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Critical Review on the Idea of Dystopia (Don DeLillo’s Realistic Dystopian…
Critical Review on the Idea of Dystopia
Aldous Huxley’s Speculative Dystopian Fiction
Brave New World
public media foster empty dreams and illusions to control society.
real problem is the likely exploitation of technological advances in a materialistic society
Written by someone who experienced the tragedies of both world wars
Brave New World presents a frightening future when a complete system of material prosperity and physical pleasures is finally achieved through technology.
From Utopia to Dystopia
first came from the idea of Plato's Republic
everyone wants to make the perfect world but it isn't possible
utopian writers usually create patterns of perfect and organized societies, and present fleeing as a fancy of the imagination
dystopia is a critical genre that makes us aware of human manipulation through technological advances in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries
Kurt Vonnegut’s Autobiographical Dystopian Fiction
The concern that human roles are more and more played by machines is the basic theme of Vonnegut’s Player Piano
Vonnegut appeared as a pacifist against the increasing totalitarianism, with the opinion that art is in charge of social critique
the function of war as a mind-numbing machine that controls people and persuades them to participate in war and to kill each other by pressing a button
Don DeLillo’s Realistic Dystopian Fiction
reality has now been substituted by simulacra and the “real” is replaced by what he calls the “hyperreal”
DeLillo’s Cosmopolis is “an allegory of self-destruction by the technologized capitalist society and its subsequent comeuppance in the violence it engenders in those whom it pushes aside”
The background of his fiction hints at some kind of ultimate visionary mystery, buttressed by his characters’ inchoate spiritual yearnings and longings
“the effects of the media serve as a fundamental mutation in Americans’ lived relationship to the world”, characters like “Hitler and Elvis Presley,” who become “absorbed in the celebrity-making apparatus of media culture”
DeLillo’s work concerns contemporary American society and depicts issues such as toxicity, mass media, terrorism, consumerism, conspiracy and paranoia
Thesis
This study also attempts to explain how works of these three writers were revolutionary in their challenging of the new values that led to the degradation of human dignity
They (the authors) employ the dystopian genre to make us aware of human dignity and criticize modern technologies that can lead to our degradation.
The purpose of this review is firstly to show the formation of dystopia that finds its roots in utopia