a lil help on Dystopia...

[anna1234]

hi, this is my first post ever, despite being twenty and a child of post modernity, I do not use the internet unless it's life and death. I joined this forum because i'm going to be doing a dissertation on dystopian literature and was curious to hear other people's views on it...and aspects related to it (e.g. marx, Hegel, J.s.Mill, Plato, David Harvey, Anthony Giddens etc).

I'm weary of the mainstream literature (orwell, huxley, bradbury, kubrick, atwood, kafka, wells, zamyatin...and the beat goes on...) and quite frankly I don't know whether it's because I’ve done too much reading around the same subject that now they all seem the same and no longer as exciting as I first felt them to be...or whether really and truly all dystopian literature are the same, either way i'm losing ambition and am becoming bored (which I can't afford to be).

I guess I'm being a lil selfish because I’m so absent minded that I'm more than likely going to lose my way and not find this website again in order to read and responds to posts...if I get any, who knows....maybe everyone's out living life.
Kind regards.

[LitNetIsGreat]

Hey don't despair, it's all that dystopian literature getting you down I bet. I'm sure that the people here will do their best to help.

What exactly is the nature of your problem? Or are your just getting that banging your head against a wall feeling? :brickwall I've heard that dissertations tend to bring on that affect, which is not good, seeing as I have mine coming up soon and my own ideas are incredibly thin.

Anyway, what in particular is bothering you?

[Pecksie]

I'm not sure what your problem is exactly... If you're looking for a good 'dystopian' read that is not 'mainstream' or one of the classics of the genre, I'd suggest Kazuo Ishiguro's 'Never Let Me Go'. It's fresh and subtler than most dystopian novels.

Recently, I read Karel Schoeman's 'The Promised Land', a South African novel written before the end of apartheid. In this novel, the blacks control the country, and whites are poor, harassed and scared. An interesting take on dystopia, and an original book in many ways.