Utopias

Identify and explore a specific connection you see between “The Lottery” and “The One’s Who Walked Away from Omelas.” You can write about any connection you see, but when exploring connections, you might think about the concepts of utopia and dystopia in relation to freedom, liberty, and escape. Do the stories offer any real alternatives to what happens or are the required suffering of selected individuals inevitable? Is there an elsewhere? In your conclusions, think about how these stories relate to our own moment. Dytopic? Utopic? You decideOn a four-paragraph response about a connection you find between the stories. Devote your introduction to explaining the connection; use the next two paragraphs to illustrate the connection, writing one paragraph for each story; conclude by giving your personal takeaway or personal connection to the stories. Try and make a connection between the stories and the present time we are living in.
Utopia: In 1516, English humanist Sir Thomas More published a book titled Utopia. It compared social and economic conditions in Europe with those of an ideal society on an imaginary island located off the coast of the Americas. More wanted to imply that the perfect conditions on his fictional island could never really exist, so he called it Utopia, a name he created by combining the Greek words ou (meaning “no, not”) and topos (meaning “place,” a root used in our word topography). The earliest generic use of utopia was for an imaginary and indefinitely remote place. The current use of utopia, referring to an ideal place or society, was inspired by More’s description of Utopia’s perfection.
Dystopia: The word dystopia is well-known as the opposite, or antonym of utopia. Utopia is a pun created by Thomas More to put us in mind of the Greek u-topos (no place) and eu-topos (good place). Utopias, More appears to be saying, are too good to be true. The origin of the equivalent term, dystopia, is a rather interesting one. If utopia denotes an ideal or dream society, dystopia is the word used to refer to an imagined nightmare world normally the world of the future. According to the Oxford English Dictionary, the noun dystopia first turns up in print in 1952, but the first citation for the word dystopian comes from a speech made in the House of Commons by the Victorian philosopher, John Stuart Mill in 1868. It has been a word used the theorize the future.

 

Comparative Textbook Analysis