Jermaine Rodriguez

English 112B

Fall 2011

Fight the Power!—Illustrating the Importance of Civil Disobedience Through Dystopian Literature

Barak Obama is a socialist, and George W. Bush is the dumbest man alive! Although these kinds of comments make most politically moderate Americans cringe, being able to say them out loud or even post them on the internet is a freedom that is sometimes underappreciated. This can be especially true of young adults who lack the knowledge of other types of government with which to adequately compare to their own. Furthermore, this lack of perspective can cause the very type of complacency that might allow these freedoms to be taken away. As Thomas Jefferson said, �The price of freedom is eternal vigilance.�

Delving into dystopian literature can give students an opportunity to look �through the looking glass� into other ways in which a society might be run, and it will better equip them to actively shape the world around them towards or away from these alternate visions. Above and beyond giving students better tools to gauge what is or is not desirable in a societal model, however, is empowering them with the belief in their own power for social change through examples of civil disobedience in dystopian literature.

Perhaps no dystopian novel is quite as well known as 1984 by George Orwell. In this book, Orwell shows how a government can use fear, surveillance, and misinformation to maintain absolute power over its citizens. The books protagonist begins go keep a diary, a crime unto itself, and through self reflection he decides to try to fight back against the totalitarian regime. An excellent piece of young adult literature to pair with 1984 is Little Brother by Cory Doctorow. The protagonist of Little Brother is a teenage boy named Marcus who cleverly uses technology to fight against government surveillance he feels is contrary to the ideals of the U.S. Constitution.

Launching the Unit

1. The first thing I would do would be to show the class a Youtube.com clip entitled �1984 is Already Here� (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g0kiHy0kAzw) I would then assign an SSW for the class with several questions to respond to.

a. Society would be safer if we had security cameras in public places to catch potential criminals.

b. To what extent does the government have the right to survey its citizens?

c. How much privacy are you willing to give up for security?

d. To what extent should the government be involved in the lives of its citizens?

e. Torture of a person who is a threat to our country�s freedom is acceptable as long the person does not die.

These questions will establish a baseline that the students will refer back to at the end of the unit to see if their views on these matters have changed.

2. In class reading of �Harrison Bergeron� by Kurt Vonnegut. In this story smart people wear devices to make them dumber, athletic people wear weights to make them slower, and beautiful people are forced into masks. These contradictions offer a chance to discuss the type of irony that the class will later read in the many slogans of 1984. The title character of �Harrison Bergeron� publicly disobeys the rules with harsh consequences. Why does he do this? Discuss his mother�s reaction to his death. The government in this story interprets the line in the Declaration of Independence �All men are created equal� to mean that nobody can be exceptional. Most people today, however, interpret this line to mean that everybody is granted equal opportunity under the law. A discussion of how different interpretations of the same laws can lead to such a radical change in their enforcement will be an important theme to pick up during the class� reading of Little Brother.

3. As the class begins to read Little Brother, using the initial baseline writings and discussions to gauge how the students feel about government surveillance, they will be assigned to either side of a debate on whether or not the protagonist Marcus is a terrorist. This debate will take place at the end of the reading, but letting the students know which side they will argue allows them to gather pertinent quotes along the way.

4. While the class is reading Little Brother, I will have selected quotes from �Civil Disobedience� by Henry David Thoreau that the students will respond to in their SSW. Some of the quotes I have chosen are as listed below.

a. �Under a government which imprisons any unjustly, the true place for a just man is also a prison."

b. �The mass of men serve the state thus, not as men mainly, but as machines, with their bodies. They are the standing army, and the militia, jailers, constables etc. In most cases there is no free exercise whatever of the judgment or of the moral sense; but they put themselves on a level with wood and earth and stones; and wooden men can perhaps be manufactured that will serve the purpose as well. Such command no more respect than men of straw or a lump of dirt. They have the same sort of worth only as horses and dogs.�

c. �The government is best which governs least.�

d. �Let every man make known what kind of government would command his respect, and that will be one step toward obtaining it.�

5. When the class has finished reading Little Brother, each student will be asked to prepare a one minute speech to defend their assigned position on whether Marcus was a terrorist.

6. The class will then watch the move �V for Vendetta� by James McTiegue. The protagonist of this movie is a terrorist attempting to incite a revolution against a totalitarian regime. Under what circumstances is it okay to use violence to affect social change? Is it ever okay? Is this character any different from modern day terrorists? How?

7. As the class begins to read 1984 I would have them start a journal that they would make entries in after every reading. I would have them pay especially close attention to the diary that Winston keeps, and how it affects his views of Big Brother. I decided it would be better to hold the canonical text (1984) until the end because of the complicated themes it contains. Also, because 1984 can be such an affecting work, I want to give the students a chance to explore their thoughts without its influence, so they can reflect upon their initial writings to see what effect, if any, 1984 had upon their opinions. This will hopefully give them a greater sense of their responsibilities in actively shaping society.

Expanding the Unit

There is a litany of young adult literature in the dystopian genre that would help to extend the unit of study. Each student would pick a dystopian novel to read on their own, and they would do a book report on it. They would be asked to compare each book to 1984 as well as the world we live in.

Suggestions for Further Reading

All descriptions for these novels are taken from Amazon.com.

The House of the Scorpion by Nancy Farmer - Matt is six years old when he discovers that he is different from other children, from other people. To most people Matt isn't a boy, but a beast, dirty and disgusting. But to El Patron, lord of a country called Opium, Matt is the guarantee of eternal life. El Patron loves Matt as he loves himself - for Matt is himself. They share the same DNA. As Matt struggles to understand his existence and what that existence truly means, he is threatened by a host of sinister and manipulating characters� Matt longs for escape, but even escape is no guarantee of freedom because Matt is marked by his difference in ways that he doesn't even suspect.

Feed by M.T. Anderson - For Titus and his friends, it started out like any ordinary trip to the moon - a chance to party during spring break and play with some stupid low-grav at the Ricochet Lounge. But that was before the crazy hacker caused all their feeds to malfunction, sending them to the hospital to lie around with nothing inside their heads for days. And it was before Titus met Violet, a beautiful, brainy teenage girl who has decided to fight the feed and its omnipresent ability to categorize human thoughts and desires.

The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins - In the ruins of a place once known as North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. Long ago the districts waged war on the Capitol and were defeated. As part of the surrender terms, each district agreed to send one boy and one girl to appear in an annual televised event called, "The Hunger Games," a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen, who lives alone with her mother and younger sister, regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. The terrain, rules, and level of audience participation may change but one thing is constant: kill or be killed.

The Giver by Lois Lawry - Since winning the Newbery Medal in 1994, Lois Lowry�s The Giver has become one of the most influential novels of our time. The story centers on twelve-year-old Jonas, who lives in a seemingly ideal world. Not until he is given his life assignment as the Receiver does he begin to understand the dark secrets behind this fragile community. The Giver is the first in the trilogy of books that includes Gathering Blue and The Messenger.

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley - Aldous Huxley's tour de force, Brave New World is a darkly satiric vision of a "utopian" future—where humans are genetically bred and pharmaceutically anesthetized to passively serve a ruling order. A powerful work of speculative fiction that has enthralled and terrified readers for generations, it remains remarkably relevant to this day as both a warning to be heeded as we head into tomorrow and as thought-provoking, satisfying entertainment.

Bringing it All Together

In order to show the students that their study of dystopian literature is applicable to the real world, the final assignment will be a research paper on a real life government that might resemble a dystopia. Students will do a report on either Nazi Germany, North Korea, Stalin era Russia, or Communist China. Upon completion of these reports, students will then be grouped according to which regime they studied to discuss how certain techniques used by these regimes to maintain power (propaganda, paranoia, surveillance) resemble some of the dystopian literature they have read. Each group will then briefly relay their findings to the class, so the class can see what common methods are used to subjugate people. This will hopefully give them the tools to recognize how they might be manipulated by their governments, and it should also show them the importance of standing up to government corruption before it gets out of hand.

Works Cited

<http://www.amazon.com>.

Anderson, M. T. Feed. Cambridge, MA: Candlewick, 2002. Print.

Collins, Suzanne. The Hunger Games. New York: Scholastic, 2008. Print.

Doctorow, Cory. Little Brother. New York: Tom Doherty Associates, 2008. Print.

Farmer, Nancy. The House of the Scorpion. New York: Simon Pulse, 2004. Print.

Huxley, Aldous. Brave New World. New York: Perennial Classics, 1998. Print.

Lowry, Lois. The Giver. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1993. Print.

Orwell, George. 1984. San Diego: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1984. Print.

V for Vendetta. Dir. James McTeigue. Perf. Hugo Weaving and Natalie Portman. Warner Brothers, 2005.