Final Class test  

  EN4241 End-of-Semester Class Test
  Maximum time: 45 minutes
 

Answer each of the three questions in no more than 15 minutes.
 

1. In inventing alternate worlds, do novelists tackle the rival claims of individual freedom and social order as ends in themselves? Or as means to some such goal as the ideal happiness of the many? (i.e., which to either seems more crucial: “Am I free?” or “Am I happy?”?)
Discuss with primary reference to Tepper and (secondary reference to Burgess).

2. What is the role of ethics (as distinguished from religion) in dystopian fiction? (i.e., what is the scope for “right” and “wrong” in their fictional worlds?)
Answer with primary reference to Atwood (and secondary reference to le Guin).

3. Brin speaks of "a pastoral solution to the human equation": what are the anxieties about the human condition that the invention of pastoral worlds is meant to, but fails to, resist?
Answer with reference to Brin (secondary reference to Dick).
 

Last Updated  20 April 2009