Dystopian Literature - Course Introduction
The thing about the future is that it always exists tomorrow and never today. In the same vein, dystopian literature always discusses future societies and never our own.
Um, so what?
Well, the issue does raise a valid question: if dystopian literature only ever discusses make-believe futuristic societies, then why bother taking an eighteen-week course in the genre? Seriously, that’s a huge chunk of the year, so there'd better be a good reason.
And there is. Sure, the bleak future as lived by Harrison Bergeron has never come to pass, and our society has yet to institutionalize the horrors of book burning. But these stories of dystopian worlds aren’t meant to be crystal balls showing us our future. They're meant to be warnings that this stuff can and does happen right now and in our own societies.
As you travel deeper into the dystopian rabbit hole, you’ll learn to draw upon these dark waking dreams and see the workings of dystopia at play in your own world. While book burning might not be in vogue these days, is it really much different than local protestors having Harry Potter banned from your school library?
Bottom line: dystopian literature creates an alternative reality we can explore. When we're done exploring that reality, we can take the ideas we've gathered and consider them in context with our own reality.
And that's just one of the many excellent reasons we'll be exploring dystopian literature in this course. Some of the others include:
- We'll question whether or not dystopias are one-size-fits-all affairs. For that matter, is anything that claims to be one-size-fits-all truly one-size-fits-all?
- We'll see if some works traditionally not considered dystopian can be read as part of the genre. For example, are Batman and Superman comics stories about superheroes or dystopias?
- We'll compare one man's dystopia with another man's utopia. Looking at you red and blue states.
- We'll explore what our own personal dystopias are. Maybe even learn a little bit about ourselves. Scary, we know.
Oh, and did we mention that dystopian literature is insanely fun to read? Because it is; what with the death, torture, revolutions, anarchy, and all-around societal collapse. Let's just consider that a bonus reason, though.