Dorsch's View of Dystopian Environments

The Hunger Games trilogy, written by Suzanne Collins and created into four movies under the direction of Francis Lawrence, provides one example of how leadership and control can be used for public manipulation in a dystopian environment.  Drawing from examples in The Hunger Games trilogy and subsequent movies as well as the second chapter of Popular Culture: A User's Guide by Imre Szeman and Susie O'Brien (2017), I argue that the merge of two ideologies, capitalism and productivity, has resulted in class stratification.  And, surveillance and enclosure of space by the entity/organization/individual in power are used in order maintain this social control.  Capitalism and Productivity  According to Szeman and O'Brien, it was during the "Industrial Revolution" that capitalism took hold of British economic interests (34).  Capitalism is an economic ideology geared toward the attainment of profit through competitive means.  In this system, it was the bourge...

I begin this new blog series with the central aim, to analyze the characteristics of dystopian environments in literature and use that knowledge to determine how those characteristics are present in today's society.  Before delving into this topic, I must start with a definition of "dystopia" to use throughout this blog series: "A dystopia [...] is a radically dysfunctional society in which the lives of the inhabitants are significantly impaired, damaged, or otherwise  undesirable" (Seeger, 2018). From this definition, we understand that a dystopian environment is dramatically unpleasant.  "Dystopia" was derived from another term, "utopia."  Seeger (2018) basis the difference between utopia and dystopia within a society on the "imagined social order" of its inhabitants.  Opposite from a dystopian environment, a utopian environment is one that is predicated on characteristics like human success and a perfect order of society. ...