English Literature / Unit 17 ENL 1642 short lesson, about 20 seconds
Dystopia
Captions available
The idea
The dystopia, an imagined society worse than our own, became a major twentieth-century British form: Huxley's Brave New World, Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Burgess's A Clockwork Orange. Burgess suggested that the word "cacotopia" suited Orwell's novel better than dystopia.
In practice
Three nightmare states.
Where people slip
Dystopias criticize the writer's present.
Your place on the trail
Every lesson rests on earlier ones and opens later ones. Tap any to jump.
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