Hey everyone! It most certainly has been a hot minute since the last post I made. What’s interesting is, unlike what usually happens between long periods of not posting (usually nothing), there has been a lot of change going on. There’s people being arrested for leaving their houses, the global market has taken a huge hit, and there’s a virus going around killing people. Along with all this craziness, in probably one of the greatest twists of irony, we have just wrapped up our unit on dystopias.
To start off the unit, we needed to define dystopia and what better way then by defining what it’s not. Stay with me on this. By developing an understanding of a simpler topic that mirrors the topic at hand, i.e. utopias, we can more clearly define the parameters of our original topic, i.e. dystopias. I find this to be a useful tool in helping to understand a wide topic. In the case of this unit, to define what a utopia was, we broke up into groups to design our own utopias.
A utopia, in its purest form, is an unattainable, idealistic society. The basis of my group’s utopia was the idea of freedom. To summarize, there are no laws or government, you can do whatever you want so long as you don’t;
1. Steal from others
2. Hurt others
3. Force others into your world view
Once we had an idea of what a utopian society looked like, we could more easily define a dystopian society. At this point, we began looking into the driving question of this unit: how do literary dystopias help us understand this point in time?
Now you can’t answer this question without doing some reading (hence ‘literary’ dystopia) so we needed a book. We had four options to pick from : George Orwell’s 1984, Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven, and Max Brooks’ World War Z.
If I’m being honest, I’m not the strongest reader and I tend to get bored quickly if a book is going too slow and getting into too much detail. That’s why I decided to read my, now, second favourite book of all time, World War Z.
This book is amazing! Full stop! It’s a compilation of interviews taken from survivors of the zombie apocalypse that took place twelve years earlier. Each chapter is a group of interviews relating to a different topic or time in the war (i.e.: the beginning of the outbreak or the US regaining control after the outbreak). I felt that many parts of the book hit super close to home, especially given the situation we are in as a result of Covid-19. That being said, it did make it significantly easier to write paragraphs comparing events in the book to that of real life. See below for my comparison of the two events:
Alright everyone, we have now reached the final stretch of this post. I would like to take a minute thank you all for making it this far. Before we can continue, here’s a word from our sponsors:
For the final project of our unit, we needed to fully answer our driving question: how literary dystopias help us understand whats going on in the world around us.
Me and my group, using the insight we gained from reading World War Z, came to the conclusion that literary dystopias help us to understand the “human” element of the world around us. Specifically, how people will react when adversity strikes.
To demonstrate this, we decided to pay homage to World War Z and conduct our own pandemic interviews. These interviews where meant to show how people from different walks of life felt about the pandemic and how, in their own way, they were dealing with it. I am confident it answered our driving question while providing insight into various perspectives on the pandemic.
This was a fun project though I would have liked to have had a greater variety of interviewees. I think the part of this project I enjoyed the most was reading the book (World War Z) because I would have otherwise never have picked it up. I’m really excited to read the book again however I think I might wait to do that after our current pandemic ends.