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Class notes Contemporary Dystopian Fiction
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Class notes Contemporary Dystopian Fiction
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Week 1 28/09/2021 NT-1 - 121Assessment
- Mid-Semester Assessment: Critical Re ection (30%)
- Word count: 1200-1500 words or equivalent
- Due: Thursday 21 October
- Final Essay: 2000 words – titles to be distributed by Lecture 4 (70%)
- Due: Monday 13 December
Terminology
- Utopia —> no place + good place (eutopia)
- u = no; topia = place —> no place
- You’re not only writing about something that doesn’t exist but something that’s
perfect.
- eu = good; topia = place —> good place
- Utopia is an imaginary place but also a good place, a perfect place.
- Anti-utopia —> a book that says that imagining a perfectly organised world is a bad idea.
- The book is set up to be perfect, but it is criticising the idea of imagining a perfect
world.
- Utopias are in themselves bad.
- Critical utopia / critical dystopia —> a text that imagines such a world but encourages us
to think about what might be wrong with it or how to avoid future problems.
- Dystopia —> the dramatisation of what happens when a world is created, deliberately or by
accident, that makes life terrible for all or many people in it/ Sometimes also post-
apocalyptic or following environmental / man-made collapse of various systems.
- It’s a bad place.
- It’s about the systems and the structures.
- It is possible for a world, real or imaginary, to be a utopia for some members and dystopia for
others (eg. Panem in The Hunger Games).
Some examples of utopian ction
- Utopia by Sir Thomas Moore / News from Nowhere by William Morris / Looking Backward by
Edward Bellamy / Herland by Charlotte Perkins Gilman.
- These texts often respond to directly to one another
- Critiquing and rejecting the ideals in the previous. Examples
- Or nding holes in their vision of a “perfect world”
- Utopias are pretty boring to read. Interesting books need con ict and di culties because
otherwise you have no plot, utopias don’t have that as they’re “perfect”
Utopias
- Fin-de-siècle (end of 19th century) was the great age of the utopia in western culture
- Scienti c, sociological, psychological, architecture; progress and optimism.
- Message —> change one thing, change everything (money, work, gender relations, religion)
- But there was always gaps, Edward Bellamy didn’t think about women in Looking Backward,
where he xes the problem of social economic inequality.
- More importantly individual freedom is generally compromised.
- The utopian impulse is never far away from totalitarianism and eugenics, even when it
genuinely wants to improve things for the majority.
Postmodernism: collapse / fear of totalising systems
- “Fragmentation, indeterminacy, and intense distrust of all universal or totalising discourses
are the hallmark op postmodern thought”
- The stereotypical novel in the 19th century was a detective ction
- After the world wars this changed from detective ction to science ction in the postmodern
world.
Utopia to dystopia
- Utopia is a place where everything works.
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, - Successful dystopia —> uncomfortable for many people, but it’s successful for the people in
power.
- Architecture is one of the ways in which power can be displayed.
- Can be used as a way to coerce people to adhere to certain rules.
Everything that has “The Cambridge Companion to…” in it is super clear and super well explained
in understandable language. “an introduction to / a companion to” —> these will be your friends
20th century as dystopia
- Everything was really optimistic at the start of the 20th century, and then everything went bad
and people started distressing everything.
Characteristics of a dystopia
- Illusion of utopian world created by corrupt / excessive authorities
- Corporate. Technological, bureaucratic. Religious, philosophical/ ideological power
- And /or mob rule and unrestrained violence
- Control of information, thought, language through surveillance, encouraging great and
distrust, propaganda.
- A gurehead or concept is worshipped and/or feared by the population
- Fear of the outside world
- Citizens are dehumanised and are denied individual choice
- Divided into groups or made to conform to the whole
- Also a lack of control, or failure of existing systems
- Caused by excessive technological, or environmental failure —> power grab or power
vacuum
- Possibility of resistance —> protagonist who sees past the norm or. Is less afraid
Dystopian protagonists
- Utopian protagonist —> often comes from elsewhere and must be taught why things are the
way they are
- Dystopian protagonist —> is already in the system / imagined future, and trapped by it.
- They will be shoved out of the magic circle of humanity and realise the system will have
to change.
- Alienated and unable to adjust - allows us as readers a way. Into understanding this
unfamiliar society.
- Begins to question the system —> learning the truth about. How power operates/
- Resistance and rebellion- though not always successful.
- Employs a language and/or personal and social memory as a means of regaining some
power and control.
- Social memory comes back a lot, it hasn’t always been like that.
- But may end up replacing the system in slightly di erent form – optimistic vs pessimist.
Contemporary Issues
- Why do you think dystopian ction experienced a resurgence around the end of the twentieth
century and the beginning of the twenty- rst?
- Should it be read as alarmist or realist?
- Do you think that this kind of ction o ers useful models for working through social and
cultural problems?
- Or does it trivialise, sensationalise, or distract from “real” issues?
- Have I left anything out in these pictures (Trump, Brexit, surveillance, gender and
reproductive rights, ecological concerns)?
- How do you feel about studying dystopian ction during a pandemic?
Week 2 05/10/2021 NT-1 - 60
Women’s Worlds in Science Fiction
- “Science ction provides a space where writers can seriously address the challenge
articulated by Karen Fowler: ‘Just ask yourself, if we weren’t taught to be women, what
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, would we be? (Ask yourself this question even if you’re a man, and don’t cheat by changing
the words).’”
- Francis Stevens, ‘Friend Island’ (1918)
- Women have taken over all of the male roles
- Leslie Francis Stone, ‘The Conquest of Gola’ (1931)
- John Wyndham, ‘Consider Her Ways’ (1956)
- His way of imagining what would happen if women took over the world —> it’s
horrible.
- Marge Piercy, Woman on the Edge of Time (1967 – imagines a future feminist world
without gender distinctions)
- Joanna Russ, The Female Man (1975)
- James Tiptree Jr. (Alice Sheldon), ‘Houston, Houston, Do You Read?’ (1976)
- Sheri S. Tepper, The Gate to Women’s Country (1988 – also discusses issues around
control of reproduction).
- Imaginative ction set in imaginative worlds to shake up gender roles and sexuality
- Imagine a world where things to do with gender have been shaken up. Most are more
optimistic than the handmaid’s tale but not all are.
- Atwood asks: “what if things were worse than the current situation”, whereas most other
people ask “what if it was better than it is now”
- Sci- can be quite optimistic and forward-looking.
- Dystopia is the sci- but with depressing elements thrown in here.
Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Herland (1915)
- In the handmaid’s tale people are turned into decorative object rather than them being
treated as people.
- Most of the tension comes from the men trying to understand that the women in herland are
people.
- Memory is important in the handmaid’s tale
- I cant remember my daughter’s face
- I don’t remember the story
- I will wiggle around the story, cannot construct it in a realistic way
- Memory and narrative is uncertain (both handmaid’s tale and herland)
- Construction of gender identity and power roles
- When women are marked as vulnerable, it’s easy to put them in a position where you
can take power over her
- Unreliable memories and unreliable narration
Problems with Herland
- Place where sticking with one gender has ruled out most of the ills of society.
- Women in herland were not allowed to raise their own children, unless they were “ t for that
supreme task”
- Terms like utopia and dystopia are not complete terms, it depends on the position you’re in
as to how you view it.
- Even if the position is not acknowledged in the book, it’s still there for literary scholars to
uncover.
Ursula Le Guin, The Left Hand of Darkness (1969)
- Set on a planet where people only develop gender characteristics once a month – can be
either male or female, almost at random.
- The time during which they develop marked gendered characteristics and can reproduce is
called being “in kemmer.”
- Main character is a male envoy from another planet trying to understand the culture and to
navigate his own gendered assumptions.
- Le Guin was criticised by feminist critics because, while the androgyny is revolutionary, the
Gethenians are referred to as “he” when not “in kemmer.”
- She was reluctant to make up a pronoun (as other writers were doing at the time) – problem
is now solved in Western culture by use of singular “they.”
- General info
- It’s set on a planet that’s mostly winter, there’s no gender characteristics.
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