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Bibliography by Tristan Denton

Page history last edited by Tristan Denton 9 years, 4 months ago

 

Annotated Bibliography Assignment

 

By Tristan Denton, Dystopian Novel Project

 

 1. Campbell, Joseph. “The Treatment for Stirrings: Dystopian Literature for Adolescents.” Blast, Corrupt, Dismantle, Erase: Contemporary North American Dystopian Literature. Ed. Brett Josef Grubisic, Gisèle M. Baxter, and Tara Lee.

           Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2014. pp. 165-180. Print.

 

Campbell’s essay, which draws exclusively from theory rather than the genre literature it aims to examine, puts forth the argument that contemporary young adult dystopian literature is a vehicle by which authors can show how subjectivity and agency is shaped ideologically in the adolescent. This essay makes this argument, spending the majority of the text doing so, by constructing a model of a subject’s ideological identification within society based mainly on the concepts of Althusser, Foucault, and Burke. In this model, the subject is interpellated into the dominant ideology by dual systems of social, normalizing pressure and external, physical force, which then forces subjects into identification with other subjects already identified with this ideology and the ideological society as a whole.

    

This model of subjectivity formation is useful to understanding the genre of young adult dystopian fiction, Campbell argues, because it is precisely the model by which this genre makes its fictions. That is, this genre aims, by way of hyperbole and metaphor, to make visible these structures of power and identification to the adolescent, who as a subject in society is both purposefully disenfranchised and pressured to form a normalized subjectivity. Ultimately, this essay puts forth, this genre functions as a way to show how “society constructs the adolescent subject” (178).

 

 


2. “Dystopian Literature Primer.” North Seattle Community College. n.p., n.d. Web. 12 November 2014.

 

J.C. Clapp’s webpage, which was apparently created for a course on children’s literature at North Seattle Community College, is nonetheless a bare bones, yet adequately comprehensive catalogue of the characteristics of the dystopian literature genre. This characteristics listed on this page are divided into bulleted lists. The most significant and relevant of these lists are “Characteristics of a Dystopian Society,” “Types of Dystopian Controls,” and “The Dystopian Protagonist.” The information contained in these lists is relatively spare, but each is, for the purposes of summary, an adequate resource for classifying and identifying the dystopian genre.  

 

This webpage could be a useful resource to this project precisely because it gives a basic summary of the elements of dystopian fiction. This project will more than likely involve analyzing dystopian texts as an undifferentiated data set of word from which to extract commonalities. This summary, on the other hand, can serve as an easily referenced basis for the project’s conception of a typical, singular dystopian text. This webpage, then, potentially provides a basis from which to ground any large scale data mining in the set of characteristics, priorities, and narrative elements that make up the prototypical dystopian novel. 

 

 


3. Kennon, Patricia. “‘Belonging’ in Young Adult Dystopian Fiction: New Communities Created by Children.” Papers: Explorations into Children's Literature 15.2 (2005): 40-49. Proquest. Web. 12 November 2014.

 

Patricia Kennon’s essay is a comparison of four dystopian novels written about, and ostensibly for, adolescents, which are centered on the perspectives of young, female protagonists. Kennon uses this essay as an exploration of the dystopian genre to put forth the argument that dystopian scenarios provide young people, and most crucially women, the opportunity to reform the structure and gendered hierarchy of modern society as a way to navigate the formation of female and adolescent subjectivity. 

 

These dystopian narratives, this essay asserts, are effective vehicles for an adolescent mediation of the still active societal forces of hierarchy and gender because of their “emphasis on the temporal depth of places” which are navigated in imagined future landscapes (41). That is, by including a look backward in the imagined future of this genre of literature, the reader is given direct insight into the discourses of power that shape their current world, while also being given an insight into their dystopian implications. This simultaneous look forwards and backwards, this essay asserts, is then an avenue into providing female subjects the opportunity to critique current gender roles and view the possibility of women to take on alternative and autonomous roles as leader and explorer. 

 

 


4. Sicher, Efriam and Natalia Skradol. “A World Neither Brave Nor New: Reading Dystopian Fiction after 9/11.” Partial Answers: Journal of Literature and the History of Ideas 4.1 (2006): 151-179. Project Muse. Web. 12 November 2014. 

 

Sicher and Skradol’s essay tackles the continued popularity and production of the dystopian novel, especially as it relates to the events of September 11th. The authors argue, in essence, that the dystopian novel continues to be powerful and popular precisely because, in ways, it has already come to pass.  That is, the essay points to September 11th as an example of “the impact of a real collision of reality and imagination” (154). This collision, they argue, is a coming-true of the dystopian novel’s premise that the power structures of the modern world will be attacked directly in an attempt to dismantle them.

 

Crucially, however, the authors argue that it is the fact that this attack and others have not reshaped the world, as in dystopian fiction, that gives this genre its power. Because these texts are received by a world that has not been entirely reshaped by large scale disaster, the dystopian novel “can only be repeated as a continual end” because “we live after the unthinkable has been thought” (154). According to this essay, then, it is this identification with a horrific future already come to pass and the simultaneous desire to avoid it that gives these texts their staying power. 

 

 


5. Staponkute, Dalia. “Resisting the Rhetoric of Science: A Philosophical and a Fictional Perspective.” European Journal of English Studies 17:3 (2014): 295-307. Proquest. Web. 12 November 2014.

 

Staponkute’s essay contrasts two authors’ approaches to resisting what she terms “the rhetoric of science” (295). Most relevantly, the author argues that William Gibson uses the dystopian genre to enact a critique of the rhetoric of science. Staponkute argues that current and technologically oriented society has given rise to a scientific language that edges out the humanistic qualities of language, in favor of disembodied information. This state of language, as this essay conceives it, constricts the potential to articulate human thought or come to knowledge independent of scientific discourse.  

 

This essay argues that the essential quality of language that resists the “rhetoric of science”—“literary language”—is that it functions as a chronotope (296). Gibson’s use of the chronotope in dystopian fiction, then, is able to, “resist being trapped by the rhetoric of science” because it can, “anticipate fictions that will either produce something new in language or result in an excess thereof” (297). The conception of the language of dystopian fiction put forth in this essay has application to this project, in large, part because it explicitly positions dystopian fiction as a reaction to the digital humanities and their totalizing influence.

 

 

 

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