That said, most of the famous distopia's (1984, for example) were written by socialists. Zamiatyn was one of them. He wrote about a totalitarian distopia... in my opinion, recognizing that the greatest enemy of a utopia is a dictatorial or totalitarian take-over of the utopia, thereby corrupting completely the ideals of the utopia.
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I'm glad my childhood anguish brings you joy, Tone. But I'll have you know I spent many a sleepless night wondering if it would be wise to get my hair permed. I was so afraid that if I did, and the economy collapsed, I wouldn't be able to reperm it. And I really hated grow out.
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Ah, well, fair enough. Your secret's safe with me, as long as you promise me that, come the revolution, I get 15 acres, a pair of oxen, and a duck pond.
A POND, mind you. If you so much as CONSIDER relocating me to some smelly marshland, I'll have the CIA on you like that. *finger snap*
After scanning her Nobel speech, I think it’s important that it’s “oppressive language,” not literature, that she says “must be rejected, altered, and exposed.” She seems to be talking about the language itself—our system of communication—not any one person’s choice of words. Honestly, though, it’s hard to tell what Morrison really wants here. She’s the sort of writer who goes for flare more than precision, and sometimes that makes her hard to pin down.
In the essays I read earlier, she protests (maybe too much) that she has no desire to legislate tolerance. She says it wouldn’t work; it would only kill the discussion and drive racism underground. As I see it, that kind of repressed racism is what Beloved is all about, with the ghost’s arrival representing a return of the repressed. (The play I quoted earlier, Spinning into Butter by Rebecca Gilman, deals with the same thing, only as it affects white academics instead of poor ex-slaves.)
But on the other hand, she clearly has a political agenda, even if only in the sense that the personal is political, and I’m not sure that her way of dealing with racism—-essentially rubbing our noses in it instead of pushing it under the couch—-is any better than the sort of PC censorship she attacks.
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Yes, Maccabeus, that seems to sum it up well. I think censorship is the attempt to legislate distasteful speech into oblivion, but convincing people to stop listening of their own volition is not censorship.
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quote:One in particular who seems to not get mentioned enough is Gloria Naylor, whom I think is absolutely fantastic.
Icarus, I completely agree!!! I read Linden Hills in college and it blew me away. Mama Day is one of my favorite books ever. She won the National Book Award, which some feel is a higher honor than winning the Nobel Prize for literature.
I also hated Beloved, along with a lot of other people I know and respect.
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