Utopian+and+Dystopian+Societies

=Definition of Utopia:=
 * a book written by Sir Thomas More (1516) describing the perfect society on an imaginary island
 * ideally perfect state; especially in its social and political and moral aspects
 * a work of fiction describing a utopia
 * an imaginary place considered to be perfect or ideal

Source: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

Virgil
= = =This link is to classical Utopias and is in the British Library=

=This link is to the 16th century dreams of Sir Thomas Moore also from the British Library=

=Look at Campanella's, Well's and Bacon's views of Utopia=



=In the 18th century with revolution in the air Condorcet, Rousseau and Washington offered visions of a fairer and more just society=





Rousseau

= =

=The establishment of 19th century earthly utopias=

=18th and 19th century utopias to be established peacefully=

=Here is a link to texts about utopian society including a very detailed questionnaire guide to founding a utopia:=

=Task: **Create your own time-line of utopias**=

=Definition of Dystopia:=

state in which the conditions of life are extremely bad as from deprivation or oppression or terror
Source: wordnetweb.princeton.edu/perl/webwn

=Dystopias=

George Orwell wrote the novel 1984:

=Nineteen Eighty-Four: we will view and discuss this film.=

=Film Guide Nineteen Eighty-Four=

=A number of film clips from the movie 1984=

**1984 Film:****Film Direction and script by Michael Radford (1984)** **from the novel by George Orwell (written 1949)**

Quote from Wikipedia about the novel:
‘Nineteen Eighty-Four (sometimes written 1984) is a 1949 dystopian novel by George Orwell about an oligarchic, collectivist society. Life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, and incessant public mind control. The individual is always subordinated to the state, and it is in part this philosophy which allows the Party to manipulate and control humanity. In the Ministry of Truth (Minitrue, in Newspeak), protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising historical records to render the Party omniscient and always correct, yet his meagre existence disillusions him to the point of seeking rebellion against Big Brother, eventually leading to his arrest, torture, and conversion. As literary political fiction, 1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction subgenre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and concepts of Big Brother, doublethink, thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Memory hole, et cetera, became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective Orwellian, denoting George Orwell's writings and totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm (1945).[1] Other classifications for the novel may include science fiction and satire.’

=Full online text of the novel:=

=[]= = = =**Wikipedia on the film version is here:**=

=[]= =** In terms of content there are a minimum of sixteen themes related to the film which I would like us to look at and discuss. **=

They are:

**1.** **Thoughtcrime: the destruction of words**

…[//Winston writes in his forbidden diary//]
 * … [|Winston Smith] **: Thoughtcrime is death. Thoughtcrime does not entail death. Thoughtcrime IS death. I have committed even before setting pen to paper the essential crime that contains all others unto itself….
 * [|Winston Smith] **: April the 4th, 1984. To the past, or to the future. To an age when thought is free. From the Age of Big Brother, from the Age of the Thought Police, from a dead man... greetings…

Beautiful thing, the destruction of words…
 * … [|Syme] **:

**2.** **The role of the prole world**

…[//Winston writes in his forbidden diary//] …[//Winston describes visiting a prostitute in the off-limit proletarian areas//] It was three years ago, on a dark evening. Easy to slip the patrols, and I'd gone into the proletarian areas. There was no one else on the street, and no telescreens. She said, "Two dollars," so I went with her. She had a young face, painted very thick. It was really was the paint that appealed to me: white like a mask, and bright red lips. There were no preliminaries. Standing there with the smell of dead insects and cheap perfume, I went and did it just the same…
 * [|Winston Smith] **: If there is hope, it lies in the proles. If they could become conscious of their own strength, they would have no need to conspire. History does not matter to them…
 * [|Winston Smith] **:

**3.** **Rewriting history**

[//Winston tapes over Rutherford's face, consigning him to oblivion//] …
 * …**[//Winston renders a war hero an "unperson"//]
 * [|Winston Smith] **: Rutherford unperson. Substitute Ogilvy. Ogilvy biog details as follows: war hero, recently killed, Malabar front. Today awarded posthumous secondary order of conspicuous merit second class.

**4.** **The concept of Big Brother**


 * …**[//first lines//]
 * [|Big Brother] **: [//voiceover//] This is our land. A land of peace and of plenty. A land of harmony and hope. This is our land. Oceania. These are our people. The workers, the strivers, the builders. These are our people. The builders of our world, struggling, fighting, bleeding, dying. On the streets of our cities and on the far-flung battlefields. Fighting against the mutilation of our hopes and dreams. Who are they?...
 * … [|O'Brien] **: What are your feelings towards Big Brother?
 * [|Winston Smith] **: I hate him.
 * [|O'Brien] **: You must love him. It is not enough to obey him. You must love him…

**5.** **In such a society what does it mean to be corrupt?**


 * … [|Winston Smith] **: Look, I hate purity. Hate goodness. I don't want virtue to exist anywhere. I want everyone corrupt.
 * [|Julia] **: Well, I ought to suit you, then. I'm corrupt to the core.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: Do you like doing this? I don't mean just me...
 * [|Julia] **: I adore it…

**6.** **The Spirit of Man** [//Winston gets up and O'Brien shows him his reflection in a mirror. Winston is disheveled and beaten//] 
 * … [|Winston Smith] **: I know you'll fail. Something in this world... some spirit you will never overcome...
 * [|O'Brien] **: What is it, this principle?
 * [|Winston Smith] **: I don't know. The spirit of man.
 * [|O'Brien] **: And do you consider yourself a man?
 * [|Winston Smith] **: Yes.
 * [|O'Brien] **: If you're a man, Winston, you're the last man. Your kind is extinct. We are the inheritors. Do you realize that you are alone? You are outside history. You unexist. Get up.
 * [|O'Brien] **: *That* is the last man. If you are human, *that* is humanity…
 * … [|O'Brien] **: Power is tearing human minds apart and putting them back together in new shapes of your own choosing…

**7.** **Emmanuel Goldstein and the conspirators**


 * … [|O'Brien] **: There are thought criminals who maintain that the resistance is not real. Believe me, Winston, it is very real. Perhaps you are not familiar with how it operates.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: I am attentive to the news.
 * [|O'Brien] **: Indeed. Then perhaps you imagine a huge network of conspirators prepared to commit any atrocity to weaken and demoralize the order of our society. The reality is infinitely more subtle. If Goldstein himself fell into the hands of the Thought Police, he could not give them a list of his agents. Such a list does not exist. They are not an organization in the sense we know. Nothing holds it together but an idea. Individually, they cheat, forge, blackmail, corrupt children, spread disease and prostitution, in the name of spreading knowledge from generation to generation, until... in a thousand years...

**8.** **Newspeak and the thought police** [//illustrates thickness with fingers//] [//narrows fingers//] [//the larynx//] [//the brain//]
 * … [|Winston Smith] **: How's the Newspeak Committee?
 * [|Syme] **: Working overtime. Plusbig waste is in adjectives. Plusbig waste is timing the language to scientific advance.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: ...yes.
 * [|Syme] **: It's a beautiful thing, the destruction of words. You wouldn't have seen the Dictionary 10th edition, would you Smith? It's that thick.
 * [|Syme] **: The 11th Edition will be that
 * [|Syme] **: thick.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: So, The Revolution will be complete when the language is perfect?
 * [|Syme] **: The secret is to move from translation, to direct thought, to automatic response. No need for self-discipline. Language coming from here
 * [|Syme] **:, not from here
 * [|Syme] **:.
 * [|Tillotson's Friend] **: [//leans over from another table//] Excuse me for intruding. But what you're saying is that we should be rid of the last vestiges of Goldsteinism when the language has been cleaned. I couldn't be more in agreement with you, brother…

**9.** **Betrayal**

[//pause//] [//gives Winston a card//]
 * … [|Winston Smith] **: It's not so much staying alive, it's staying human that's important. What counts is that we don't betray each other.
 * [|Julia] **: If you mean confessing, we're bound to do that. Everybody does. You can't help it.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: I don't mean confessing. Confessing isn't betrayal. I mean feelings. If they can make me change my feelings. If they can stop me from loving you, that would be real betrayal…
 * … [|O'Brien] **: Smith? I have been reading your Newspeak articles in the Times.
 * [|Winston Smith] **: Yes?
 * [|O'Brien] **: You write it very elegantly. That is not my own opinion - I was recently talking to a friend of yours who is an expert. His name... has slipped my memory for the moment. What I wanted to say is that there were one or two unwords, only very recent. Have you seen the 10th Edition of the Newspeak Dictionary?
 * [|Winston Smith] **: No... we're still using the 9th Edition at MinRec.
 * [|O'Brien] **: A few advance copies have been circulated - I have one myself.
 * [|O'Brien] **: You might be interested?
 * [|Winston Smith] **: Yes!
 * [|O'Brien] **: There are some plusskillful new developments. Let me give you my address.
 * [|O'Brien] **: I am usually at home in the evenings. If I am not there, then my servant will give you the Dictionary…

**10.** **Doublethink**


 * … [|Winston Smith] **: In accordance to the principles of Doublethink, it does not matter if the war is not real, or when it is, that victory is not possible. The war is not meant to be won. It is meant to be continuous. The essential act of modern warfare is the destruction of the produce of human labor. A hierarchical society is only possible on the basis of poverty and ignorance. In principle, the war effort is always planned to keep society on the brink of starvation. The war is waged by the ruling group against its own subjects. And its object is not victory over Eurasia or Eastasia, but to keep the very structure of society intact. Julia? Are you awake? There is truth, and there is untruth. To be in a minority of one doesn't make you mad…

**11.** **Winston**

**12.** **Julia**

**13.** **O’Brien**

**14.** **Charrington (antique shopkeeper)** **& Parsons (Winston’s next-door neighbour**

**15.** **The film 1984 and the post-war world in 1949**

**16.** **Room 101**


 * … [|O'Brien] **: You once asked me, Winston, what was in room 101. I think you know. Everyone does. The thing that is in room 101... is the worst thing in the world…

=Fahrenheit 451: we will view and discuss this film too as well as 'The Hunger Games'.=

=A Guide to Fahrenheit 451=

=A visual analysis of Francois Truffaut's classic film 'Fahrenheit 451'=

=**Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 and the dystopian condition**=

=Study Guide: Fahrenheit 451=

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