1. Features of Dystopian Literature
L.O.
To identify and analyse the effect of language features of dystopian literature. (AO2)
To develop understanding of the literary context of dystopian literature. (AO3)

2. Spot the dystopian text
Which of these quotes are from dystopian texts? How do you know? What do they have in common?

3. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” “Reader, I married him.” “District 12: Where you can starve to death in safety.” “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.” “Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.” “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.”

4. “Anybody can be virtuous now
“Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.” “Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair.” “So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” “People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” “There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” “Becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it.”

5. “It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen.” ― George Orwell, 1984 “Reader, I married him.” – Charlotte Bronte, Jane Eyre “District 12: Where you can starve to death in safety.” - Suzanne Collins ‘The Hunger Games’ “It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife.” – Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice “We can destroy what we have written, but we cannot unwrite it.” ― Anthony Burgess, A Clockwork Orange “Better never means better for everyone... It always means worse, for some.” ― Margaret Atwood, The Handmaid's Tale “If you live to be a hundred, I want to live to be a hundred minus one day, so I never have to live without you.” – A.A. Milne, Winnie the Pooh

6. “Anybody can be virtuous now
“Anybody can be virtuous now. You can carry at least half your morality about in a bottle. Christianity without tears—that’s what soma is.” Brave New World – Aldous Huxley
“Looking at me, you'd never guess I'd killed three people. It isn't fair.” ― Iain Banks, The Wasp Factory
“So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” – F.Scott Fitzgerald, ‘The Great Gatsby
“People were always getting ready for tomorrow. I didn't believe in that. Tomorrow wasn't getting ready for them. It didn't even know they were there.” ― Cormac McCarthy, The Road
“There is only one thing in the world worse than being talked about, and that is not being talked about.” ― Oscar Wilde, The Picture of Dorian Gray
“Becoming fearless isn't the point. That's impossible. It's learning how to control your fear, and how to be free from it.” ― Veronica Roth, Divergent

7. Features so far…

8. Group Analysis
In groups of 4, you will look at different dystopian extracts. Each group member needs to have a different focus as you read and analyse the text. Person 1) What makes it dystopian? Person 2) How has the writer used language? What techniques are used? Are there any patterns? Person 3) How has the writer created a sense of mystery or unease? Person 4) How is the extract structured? How are the sentences structured? How does this add to the dystopian feel?

9. Extract 1 – ‘Brave New World’
A SQUAT grey building of only thirty-four stories. Over the main entrance the words, CENTRAL LONDON HATCHERY AND CONDITIONING CENTRE, and, in a shield, the World State's motto, COMMUNITY, IDENTITY, STABILITY. The enormous room on the ground floor faced towards the north. Cold for all the summer beyond the panes, for all the tropical heat of the room itself, a harsh thin light glared through the windows, hungrily seeking some draped lay figure, some pallid shape of academic goose-flesh, but finding only the glass and nickel and bleakly shining porcelain of a laboratory. Wintriness responded to wintriness. The overalls of the workers were white, their hands gloved with a pale corpse-coloured rubber. The light was frozen, dead, a ghost. Only from the yellow barrels of the microscopes did it borrow a certain rich and living substance, lying along the polished tubes like butter, streak after luscious streak in long recession down the work tables. "And this," said the Director opening the door, "is the Fertilizing Room." Bent over their instruments, three hundred Fertilizers were plunged, as the Director of Hatcheries and Conditioning entered the room, in the scarcely breathing silence, the absent-minded, soliloquizing hum or whistle, of absorbed concentration. A troop of newly arrived students, very young, pink and callow, followed nervously, rather abjectly, at the Director's heels. Each of them carried a notebook, in which, whenever the great man spoke, he desperately scribbled. Straight from the horse's mouth. It was a rare privilege. The D. H. C. for Central London always made a point of personally conducting his new students round the various departments. "Just to give you a general idea," he would explain to them. For of course some sort of general idea they must have, if they were to do their work intelligently–though as little of one, if they were to be good and happy members of society, as possible. For particulars, as every one knows, make for virtue and happiness; generalities are intellectually necessary evils. Not philosophers but fret-sawyers and stamp collectors compose the backbone of society. "To-morrow," he would add, smiling at them with a slightly menacing geniality, "you'll be settling down to serious work. You won't have time for generalities. Meanwhile …" Meanwhile, it was a privilege. Straight from the horse's mouth into the notebook. The boys scribbled like mad. Tall and rather thin but upright, the Director advanced into the room. He had a long chin and big rather prominent teeth, just covered, when he was not talking, by his full, floridly curved lips. Old, young? Thirty? Fifty? Fifty-five? It was hard to say. And anyhow the question didn't arise; in this year of stability, A. F. 632, it didn't occur to you to ask it. "I shall begin at the beginning," said the D.H.C. and the more zealous students recorded his intention in their notebooks: Begin at the beginning. "These," he waved his hand, "are the incubators." And opening an insulated door he showed them racks upon racks of numbered test-tubes. "The week's supply of ova. Kept," he explained, "at blood heat; whereas the male gametes," and here he opened another door, "they have to be kept at thirty-five instead of thirty-seven. Full blood heat sterilizes." Rams wrapped in theremogene beget no lambs.

10. Extract 2 – The Hunger Games
Sixty seconds. That's how long we're required to stand on our metal circles before the sound of a gong releases us. Step off before the minute is up, and land mines blow your legs off. Sixty seconds to take in the ring of tributes all equidistant from the Cornucopia, a giant golden horn shaped like a cone with a curved tail, the mouth of which is at least twenty feet high, spilling over with the things that will give us life here in the arena. Food, containers of water, weapons, medicine, garments, fire starters. Strewn around the Cornucopia are other supplies, their value decreasing the farther they are from the horn. For instance, only a few steps from my feet lies a three-foot square of plastic. Certainly it could be of some use in a downpour. But there in the mouth, I can see a tent pack that would protect from almost any sort of weather. If I had the guts to go in and fight for it against the other twenty-three tributes. Which I have been instructed not to do. We're on a flat, open stretch of ground. A plain of hard-packed dirt. Behind the tributes across from me, I can see nothing, indicating either a steep downward slope or even a cliff. To my right lies a lake. To my left and back, sparse piney woods. This is where Haymitch would want me to go. Immediately. I hear his instructions in my head. "Just clear out, put as much distance as you can between yourselves and the others, and find a source of water." But it's tempting, so tempting, when I see the bounty waiting there before me. And I know that if I don't get it, someone else will. That the Career Tributes who survive the bloodbath will divide up most of these life-sustaining spoils. Something catches my eye. There, resting on a mound of blanket rolls, is a silver sheath of arrows and a bow, already strung, just waiting to be engaged. That's mine, I think. It's meant for me. I'm fast. I can sprint faster than any of the girls in our school, although a couple can beat me in distance races. But this forty-yard length, this is what I am built for. I know I can get it, I know I can reach it first, but then the question is how quickly can I get out of there? By the time I've scrambled up the packs and grabbed the weapons, others will have reached the horn, and one or two I might be able to pick off, but say there's a dozen, at that close range, they could take me down with the spears and the clubs. Or their own powerful fists. Still, I won't be the only target. I'm betting many of the other tributes would pass up a smaller girl, even one who scored an eleven in training, to take out their more fierce adversaries.

11. Extract 3 – Fahrenheit 451
It was pleasure to burn. IT was a special pleasure to see things eaten, to see things blackened and changed. With the brass nozzle in his fists, with this great python spitting its venomous kerosene upon the world, the blood pounded in his head, and his hands were the hands of some amazing conductor playing all the symphonies of blazing and burning to bring down the tatters and charcoal ruins of history. With his symbolic helmet numbered 451 on his stolid head, and his eyes all orange flame with the thought of what came next, he flicked the igniter and the house jumped up in a gorging fire that burned the evening sky red and yellow and black. He strode in a swarm of fireflies. He wanted above all, like the old joke, to shove a marshmallow on a stick in the furnace, while the flapping pigeon-winged books died on the porch and lawn of the house. While the books went up in sparkling whirls and blew away on a wind turned dark with burning.

12. Extract 4 – A Clockwork Orange
The four of us were dressed in the height of fashion, which in those days was a pair of black very tight tights with the old jelly mould, as we called it, fitting on the crotch underneath the tights, this being to protect and also a sort of a design you could viddy clear enough in a certain light, so that I had one in the shape of a spider. Pete had a rooker (a hand, that is), Georgie had a very fancy one of a flower, and poor old Dim had a very hound-and-horny one of a clown's litso (face, that is). Dim not ever having much of an idea of things and being, beyond all shadow of a doubting thomas, the dimmest of we four. Then we wore waisty jackets without lapels but with these very big built-up shoulders ('pletchoes' we called them) which were a kind of a mockery of having real shoulders like that. Then, my brothers, we had these off-white cravats which looked like whipped-up kartoffel or spud with a sort of a design made on it with a fork. We wore our hair not too long and we had flip horrorshow boots for kicking.
'What's it going to be then, eh?'
There were three devotchkas sitting at the counter all together, but there were four of us malchicks and it was usually like one for all and all for one. These sharps were dressed in the heighth of fashion too, with purple and green and orange wigs on their gullivers, each one not costing less than three or four weeks of those sharps' wages, I should reckon, and make-up to match (rainbows round the glazzies, that is, and the rot painted very wide). Then they had long black very straight dresses, and on the groody part of them they had little badges of like silver with different malchicks' names on them – Joe and Mike and suchlike. These were supposed to be the names of the different malchicks they'd spatted with before they were fourteen. They kept looking our way and I nearly felt like saying the three of us (out of the corner of my rot, that is) should go off for a bit of pol and leave poor old Dim behind, because it would be just a matter of kupetting Dim a demi-litre of white but this time with a dollop of synthemesc in it, but that wouldn't really have been playing like the game. Dim was very very ugly and like his name, but he was a horrorshow filthy fighter and very handy with the boot.

13. Extract 5 - Divergent
"What do you want them to do?" I say as gently as I can — which isn't saying much. "Condemn him? Al's already dead. He can't hear it, and it's too late."
"It's not about Al," she says. "It's about everyone watching! Everyone who now sees hurling themselves into the chasm as a viable option. I mean, why not do it if everyone calls you a hero afterward? Why not do it if everyone will remember your name?" But of course it is about Al, and she knows that. "It's …" She's struggling, fighting with herself. "I can't … This would never have happened in Abnegation! None of it! Never. This place warped him and ruined him, and I don't care if saying that makes me a Stiff. I don't care, I don't care!"
My paranoia is so deeply ingrained, I look automatically at the camera buried in the wall above the drinking fountain, disguised by the blue lamp fixed there. The people in the control room can see us, and if we're unlucky, they could choose this moment to hear us too. I can see it now, Eric calling Tris a faction traitor, Tris's body on the pavement near the railroad tracks … "Careful, Tris," I say.
"Is that all you can say?" She frowns at me. "That I should be careful? That's it?" I understand that my response wasn't exactly what she was expecting, but for someone who just railed against Dauntless's recklessness, she's definitely acting like one of them.
"You're as bad as the Candor, you know that?" I say. The Candor are always running their mouths, never thinking about the consequences. I pull her away from the drinking fountain, and then I'm close to her face and I can see her dead eyes floating in the water of the underground river and I can't stand it, not when she was just attacked. Who knows what would have happened if I hadn't heard her scream? "I'm not going to say this again, so listen carefully." I put my hands on her shoulders. "They are watching you. You, in particular."

14. The Wall
You need to create a display of features and ingredients of dystopian fiction.
You need to include typical:
Setting
Characters
Use of language features
Plot
Quotes of dystopia

15. Dystopian style Look back at your notes from last lesson.
What makes a Dystopian text ‘Dystopian’?
What are the typical features of:
Language?
Form?
Structure?

16. Typical language, form and structure found in Dystopian literature
Description of disturbing environment: listing, sinister language and imagery, alliteration, sensory imagery
Semantic fields of discomfort – winter, cold, dark
Language of control/surveillance
Time imagery
Dehumanising language, animalistic imagery
Juxtaposition – contrast, comparison
Rhetorical questions – questioning
Uniformity imagery
Bizarre words, a special language
Third person narration or first person narrative
First person – rebelling/
Short sentences build tension, suspense
Time is running out
Repetition
Cyclical structure

17. Typical language, form and structure found in Dystopian literature
Violent imagery – disasters; uneases the readers
Unusual colloquialisms – ‘A Clockwork Orange’ – manipulation of dialect, accent and inventions of new language
Juxtaposition - constant transition from hope to destitution – pleasure vs. pain
Apocalyptic imagery; futuristic language to reflect changes in time or the impending end of time
Anachronisms – language unfitting with their time – archaic? Futuristic?
Imperative language / commands – totalitarian
Questions – uncertainty (identity, future fate, actions, trust)
Monotone
Person
Metaphors – “straight from the horses mouth into the notebook” - Tyrannical leaders use metaphors to mask their true intentions - Manipulating the reader
Build up to whether or not the protagonists will be liberated from their oppressive lives
Ambiguous endings
Omniscient narration
Protagonists – important to understand huge aspects of the life stories
Death / punishment of the protagonist at the end
Tragedy
Novels – narration
Satire
Allegory
Fictional microcosm – characters used to represent wider political concerns
Repetition – monotony, chaos, pace and tension
Oppression, conflict, hope, liberation  general structure of Dystopian fiction
One-word sentences – brings out uneasiness, builds high levels of pace and tension to uncomfortable moments for the characters and therefore the readers
Simple sentences – commands
Complex sentences – builds up chaos and intensity – action / imagery – create Dystopian atmosphere
Creating significant pauses – allows for the readers to feel the discomfort of the characters
Listing, description, stream of consciousness
Narration / thought vs. Speech