Visual Representation of the Fantastic
Posted in dystopia, Fantastic, Reality, time on Apr 16th, 2020
Category Archive for 'dystopia'
“The Semplica Girl Diaries”
Posted in dystopia on Apr 11th, 2020
When I first starting reading this piece, I quickly grew agitated. Why? The sentence structure was all over the place. It honestly made me want to red ink the entire thing. However, when I delved deeper into his words a fondness for his character quickly subsided the agitation. I will be honest, it was hard […]
Social Commentary in “The Semplica Girl Diaries”
Posted in Consent, dystopia, Social Fears, Solitude, Utopia on Apr 5th, 2020
In an interview with The New Yorker, George Saunders mentions that the inspiration for “The Semplica Girl Diaries” came from a dream that he had many years ago; he then goes on to say the following: “Einstein said (or, at least, I am always quoting him as having said), ‘No worthy problem is ever solved […]
Contagion Fables
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, pestilence on Mar 28th, 2020
In an essay in the March 30 issue of the New Yorker entitled “What Our Contagion Fables Are Really About,” Jill Lepore offers a wide-ranging, squirm-inducing discussion of the “literature of pestilence.” Early in the article she writes: The literature of contagion is vile. A plague is like a lobotomy. It cuts away the higher realms, […]
Social Distancing and The Memory Police
Posted in Captivity, coronavirus, dystopia, Isolation on Mar 23rd, 2020
This morning I came across a brief article online about social distancing and its relation to Yoko Ogawa’s The Memory Police. Published at Slate, the article is titled “The Dystopian Novel for the Social Distancing Era,” and the author, a D.C.-based writer by the name of Joshua Keating, draws parallels between the permanent disappearances in Ogawa’s novel and the […]
Coronavirus, Fantastic?
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, fear, Isolation, Loneliness on Mar 19th, 2020
Throughout this course we have explored the realm of fantastic in fiction and the amount of varieties within the category. If we were to have read a story about a pandemic that caused mass hysteria and isolation just a couple months ago, before the pandemic became a force to be reckoned with, we would have […]
How 2020 made us go crazy
Posted in Captivity, Desperation, dystopia, Fantastic, Isolation, Loneliness, Longing for Answers, Mystery, Obsession on Mar 19th, 2020
“All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy.” We’ve all heard of cabin fever. Well, welcome to self-quarantine during the Coronavirus, with social distancing and young folks who are being advised to stay far away from the Boomers. So far my room is clean; we created an at-home office for me in the old guest room; […]
It really just takes a pandemic to put everything in perspective
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, One Hundred Years of Solitude on Mar 19th, 2020
As I was reading OHYOS I kept trying to pin down the fantastic elements. But there were so so many and none of them were fantastic enough to be fantastic in my mind. No matter what I was reading (a man followed by butterflies, people paying to view ice, a girl just floating up and […]
The Fantastic in Reality
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia, Fragility on Mar 19th, 2020
The outbreak of Covid-19 brings the fantastic into the non-fiction. In this class, we discuss the fantastic and scary aspects of stories, not our current state. According to the CDC, the number of cases was 4,226 on March 16th for the United States. Today, March 18th, the number is 9,345. World wide the virus has infected 219,228. If […]
A Story Written by a Four-Year-Old
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia on Mar 19th, 2020
I read a post on social media that said: “Sometimes I feel like this year is being written by a four-year-old, a lot of people got sick so they bought a lot of toilet paper and stayed home.” This unfathomable idea, or what was supposed to be incomprehensible, of COVID-19, has set people out on […]
Rooted in Reality: How the Fantastic Isn’t Always as Unbelievable as it Seems
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia on Mar 18th, 2020
In my history classes, people always joked about the fact that we were overdue for a plague, likely thinking it wouldn’t happen. Now here we are, cancelling large-scale events, closing down schools for the rest of the year, hoarding toilet paper, and locking ourselves away while preparing for the worst. Even returning to Sweet Briar […]
The Fantastics of COVID-19
Posted in coronavirus, Death, Desperation, dystopia, Loneliness on Mar 18th, 2020
Receiving emails all stating the same thing, hearing the news all reciting the same scripts, it brings to mind a few familiarities. Naturally, the first thing that came to my mind was the movie Contagion released in 2011. The idea of a pandemic sweeping the planet and taking out certain people. But it also reminds me […]
Literature and the Coronavirus
Posted in coronavirus, dystopia on Mar 16th, 2020
In my email this morning, I asked you to think a bit about the current circumstances we face — the pandemic created by the novel coronavirus, the social isolation being imposed on our society and throughout much of the world, and the myriad ways in which our lives have been abruptly interrupted and altered — and […]
The domes in “The Dome” are all obvious metaphors for isolationism, but the underlying implication is that isolation is something to be feared; at one point, the phrase “hostile apartness” is even used. Solitude happens to a staple of fantastical fiction; often, there is one character or a place that is separate from the rest […]
Applying the History of Japan to this Novel and more
Posted in dystopia on Feb 13th, 2020
The Memory Police is a novel about a dystopia on an island that is trying the reconcile the loss of memory. Throughout the novel, we see this small island living under the stern domination of the Memory Police, who barge into their homes and seize their belongings, loved ones, and more importantly, memories. On page 13, […]