Notice Board

The Institute for Child and Youth Studies (I-CYS) and the Department of English presents:

Imposed Innocence, the End of Society, and Our Posthuman Future: Exploring the Role of the Child in Post-Apocalyptic and Dystopic Fiction and Film

by Dr. Nick Morwood - the Department of English

The popularity of the figure of the child in dystopic and post-apocalyptic culture is understandable. In a world where society has been fundamentally altered, or destroyed altogether, the child as an external moral compass can seem critical for contextualizing the action in an ethically empty world. However, the representation of children in such culture is frequently a manipulative lynchpin in the promotion of simplistic, even dangerous, politics. From Antigone to Total Recall, the notion that the child figure might actively guide a society in its darkest hour is problematic at best – given the common but problematic assumptions of innocence and simplicity – and frequently absurd, implying that adult experience and understanding should give way to a pastoral fantasy of innate goodness. Cormac McCarthy’s The Road goes further: by figuring the protection of the child as the ultimate political goal, the novel ushers-in a profoundly anti-societal ideology, where American ideals of family and the sovereignty of private space and property trump, and even stand-in for, responsibility to wider society. The complexity of the post-apocalyptic and dystopic genres rewards close study, with Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go being an example that counters such manipulative representations. Using fully realized child and youth characters, the novel actively critiques societal historico-political naiveté, while exploring the dangers of the persistence of humanism in a posthuman world.

Wine and Cheese reception
Friday, January 29
3:00 pm in room C640 in University Hall