مجلة سيميائيات
Volume 19, Numéro 1, Pages 677-688
2024-03-30

Contagious Dystopia From We To The Handmaid’s Tale

Authors : Serir Lina . Bouhassoun Azzeddine .

Abstract

The research paper reads an intertextual analysis of Yevgeny Zamyatin and Margaret Atwood on dystopian fiction. In the scheme of things, the twentieth century was a time of terror and suspicion caused by human ideological fallacy to reach perfection through the premise of utopia. The outcome of leading with greed spawned heresy in a labyrinthine world that writers manifest through dystopia which has been spread burly through literature. In this vein, Zamyatin and Atwood scrutinized their cataclysmic communities in their narratives; using an imaginary setting in a distant future. This study aims to decode some parts of We and The Handmaid's Tale to affiliate these oeuvres within the anti-utopian vessel. Some literary tools assist in the findings of this paper which assert that the Russian and English selected novels veer towards the same vision of dystopia the infection of which seems inevitable. It also finds that the texts recommend a reading between the lines to realize hidden layers and references which empower the identity of the literary works. As a result, Zamyatin and Atwood remain indebted to previous works and art that helped them criticize the deemed "perfect place" where suffering and dehumanization are its concealed founding structure.

Keywords

Dystopia ; Intertextuality ; Zamyatin ; Atwood ; We ; The Handmaid’s Tale