Brian Attebery, Professor of English at Idaho State University and editor of The Journal of the Fantastic in the Arts, will be giving a talk jointly hosted by The Centre for Critical and Creative Cultures and the Scottish Centre for Comics Studies on ‘Young Adult Dystopias and Utopias’.
This will take place on Wednesday 13 February 2019, 16:30-18:00, in the Baxter Lecture Theatre (room 1:36) University of Dundee, Tower Building.
Young Adult readers have long embraced dystopian literature, more recently with series such as Suzanne Collins’s Hunger Games and Patrick Ness’s Chaos Walking but also going back to earlier works by writers such as John Wyndham, John Christopher, Lois Lowry, and Ray Bradbury. This talk looks at the link between teen readers and dystopia and also at the relationship between utopian and dystopian versions of social extrapolation. We need both, but there is danger that the emphasis on negative projections can keep us from trying out more hopeful alternatives.