Compare And Contrast Utopia And Dystopia

“Our business here is to be utopian, to make vivid and credible, if we can, first this fact and then that, of an imaginary whole and happy world” (Wells 10). Definitions of utopia and dystopia are various and different by many critics and writers. For instance, utopia is how to organize the society and relationships between people in a perfect way than in writer’s society. In addition, it is thought that utopia is principal category in literature in the twentieth century. Utopia is similar to science fiction because both of them represent unreal world and refer to unique and perfect society (Suvin 34 – 38) there is another definition of utopia which is “Utopia is a holding operation, a set of strategies to maintain social order and the perfection in the face of deficiencies, not to say hostility, of nature and the willfulness of a man” (Davis 37). On the other hand, there is an opposite definition of utopia which is described as an imagined community established in specific time and place by which the writer wants the reader to imagine and know a perfect society than his community (Sargent 9).

For instance, “Dystopia combines satire on existing society with a parodic inversion of transcendent or controlling utopian aspirations” (Davis 50). Similarly, dystopia is defined as the dominant tragedy of Modernism and it also refers to the negation of perfect communities. It is the opposite idea of utopia (Claeys 100). There is another definition of dystopia which is that “dystopias are jeremiads” (Sargent 17). Dystopia is really needed because it helps people by presenting depressing future that must be avoided. Moreover, it represents the result of people’s behaviors and spoil. So, it enables people to change for the