Critics Quotes Flashcards
Alex Gendle
cautionary tales
“dystopias are cautionary tales, not about some particular government or technology, but the very idea that humanity can be molded into an ideal shape”
Syreeta McFadden
anxieties and realities
“dystopian stories used to reflect our anxieties, now they reflect our reality”
Lauren Oliver
hope
“dystopian novels… show that there is always hope, even in the bleakest future”
George Orwell
image of the future
“if you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face - forever”
Tom Moylan
terrors of the twentieth century
“dystopian narrative is largely the product of the terrors of the twentieth century”
Brady Gerber
no escape from the dystopian state
“there is no way out of the dystopian state, even in thought”
Amin Malak
power
“dystopias essentially deal with power… power as the prohibition or perversion of human potential”
E M Forster
hateful apocalypse
“there is not a monster in that hateful apocalypse which does not exist in embryo today”
Alan Kennedy
the boot and the face
“for the boot to feel power it is dependent on the existence of the face”
Erika Gottleib
degradation of human beings
“man is nothing but a beast, and like a beast, can be degraded until he is deprived of his will”
Margaret Atwood
importance of language
“the importance of language is highlighted as the main instrument of ideological and social control”
Tim Crook
purpose of propaganda
“the purpose of propaganda is to narrow and limit human consciousness, confuse human consciousness and control and narrow the range of thinking”
Mary McCarthy
dystopias are a reflection of our own society, functioning as a warning
“we are warned by seeing ourselves in a distorting mirror, of what we may be turning into if current trends are allowed to continue”
George Orwell
opposition to totalitarianism
“every line of serious work that i have written since 1936 has been written, directly and indirectly, against totalitarianism”
Richard Clay
utopia as an engine of cultural change
“that yearning, that shared hope for better, is like a current that runs throughout history… the idea of utopia has been an engine of cultural change, spurring human imagination”
M Keith Booker
unfamiliar settings
“dystopian literature works by a process of ‘defamiliarisation’ in which unfamiliar settings provide the backdrop to explore social and political practices that might otherwise be taken for granted in a familiar setting”
M Keith Booker
dreams becoming nightmares
“if a utopia is an imagined ideal society that dreams of a world in which the social, political and economic problems of the real present have been solved, then a dystopia is an imagined world in which the dream has become a nightmare”
Margaret Atwood
ustopia
“ustopia is a word i made up combining utopia and dystopia — the imagined perfect society and its opposite because, in my view, each contains a latent version of the others”
Tom Moylan
political opposition
“a new space for a new form of political opposition”
Tom Moylan
ambiguous endings
“critical dystopias are texts that maintain a utopian impulse… allowing both readers and protagonists to hope by resisting closure: the ambiguous, open endings of these novels maintain the utopian impulse within the work”
Tom Moylan
modern society
“dystopia expresses a simple refusal of modern society”
Ursula K Le Guin
extrapolating current trends
“to extrapolate imaginatively from current trends and events to a near future that’s half prediction, half satire”
M Keith Booker
social criticism
“the role of dystopian fiction is social criticism… the treatment of imaginary societies in the best dystopian fiction is always highly relevant to the specific ‘real world’ societies and issues”
Phillip Rahv
utopia betrayed
1940s texts tend to be about “the melancholy mid century genre of lost illusions and utopia betrayed”
Marge Piercy
purpose of creating imagined futures in dystopias
“the point of a novel about the future is not to predict it… the point of creating futures is to get people to imagine what they want and don’t want to happen down the road — and maybe do something about it”
Margaret Atwood
the power of names
“the names people are given determine the way they perceive themselves”
Margaret Atwood
optimism in THMT
“The Handmaid’s Tale is optimistic… it shows that the writer retains three attributes that power-mad regimes cannot tolerate: a human imagination; the power to communicate; and hope”
Anthony Burgess
free will
“is it better for a man to have chosen evil than to have good imposed upon him?”
Charlie Brooker
technology
“it’s hard to think of a single human function that technology hasn’t somehow altered”
“if technology is a drug - and it does feel like a drug - then what precisely are the side-effects?”
Robert Stevenson Brown
pessimism in 1984
“Orwell’s vision is more pessimistic than that of Huxley. Winston is not allowed to make his final tragic stand against society, as John does in Brave New World by committing suicide, instead he is exposed as a traitor and tortured until he renounces always rebellious thoughts, even his love for Julia”
Robert Stevenson Brown
technology
“one of the vital functions of dystopias is to make readers re-evaluate their relationship with the machines and technology of the modern world”
Robert Stevenson Brown
communicating fears to the reader
“in dystopias, authors take beliefs and trends within their own societies which they find worrying and extrapolate and exaggerate these aspects to create a nightmarish society of the future”
“this allows them to communicate their fears to the reader”
Peter Firchow
the present
“most of the memorable utopian and dystopian fictions of our time are largely pessimistic — not of course about the future, but really about the present”
