2024 | 1

Browsing 2024 | 1 by Subject "Dystopia"

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  • Article
    "Are There Any Questions?": Fiction, Religion and Politics in The Handmaid's Tale. Editorial
    Pezzoli-Olgiati, Daria; Fritz, Natalie (2024) , S. 7-24
    Editorial to the issue on Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale that highlights how the cross-media distribution of the novel since 1985 has helped the dystopian narrative to become a global phenomenon, and refers to its impact on socio-political discussions – not only on a visual level.
  • Journal Issue
    Fiction, Religion and Politics in The Handmaid’s Tale
    (2024)
    Since its publication in 1985, The Handmaid’s Tale, a novel by Margaret Atwood, has had an enormous impact on different media productions, from opera to graphic novel to a much-acclaimed TV series. The novel develops a disturbing vision of the theocratic, totalitarian state Gilead. The narrator records fragments of her everyday life as a “handmaid”, one of the women assigned as slaves to the elite’s families for reproductive purposes. Atwood’s novel points out how religious and political fanaticism fuel social violence, inequality, and the abolishment of individual rights. With its clear articulation of widespread fears concerning contemporary democracy and its future – dystopian – developments, The Handmaid’s Tale has become a global cultural phenomenon. The articles gathered in this issue approach the complex interdependence of fiction, religion and politics in The Handmaid’s Tale in light of the novel of 1985 and the Hulu series that started in 2017. The articles by Friedhelm Hartenstein, Ann Jeffers, and Bina Nir offer a close reading of the use of biblical references in the novel, analysing the ambivalent role of religion in the (de-)legitimation of a destructive political power. Simon Spiegel focuses on the TV series and explores the transformation of the dystopian novel into a serial drama, and the paradoxical challenges of the serie’s success. The articles of the thematic section are introduced by the editors’ contribution that describes the processes of the narrative’s diffusion across media and contexts, and the hermeneutical power of this dystopian universe to address the interplay of religion and politics.
  • Article
    The Restrictions of Genre: The Television Series THE HANDMAID’S TALE as a Classic Dystopia
    Spiegel, Simon (2024) , S. 89-106
    While there is a long tradition of literary utopias, there are hardly any positive utopias in film. Cinematic dystopias, by contrast, abound. The typical dystopia usually features a protagonist who is in opposition to the ruling regime, a built-in dramatic conflict that makes dystopias particularly well-suited for films. Although the huge success of Hulu’s THE HANDMAID'S TALE seems to confirm the affinity between film and dystopias, the show also highlights that a series spanning multiple seasons has very different dramaturgical demands than a feature film. Those demands are at odds with the narrative structure of a typical dystopia. While the standard rebellion plot provides the needed tension, it cannot be prolonged endlessly. Sooner or later the rebellion either succeeds or fails, at which point literary dystopias normally end. A series like The Handmaid’s Tale needs to be able to continue that plot, which is the primary reason why the protagonist Offred never leaves Gilead despite having several opportunities to do so.