http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/keyword/dystopian-literature Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Mon, 25 May 2026 06:43:53 -0400 Mon, 25 May 2026 06:43:53 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1031/survival-and-morality-in-cormac-mccarthys-the-road-exploring-aquinian-grace-and-the-boy-as-messiah By Carla M. Sanchez - In the first scene of The Road (2006), Cormac McCarthy encapsulates the bleak psychology of his post-apocalyptic novel with a metaphor of blindness that symbolically translates the confusion and hopelessness of his desolate world. In a normal setting, the father’s moment of awakening would mean a return to consciousness and the certainty of reality, a relief from the hauntingly cryptic realm of dreams. But in this landscape, where gloom corrupts the days like “the onset of some cold glaucoma dimming away the world,” the clarity of waking is negated by a fear that only the refuge... Fri, 01 May 2015 06:41 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1031/survival-and-morality-in-cormac-mccarthys-the-road-exploring-aquinian-grace-and-the-boy-as-messiah http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/606/literature-as-a-social-tool-education-and-cohesion-or-class-domination By Hannah A. Weber - English literature is all-encompassing: it ranges from societal utilitarianism of the didactic through to the celebration of individualism embodied in post-modern work. Literature, as part of a larger cultural body, is both instructive and entertaining, and has the power to facilitate personal understanding and encourage social cohesion. The society depicted in Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is disillusioned with literature: the populace has forgotten its potential to educate and entertain, and has become sceptical of the intellectual elitism it is seen to represent. People are now captivated... Fri, 13 Jan 2012 10:55 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/606/literature-as-a-social-tool-education-and-cohesion-or-class-domination http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/591/the-word-pocalypse-joss-whedons-dollhouse-and-dystopian-language By Elizabeth Padden - In my linguistic analysis of Dollhouse I will begin by examining four words: Attic, Echo, Active, and Doll, selected for their frequent usage in the series and for their exemplification of the way in which new meanings are associated with words that already have preexisting meanings. Using Hayakawa's definitions of the two categories of word meaning, denotative and connotative, I will deconstruct the preexisting meanings of the selected words and address their relationship to new denotations and connotations associated through context. Literal denotative meanings and associative connotative meanings... Mon, 07 Nov 2011 10:05 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/591/the-word-pocalypse-joss-whedons-dollhouse-and-dystopian-language http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/54/viewing-four-vonnegut-novels-through-the-lens-of-literary-criticism By Lindsay D. Clark - I like Kurt Vonnegut because he’s innovative and unique, his literary voice speaking out of a time period I love, when he “was actually helping to breathe life into a new genre—modern, pop fiction,”[1] according to critic Tom Verde. Even though he himself isn’t a radical, and in fact most of his beliefs (according to him) stem from a childhood spent during the Great Depression, the unrest of the sixties and seventies allowed him not only liberation in what he could write about—science in an age of dizzying technological advancement; religion, sex, and tradition... Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:55 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/54/viewing-four-vonnegut-novels-through-the-lens-of-literary-criticism