignty in order to manipulate emotions so as to overthrow it. However, this victorious emergence from the labyrinth entails detrimental repercussions on both Katniss and Theseus, as they are eventually both alienated, marginalized and emotionally crippled. In short, I will attempt to read the classic and the modern text through a common, contemporary theoretical axis in order to underpin the sense of continuity from past to present regarding the issue of political manipulation of emotions.

BEST SMALL FICTIONS reprint (Sonder Press 2020). This flash-fiction is the opening of "A Terrible Racket," a novel-in-progress. The action takes place on a hill-top street, Caiseas, looking west over the Caribbean, where an invalid, Gabriel, and his wife Marta, make the best of what is left to them from the Glory Days. The sexual undercurrents and post-apocalyptic backdrop which run throughout the novel are introduced here.

Student Learning Outcomes
At end of this class students will be able to…
1. Identify & Discuss some of the classical mythology & history that inspired Suzanne Collins’ novels.
2. Discuss the major themes and ideas in the novel, such as dystopias, totalitarianism, oppression, scapegoating, death games, PTSD and reality television
3. Identify and discuss parallels in the students’ own and other world cultures.