Description
The point of introducing these two stories in such a brief manner is to attempt to illustrate how important the past is to them. These are dystopian fictions which bring that past palpably into their fictions of the future. Those futures are unimaginable without those pasts and those pasts are held responsible for those imagined terrible futures. Readers of these fictions cannot look away from that past.Now compare the model of dystopia which emerged in the later nineteenth-century and was consolidated by the mid-twentieth century. This is the narrative form of dystopian fiction scholars refer to as the classic dystopia. I will take here Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932) and George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) as my examples. Both dystopian fictions mourn a past they can barely remember. Their lack of remembering and the melancholy it evokes within the text, is offered to the reader as her position too: this past that is absent is and was a wanted thing, it is the standard by which the dystopian present could be measured and found wanting (if only that past can be accessed).
المدة | مايو 17 2024 |
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عُقِد في | University of Leeds, United Kingdom |
درجة الإدراك | دولي |