Patricia Wheeler

Representations of Dystopia in Literature and Film

In this issue of Critical Survey scholars from both Britain and North America analyse representations of dystopia in literature and film. In the keynote article, Patrick Parrinder offers an examination of Samuel Butler’s Erewhon, contextualising it within the tradition of dystopian romance – which, he argues, saw a last flowering in the late nineteenth century. In a thought-provoking discussion Parrinder covers a range of utopian/dystopian narrative strategies and a selection of novels including The Time Machine, The Coming Race and A Crystal Age. In the second article Michael Amey considers Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We through the lenses of Foucauldian and Lacanian theories. He argues that in its depiction of the regulatory power of the pervasive surveillance in The One State, Zamyatin’s We resonates with Michel Foucault’s analysis of the disciplinary regime embodied in Jeremy Bentham’s design for the Panoptican. Amey offers an engaging and astute discussion of the unremitting surveillance that in many dystopian societies forces the citizens to internalise the state’s regulatory power so that it becomes the principle of their own subjection. He argues that the lack of privacy in The One State, along with a strictly imposed uniformity of actions, insures that individuals are assimilated into the collectivism in which rebellion is nearly impossible. Amey goes on to discuss the self-conscious, reflexive gaze exhibited in the development of the identity of the protagonist, D-503. He believes that Zamyatin’s description of D-503’s development into an individual relies heavily on the imagery of mirrors and reflections, and closely matches psychoanalyst Jaques Lacan’s ‘mirror-stage’ theory. In ‘Re-membering the Future: Doris Lessing’s “Experiment in Autobiography”’, Aaron Rosenfeld argues that Doris Lessing’s Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) re-reads the future-history literary tradition, critiquing its formulation of the relationship between the individual and history and between the individual and the community.