Publication details
Reaching Beyond the Literary : Dystopias and Political Activism
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| Year of publication | 2019 |
| Type | Appeared in Conference without Proceedings |
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| Citation | |
| Description | The paper analyzes dystopian worlds being appropriated in the contemporary setting for the purposes of social, political, or environmental activism as well as reactional forms of art. It explores how dystopian worlds alternate between the state of active creation by the author and static phase of being finished, as described by Linda Hutcheon in The Canadian Postmodern, and again an active phase of being interpreted, reformed, repurposed in another time and space. Utilizing the theories of Lubomír Doležel, specifically the three degrees of historical-knowledge recovery which he introduces in his work Possible Worlds of Fiction and History, the paper explores new ways in which historical or factual events encoded in dystopian novels are reconstructed and reused. The paper concentrates on several dystopian stories including Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Oryx and Crake, and The Heart Goes Last, as well as others such as the story of Noah’s Ark from the book of Genesis, George Orwell’s Animal Farm, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Further, the paper emphasizes the performative aspect embedded in certain occurrences of activism and draws upon the theories of Augusto Boal and Erika Fischer-Lichte whose scholarships both revolve around the topic of performance and the spectator of an artwork becoming the active force of change. Via the activism described, one may not only notice the interplay between the past, present, and future, but also ways in which the imaginary may extrapolate what the world might look like if the interpretations of these activists are made real. |
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