“Of course i’m happy”: an analysis of Animal farm (Orwell, 1945) and Fahrenheit 451 (Bradbury, 1953) dystopian modernity
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.15448/1984-4301.2017.2.26605Keywords:
Animal Farm (ORWELL, 1945), Fahrenheit (BRADBURY, 1953), Dystopia.Abstract
Utopia and dystopia, providing readers with diverging possibilities future, have always given them tools to rethink society. This is so because, even though texts are inserted within a context, they are also empowered with the possibility of shaping new contexts – literature is informed and informs reality, working as a receptacle and as a response to social and political turmoil. Bearing that in mind, this study aims at making out how Animal Farm (ORWELL, 1945) and Fahrenheit 451 (BRADBURY, 1953) react to the epistemes with which we, as readers, come equipped. What both novellas demonstrate is that there is the possibility of accepting or the possibility of fighting – as long as we become aware that the latter option is a feasible one. Addressing issues such as that of subjects’ alienation and/or of their lack of critical abilities to interact fruitfully with one another as to change their condition, these narratives are a glimpse of the political arena whereto literary discourses might be taken. After all, to think politically about literary productions might be a choice, but the fact that literature per se is a political institution is not.
Downloads
References
ARISTOTLE. Aristotle Poetics. Ed. D.W. Lucas. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968.
ATWOOD, Margaret. Oryx & Crake. New York: O.W. Toad, Ltd, 2003.
______. Writing Oryx and Crake. New York: Random House, 2003.
BACHELARD, Gaston. The Poetics of Space. London: Beacon Press, 1958.
BAUMAN, Zygmunt. Consuming Life. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2007.
BEAULIEU, Jean. The Role and Representation of Nature in a selection of English- Canadian Dystopian Novels. Quebec: Université Laval, 2006.
BRADBURY, Ray. 1945. Fahrenheit 451: A Novel. USA: Simon & Schuster, 2013.
COLE, Amanda. In Retrospect: Writing and Reading Oryx and Crake. Philament: Online Journal of Arts and Culture, University of Sydney, v. 7, n. 12, 2015.
COLLINS, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. UK: Scholastic Press, 2010.
DARVISH, Bran; MOHAMMADREZA, George. N. From Utopian Dream to Dystopian Reality: George Orwell's Animal Farm a Case Study. American Journal of Scientific Research, v. 10, n. 18, p.
-106, Dec. 2011.
DERRIDA, Jacques. Acts of Literature. London: Routledge, 1992.
EAGLETON, Terry. Literary Theory: An Introduction. London: Blackwell Publishing, 2010.
______. Marxism and Literary Criticism. London: Routledge Classics, 2012.
ECO, Umberto. The Role of the Reader: Explorations in the Semiotics of Texts. USA: Indiana University Press, 1984.
FEENBERG, Andrew. Alternative Modernity: The Technical Turn in Philosophy and Social Theory. USA: University of California Press, 1995.
FOUCAULT, Michel. (1976). The History of Sexuality: An Introduction Reissue Edition. UK: Vintage, 1990.
FREDRIC, Jameson. The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press. 1981.
FUNCK, Susana Bornéo. The impact of Gender on Genre: Feminist Literary Utopias in the 1970s. Florianópolis: PPGI, 1998.
GALEANO, Eduardo. Open Veins of Latin America. Translated by Cedric Belfrage. New York: Monthly Review Press, 1997.
GLOVER, John. Human/Nature: Ecological Philosophy in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx And Crake. English Studies in Africa, v. 2, n. 52, p. 50-62, Aug. 2009.
GOLDING, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Routledge, 1954.
GONÇALVES, Davi. Snowball vs. Snowman: A dystopian bridge between George Orwell’s Animal Farm and Margaret Atwood’s Oryx & Crake. Pensares em Revista, v. 3, n. 2, p. 153-168, jan./jun. 2013.
HARVEY, David. Spaces of hope. Edinburg UP, March, 2000.
______. The enigma of capital and the crisis of capitalism. Profile Books, 2010.
KENNAN, Ashley. Hidden meanings in Animal Farm and Fahrenheit 451. Percy Julian Middle School Journal, v. 4, n. 3, p. 5-20, Illinois: Oak Park, Jan. 2014.
LACAN, Jacques. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the Function of the I as Revealed in Psychoanalytic Experience. In: LEICH, Vincent et al. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001. p. 187-223.
MARQUES, Eduardo. I sing the body dystopic: Utopia and posthuman corporeality in P.D. James’s The Children of Men. Revista Ilha do Desterro: A Journal of English Language, Literatures in English and Cultural Studies, v. 32, n. 2, July/Dec. 2013.
MERCHANT, Carolyn. Reinventing Eden: The Fate of Nature in Western Culture. New York: Routledge, 2003.
MICHAUD, Nicolas. The Hunger Games and Philosophy. New Jersey: John Wiley & Sons. Hoboken, 2012.
MORE, Thomas. 1516. Utopia. Cambridge: Simon & Brown, 2010.
ORWELL, George. Animal Farm. New York: Barron's Educational Series, 1984.
PASOLD, Bernadette. Utopia vs. Satire in English Literature. Florianópolis: PPGI, 1999.
PLATO. (380 BC). The Republic. London: Penguin Classics, 2008.
RODDIS, Melissa. Someone Else’s Utopia: The Eco-Posthuman Utopia of Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake. Writing Technologies, v. 5, n. 6, Feb. 2013.
SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur. The Horrors and Absurdities of Religion. London: Penguin Books, 1970.
STEBLE, Janez. New Wave Science Fiction and the Exhaustion of the Utopian/Dystopian Dialectic. Slovenia: University of Ljubljana Faculty of Arts, 2011.
SZEMAN, Imre. Literature on The Periphery of Capitalism: Brazilian Theory, Canadian Culture. Florianópolis: Revista Ilha do Desterro, v. 40, n. 1, p. 25-42, jan./jun. 2001.
TILLEY, Hellen. Utopia/Dystopia: Conditions of Historical Possibility. USA: Princeton University Press, 2010.
WILLIAMS, Raymond. Culture and Materialism, Cardiff: Verso Radical Thinkers Series, 2005.
WOLF, Christina; NORRIS, Christopher. The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism: Twentieth-Century Historical, Philosophical and Psychological Perspectives. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.
YOUNG, Chris. From Nowhere: Utopian and Dystopian Visions of our Past, Present, and Future. Toronto: Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, 2013.
YOUNGS, Tim. The Cambridge Introduction to Travel Writing. UK: Cambridge University Press, 2013.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright
The submission of originals to Letrônica implies the transfer by the authors of the right for publication. Authors retain copyright and grant the journal right of first publication. If the authors wish to include the same data into another publication, they must cite Letrônica as the site of original publication.
Creative Commons License
Except where otherwise specified, material published in this journal is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license, which allows unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original publication is correctly cited.
