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”It follows that there are two ways for the nature and use of human power to change. One is that an order might issue from the palace, a command upon the people saying ‘It is thus.’ But the other, the more certain, the more inevitable, is that those thousand thousand points of light should each send a new message. When the people change, the palace cannot hold.”
(Alderman, The Power 4)
The current political climate seems to have inspired a number of authors in the English-speaking world to write dystopian fiction. In the last three years alone, a slew of dystopian novels were published (e.g. Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016), Louise Erdrich’s Future Home of the Living God (2017), Leni Zumas’ Red Clocks (2018), Christina Dalcher’s Vox (2018), Bina Shah’s Before She Sleeps (2018), Sophie Mackintosh’s The Water Cure (2018), Sam J. Miller’s Blackfish City (2018), Ben Smith’s Doggerland (2019), John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019), …). Dystopias, according to Fátima Vieira, have two main aims:
- On the one hand, the readers are led to realize that all human beings have (and will always have) flaws, and so social improvement – rather than individual improvement – is the only way to ensure social and political happiness; on the other hand, the readers are to understand that the depicted future is not a reality but only a possibility that they have to learn to avoid. (in The Cambridge Companion to Utopian Literature, ed. Gregory Claeys, 17).
In this course we are going to look at three British contributions to the genre. One is a classic and defining text, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), and the other two are very recent: Naomi Alderman’s The Power (2016) and John Lanchester’s The Wall (2019). We are going to analyse the power structures, imbalances, and reversals these three texts present and discuss in how far they represent the concerns of their time.
Please purchase the following editions. You have to have read Orwell before the start of term.
Alderman, Naomi. The Power. Penguin, 2017. ISBN-10: 9780670919963 / ISBN-13: 978-0670919963
Lanchester, John. The Wall. Faber & Faber, 2019. ISBN-10: 0571298729 / ISBN-13: 978-0571298723
Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. 1949. Penguin, 2008. ISBN-10: 0141036141 / ISBN-13: 978-0141036144 |
