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You are currently viewing PAR Sillages Critiques 32,2022: « After 1984 », ed. C. Beaufils, J. Oltarzewska, F. Regard and C. Wrobel

PAR Sillages Critiques 32,2022: « After 1984 », ed. C. Beaufils, J. Oltarzewska, F. Regard and C. Wrobel

Nous avons le plaisir d’annoncer la parution du numéro 32 de Sillages Critiques :

32 | 2022
After “1984”: Some Contemporary British Versions of Dystopia

Après “1984” : Quelques dystopies britanniques contemporaines
Edited by Cécile Beaufils, Jagna Oltarzewska, Frédéric Regard and Claire Wrobel
After 1984: Some Contemporary British Versions of Dystopia

1984 is the date in the future when the action in Orwell’s premonitory novel was supposed to take place. When people in the real world of 1984 came to realise that history had caught up with that originally fictional date, worried interrogations started to emerge as to whether Orwell’s fiction had actually come true. Whether we now lived in the dystopian world that the novel had foreseen, i.e. in the world of Big Brother – a world of omnipresent surveillance screens, greedily confiscated power structures, constant linguistic revisionary tactics, and ruthlessly utilitarian biopolitics. Orwell’s striking modernity was apparent to everyone, ordinary citizens and journalists, sophisticated literary critics and astute political thinkers, and of course shrewd artists of all sorts, including film directors and novelists.

What are the contemporary forms of dystopia in Britain? Have topics changed? Perspectives been modified? Is there such a thing as a British posterity of Orwell?