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(2016
premidterm assignment) Model Student Pre-midterm answers 2016 (Index) Essay 2: Personal / professional research topic proposal |
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Kimberly Hall
Research Proposal- BACK TO THE FUTURE
For
this paper, I would like to research how the real-world fears and conflicts of
the authors influence the narratives and conflicts in speculative fiction. These
connections are particularly noticeable in dystopian and post-apocalyptic
settings, where authors can take their fears for the future and make them real.
Stories about uprisings against ‘the man’ or ‘the system’ have always been my
favorites – I did grow up with Star Wars,
after all – but only recently have I been thinking that these stories with these
narratives exist because their authors are actually scared for the future. The
variety of narratives and conflicts reflect the variety of fears that authors
have had for the future.
For example, 1984 was written
at the beginning of the Second Red Scare, when the fears of communism and
radical political leftism were running rampant in the Western world; the primary
antagonists in this novel are ‘the Party’ and ‘Big Brother’. In “Stone Lives”,
which was published in 1985, the author envisions a world run by corporations,
where the poor have been made poorer and the rich have been made richer; the
eighties was a time of advancing medicine and technology, but also of widening
social and economic inequality. It might seem a little convoluted, but I think
it is interesting to look at stories about the future to try and envision how
people thought in the past.
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