Dystopian societies

Good morning and welcome to this year’s Senior English conference. We are going to be focussing on Critical Literacy by discussing the influence that composers have to frame the viewer’s visions through the texts they present. Today I will be analysing who has the power to control or form fears and beliefs based on how we see our future. This analysis will be made through the use of two dystopian texts, George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and the film Minority Report directed by Steven Spielberg. It takes the responder’s interest on current events, cultural assumptions, values, attitudes and beliefs of the time as well as the composer’s perspective to influence the responder’s views of a fearful future. The fears the composer has portrayed in the dystopian text is unable to exist without the responder’s fear in the issue itself and this fear can be affected by many aspects including the time in which the responder reads the text, the responders background, wealth or their lifestyle.

A dystopian society is a fictional society that is the antithesis of utopia. It is usually brought about as a result of human action or inaction, whether from mere stupidity or human evil. Dystopian societies often exhibit traits such as a utopian society with one fatal flaw, a nation-state ruled by upper-class, worship for a state figurehead or a deliberately engineered breakdown of family ties. Over the past century many texts have been produced to outline a dystopian future and these texts are often composed as a warning about an issue or fear of the time. Examples of feared dystopias over time include totalitarian governments in the 1930’s to 1940’s, nuclear war during the Cold War, a technology explosion in the 1980’s, superstate surveillance in the 1990’s. “People shouldn’t fear their government; a government should fear its people.”

George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four presents a fear of a totalitarian state in which the main character Winston Smith lives in. Orwell