Thursday, February 18, 2010
Dystopi(c)a For A Paper
I've been attempting to come up with a paper topic, and at the moment this is the best I have. I've always found the concept of a dystopia to be extremely interesting and as far as a degree of darkness it's quite difficult to get much darker than an entire society gone completely wrong in some horrible way. So, what I was thinking was for a paper to possibly compare different dystopia societies from a couple of different works. I don't really have any specific ones at the moment, and I would be more than happy to take suggestions.
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I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream would be the most extreme example. The Repairer of Reputations is another.
ReplyDeleteI got the feeling that "Family" was set in the future. I guess you could make the argument that their society is dystopian, but it might be easier to use some of the other texts since it focuses on a few individuals in the family and only mentions people outside the family a few times.
ReplyDelete"The Repairer of Reputations" and "Family" would fit this theme very well. "Family" actually tells us rather a lot about the surrounding society, actually, if you re-read it with that in mind. An argument could be made that "Smoke Ghost" depicts a dystopia in the making, or perhaps a dystopia just coming into its own. "The Mysteries of the Joy Rio" could fit: That's quite a pocket society in that theater, with various (literal) levels. Also relevant in the Straub volumes, but not discussed in class, are Melville's "The Tartarus of Maids," Rice's "The Refugee," Ligotti's "The Last Feast of Harlequin," Straub's "A Short Guide to the City," Saunders' "Sea Oak," Tessier's "Nocturne" -- an increasingly pervasive theme in the anthology, now that you mention it. Another candidate is the Shirley Jackson story invoked in class, "The Lottery."
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