...Characteristics Utopia: A place, state, or condition that is ideally perfect in respect of politics, laws, customs, and conditions. Dystopia: A futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control. Dystopias, through an exaggerated worst-case scenario, make a criticism about a current trend, societal norm, or political system. Characteristics of a Dystopian Society • • • • • • • • • Propaganda is used to control the citizens of society. Information, independent thought, and freedom are restricted. A figurehead or concept is worshipped by the citizens of the society. Citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance. Citizens have a fear of the outside world. Citizens live in a dehumanized state. The natural world is banished and distrusted. Citizens conform to uniform expectations. Individuality and dissent are bad. The society is an illusion of a perfect utopian world. Types of Dystopian Controls Most dystopian works present a world in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through one or more of the following types of controls: • Corporate control: One or more large corporations control society through products, advertising, and/or the media. Examples include Minority Report and Running Man. Bureaucratic control: Society is controlled by a mindless bureaucracy through a tangle of...
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...Everyone dreams with the ridiculous idea of having a perfect world without problems, without suffer, without greed, and even with immortality, but what if we found what we were looking for, would it still be perfect. Many talented writers attempted to illustrate the opposite idea that people had about a perfect world because it would create sense into a broken society that just needed a little healing. Before it could be too late, Aldous Huxley wrote Brave New World with dense dystopian characteristics that certainly painted some sort of dark image in the minds of readers about the type of world that they would face in a distant future. Dystopian novels essentially illustrate a futuristic world that seems perfect in the eyes of others, but...
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...Utopian literature is a genre that is characterized by a perfect society. A utopia is a place where everybody is equal. No one is better looking than anyone else. Nobody is stronger than anybody else. Normally a perfect society becomes an imperfect, or dystopian society. In the story “Harrison Bergeron” by Kurt Vonnegut, the handicap general claims to have a perfect society. In the book it says ”...Everybody was finally equal. They weren’t only equal before God and the law. They were equal every which way.” (Vonnegut 1). This portrays a utopian society because nobody had to worry about being better than anybody else. The world was finally a “perfect” place. “The television program was suddenly interrupted for a news bulletin. It wasn’t clear at first as to what the bulletin was about was about, since the announcer, like all announcers, had a serious speech impediment. For half a minute, and in a state of high excitement, the announcer tried to say ladies and gentlemen.” (Vonnegut 2). In the story, they tried to create a utopia by handicapping people to make everyone equal. Also, because of the handicap...
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...In 1949, George Orwell wrote and published his final novel 1984 about a utopian society, Oceania, on the surface and a dystopian society when looked into further into through Winston Smith’s perspective. This character goes against the totalitarianism government ran by the Inner Party and Big Brother. Orwell gave a dramatic utopian and dystopian fiction book that is also political and social science fiction because Orwell often wrote about going against totalitarianism. Utopia is defined as ‘an imagined place or state of things in which everything is perfect.’ which is exactly how George Orwell portrayed Oceania to be for a majority of the citizens or Party members. Oceania’s government or Big Brother can do no wrong, especially in the eyes...
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...Quick 11/8/12 A perfect society A perfect society is hard to come by. As a matter of fact, it is impossible. Human beings by definition are imperfect. There is not a single way in the world human beings can be in a utopian. Fahrenheit 451 (UNDERLINE and AUTHORS) is a great example of this. There are many things this book can be called. A science fiction, dystopian, bildungsroman, and a satire are all examples of what this book entails. Fahrenheit 451 proves countless times that it is a science fiction novel. In this novel, there are many changes in the world that many might not be able to adapt to. Books are highly illegal and whoever has books are killed by the hound. The hound is a robotic killing machine that sniffs out books and injects the culprit with a lethal substance. The government allows people to be killed inhumanly and without questions being asked. “We need not to be let alone. We need to be really bothered once in a while. How long is it since you were really bothered? About something important, about something real?” (Bradbury). Nothing in this society is real. “I'm seventeen and I'm crazy. My uncle says the two always go together. When people ask your age, he said, always say seventeen and insane.” (Bradbury). No one during this time in society are actually sane. Everyone kills and kills themselves; it is something wrong that cannot be undone. Science fiction is a great word describing how this society works. A dystopian is a definite word...
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...Some pieces of literature portray a society of utopia and others may portray a society of dystopia. A utopian society is a place, state, or condition that is ideally perfect in respect of politics,laws, customs, and conditions. A dystopian society is a futuristic, imagined universe in which oppressive societal control and the illusion of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control. In both Fahrenheit 451 and The Hunger Games, citizens live in a society with a fear of the outside world, individuality compressed, and the illusion of a perfect utopia life. The two are set in a realistic futuristic society that shares numerous similarities. The citizens of Fahrenheit 451 and The Hunger Games share a fear of the outside world. In Fahrenheit 451, no one has the desire to go outside or be apart of it. Citizens in The Hunger Games are gated into their communities by electric fences to keep them from going beyond the boundaries. Though the circumstances keeping each from leaving are different, neither are often questioned. The outside world is kept as a segregated part of society in both Fahrenheit 451 and The Hunger Games....
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...1984, A Dystopian Novel The novel “1984” by George Orwell, is a quintessential dystopian novel. A dystopia is a vision of society in which life is typically characterized by human misery, poverty and violence. A dystopian society have an oppressive societal control and the illusions of a perfect society are maintained through corporate, bureaucratic, technological, moral, or totalitarian control. The novel 1984 takes place in a totalitarian state of Oceania that would make even dictators like Hitler and Kim Jong Un grin with envy. In a dystopian society, citizens are perceived to be under constant surveillance. A great example of this, in 1984, would be the telescreen. The telescreen is a “futuristic device” used to survey the citizens of Oceania at all times for crimes such as “thoughtcrime, facecrime sexcrime etc. Throughout London, Winston sees posters with a man gazing down over the words “BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU” everywhere he goes. “Big Brother” is the face of the party and a leader behind the great power. Any One who goes against Big Brother will be vaporized. The poster of the Big Brother seems to control people of Oceania by reminding that they are being watched at all times. Furthermore, the party also uses propaganda as a powerful weapon to control the citizens of Oceania. One of the main propaganda used by the government is the “Two minutes”. The two minutes hate is used to brainwash the citizens into identifying who the true enemy is. Even though the...
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...then on to the 19th century, utopian fiction has experienced a development and a dramatic turn into just the opposite tone, dystopian. These two distinctive streams in British literature, with a same distant source, contain totally different settings—if the utopian novels have demonstrated the perfectly idealized future society for mankind, then the dystopian ones describe the least ideal society, and it is usually considered that a dystopia is the vision of a society in which condition of life are miserable and characterized by poverty, oppression, war, violence, disease, pollution, nuclear fallout and/or the abridgement of human rights, resulting in widespread unhappiness, suffering, and other kinds of pain.1 As material civilization develops into a certain level and can be considered as more than sufficient, then the world is superior to spiritual civilization; however human spirit is the reflection and is controlled by the substances. So, in a highly-developed society with rich material life and high technology, human spirit indeed has no real freedom. Of course, flooding modernized technologies provide human beings a better living condition, but they are covering up an empty and weak spiritual world. Human beings are made to be squeezed to become the flat and instrumental existence surround by machines which makes them feel it is a perfect world. It is obvious that this point contains a positive function in terms of political reality. Although, the political principles...
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...He also then adds that New Middletown is bordered by a forest and the other half is walled. Thus, allowing the inference Max lives in a dystopian society. For example, from prior knowledge, I know dystopian societies have a tendency to create an illusion of a perfect society while information and freedom are restricted. In the same manner, New Middletown creates the illusion of a perfect society by isolating the city by building borders and not allowing access to people who will alter the way the society functions. Therefore, allowing the inference that Max might be living in a dystopian...
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...An utopian society is seen as the ultimate goal of any society. There are varying degrees of what a utopian society can look like and how successful the society is. Unfortunately, The state of the world is moving further away from an utopian society and closer to a dystopian society. While there are many actions to try to make the world a better place, it has been harder and harder to reach the ideal society. There are many problems in the world that show the falling into a dystopian world. The increasing amount of crime is an obvious and prominent issue. In a perfect world, there would be no crime, and in a real world it is incredibly hard to eliminate. Over the last decade, there have been numerous amounts of terrorist attacks including the September 11th attack, the Boston Marathon bombing, and attacks and threats by Isis. In addition to terrorist attacks, there are also murders, rapes, violent crimes, and less severe crimes that happen everyday....
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...Universal Storytelling Elements Movies, such as The Maze Runner, follow an extremely similar chain of events in comparison to other stories of the same genre. The Maze Runner takes the prototype storytelling strategy of dystopian societies, and creates a feel similar to the recognized short story called “The Lottery”. The story begins with a teenage boy arriving at an open field surrounded by walls far too high to reach. This boy instantly found himself at the center of many other boys of the same age who seem to be completely used to people showing up there. While this may seem like a simple story, the detail added to The Maze Running that gives the unique feel is that everybody in the field were also somehow forced into this...
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...The short story “Harrison Bergeron,” by author Kurt Vonnegut Jr., typifies the characteristics commonly associated with dystopian literature. In the short story, there is an illusion of a “perfect” (Read.Write.Think 1) society in a utopian world when in actual fact that is not so. In the beginning of the short story, the society is thought to be “…finally equal. Before God and the law.”(Vonnegut Jr. 1). This is not clearly shown, as society is brainwashed to think that everyone is equal when in reality, they are kept in physical and psychological restraints while information, freedom and independent thought are strictly forbidden from society. The main protagonist Harrison is shot and killed for trying to help others realize the “negative aspects”...
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...Dystopia Dystopia is often a society set in the future that has degraded into a repressive and controlled state, often under the control of some form of government but not always. A dystopian society can also be a planned structured society in which the conditions of life are deliberately made miserable. Some examples of these can be characterized by poverty, oppression, violence, disease, scarcity, and/or pollution for the benefit of a select minority or some unnatural societal goal. I am going to discuss how the short story “The Lottery," by Shirley Jackson and the film Demolition Man directed by Marco Brambilla exhibits dystopian. In the short story “They Lottery” the author makes a society where the town people are willing to kill each other in order to preserve a their idea of balance and success. The town in "The Lottery,” have employed what they sees as the fairest way to continue this ancient tradition. “The Lottery” is a story of misguidance and ultimate horror. The way the plot is structured takes the audience from one extreme (a very sunny, happy day) to another (a ghastly murder). The town is described as a simple and beautiful one, with children running and playing, happy to be out of school for the summer. The reader is led to believe that everything is perfect and the community is gathering for a raffle of some kind. After all, the story’s title is “The Lottery”. Lotteries have a positive connotation in most peoples’ mind. Lotteries are usually grouped...
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...Would people be able to achieve a perfect society or should government be the one who controls everyone’s happiness? In Brave New World, Huxley proposes that a perfect society can be achieved through control, however, readers come to the understanding that the characters in the book have no individuality and cannot obtain a perfect society through the government’s control. The use of soma, a government supplied drug, is a factor that adds to creating virtual peace and happiness for the characters in the book. The government trying to control everyone to think the same through the use of eugenic science and soma, is what creates a utopian society and adds to no one being individual in the book Brave New World. Discrimination on Individuality...
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...Picture a society forced to live in a dystopic world with flying machines, hoverboards, interface rings and eye reading machines. These are some parts of dystopia, just as shown in other novels such as The Maze Runner, Hunger Games, and The Giver. In the book, Uglies by Scott Westerfeld, the reader meets Tally Youngblood. Tally Youngblood is 16 and she lives in Uglyville. Tally has a best friend Peris that is 3 months older than her who was turned pretty first. It states on page 3 “Tally takes on the roles of vandal, outcast, and informer.” Utopia is not attainable because there cannot be a perfect world, as dystopia is defined as an imagined place or state in which everything is unpleasant or miserable. Therefore, Uglies is an example of...
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