This book presents an extended account of the language of dystopia, exploring the creativity and style of dystopian narratives and mapping the development of the genre from its early origins through to contemporary practice. Drawing upon stylistic, cognitive-poetic and narratological approaches, the work proposes a stylistic profile of dystopia, arguing for a reader-led discussion of genre that takes into account reader subjectivity and personal conceptualisations of prototypicality. In examining and identifying those aspects of language that characterise dystopian narratives and the experience of reading dystopian fictions, the work discusses in particular the manipulation and construction of dystopian languages, the conceptualisation of dystopian worlds, the reading of dystopian minds, the projection of dystopian ethics, the unreliability of dystopian refraction, and the evolution and hybridity of the dystopian genre.
Author(s): Jessica Norledge
Series: Palgrave Studies In Language, Literature And Style
Edition: 1
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
Year: 2022
Language: English
Commentary: TruePDF
Pages: 253
Tags: Stylistics; Psycholinguistics And Cognitive Lingusitics; Contemporary Literature; Poetry And Poetics; Genre Studies
Acknowledgements
List of Texts
Chapter 1—Towards a Poetics of Dystopia
Chapter 2—Language in Dystopia
Chapter 3—Building Dystopian Worlds
Chapter 4—Reading Dystopian Minds
Chapter 5—Dystopian Ethics
Chapter 6—Unreliability and Dystopian Refraction
Chapter 7—Reconceiving the Dystopian Genre
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
1 Towards a Poetics of Dystopia
The Origins of Dystopia
Mapping the Dystopian Impulse
The Anti-Utopia
The Critical Utopia
The Critical Dystopia
Dystopia, Science Fiction and Satire
Cognitive Estrangement and Dystopian Worlds
Re-evaluating Dystopian Prototypicality
The Evolution of Dystopian Style
References
2 Language in Dystopia
Language(s) in Literature
Conlangs and the Dystopian Imagination
Dialectal Extrapolation
Dystopian Antilanguages
Linguistic Relativity: Dystopia and Whorf
Languages of/in the Future
References
3 Building Dystopian Worlds
The Text-Worlds of Dystopia
Articulations of Dystopian Time
Conceptualising Futures Past
The Dystopian Landscape
The Text-World–Discourse-World Relationship
Immersion and Dystopia in the Mind
References
4 Reading Dystopian Minds
Examining Dystopian Consciousness
Mind-Style
Theory of Mind and Mind-Modelling
Collective Experiences of/in Dystopia
The Dystopian Social Mind
Modelling the Dystopian Collective
Embodying and Resisting the Dystopian Social Mind
References
5 Dystopian Ethics
An Ethics of Reading
Feminist Dystopianism
Dystopian Realism
Conceptualising Paratopia
An Ethical Feedback Loop
Dystopian Resonance
References
6 Unreliability and Dystopian Refraction
Ecodystopian Extrapolation
A World Unknown
Detecting the Dystopian Lie
Unreliable Futures
Unreliability and World-Replacement
The (Un)reliability of Dystopian Storytelling
References
7 Reconceiving the Dystopian Genre
Evolving Platforms: From Televisual Dystopia to Ballet
Dystopian Hybridity
The Young-Adult Dystopia
The Future of Dystopia
References
References
Index
