Dystopian fiction has arguably never been more relevant than today with
dystopic concerns such as, climate change, the reign of Donald Trump and the
Refugee Crisis, impacting us not only in the West, but on a global scale. My work
aims to bring to light how what we see in the world is largely influenced by the
ways in which we think and how we communicate such thoughts through our
language. The discourse we create alters our perspective and generates our
many social systems, including our political ones. These interactions between
language, society, text worlds, and cognition are typically multi-layered, and in
constant flux, fragile and interchangeable. To explain this I draw on two modern
dystopian fictions, Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World and Margaret Atwood’s The
Handmaid’s Tale. These texts in particular reveal how organizations gain and
maintain political power within our current society. However, I also entertain a
more philosophical approach in the final chapter, appealing to the idea that
systems of control are happening even on a word-level basis. The work begins to
suggest how language possibly both creates social constructs, and reflects the
patterns of human thought itself.