Department of General and Comparative Literature
Subject: Contemporary Dystopian Literature
Supervisor: Prof. Ilana Pardes
Abstract: After years of being considered an inferior and niche subject, the dystopia genre has experienced a real renaissance in recent years. In culture, film and television, many works are dedicated to thinking and imagining the future that awaits humanity, among other things in light of climate change, technological innovations and the economic forces that are shaping society. The place of dystopian literature has not been absent either, and the new and prolific wave of dystopian literary works published in Israel and around the world is receiving much attention in academic research. Dystopian literature is fascinating because it is an attempt to imagine the future out of the fears and concerns of the present and the past, and serves as a reminder that the unprecedented power that humanity has to shape its future may serve as a double-edged sword. Thus, instead of utopian fantasies, we get an effective picture of human anxiety about what we can do to ourselves. The growing interest in dystopias reflects the unease that exists in society from the future. In my thesis work i wrote about the reacrion between dystopian literature and the narrative form of personal and historical testimony. Through a comparative reading of two contemporary novels characterized by a combination of dystopia and witnessing, The Handmaid's Tale (1985) by Margaret Atwood, and The Third by Yishai Sarid (2015), as well as the interdisciplinary research of trauma studies in literature, psychology and history, I have argued that these works are unique in that they do not treat the dystopian future as an extreme of present trends but rather as a result of past events recurring in society as trauma, thereby covertly influencing society in its attempt to shape its future.
In my Phd studies I would like to continue to explore the unique encounters between the dystopia genre, which is considered familiar and relatively fixed, to different narrative forms that challenge and expand dystopia's ability to represent speculative ways of thinking about the future of humanity. To this end, I intend to continue to engage in contemporary dystopias, influenced by the tradition of utopian / dystopian writing, in the spirit of opposition to totalitarian society, but address new areas of interest, including issues related to the climate crisis, socioeconomic critique and price of the accelerated pace of technological innovations and changes .
Bio: I have studied for my B.A and a M.A. in comparative literature at the Hebrew University. My thesis work was about witnessing and trauma in contemporary dystopian literature.
Publications:
President Scholarship 2022/23