Imagining Surveillance: Eutopian and Dystopian Literature and Film in Bloomington, MN

Critically assesses how literary and cinematic eutopias and dystopias have imagined and evaluated surveillance.
Imagining Surveillance
presents the first full-length study of the depiction and assessment of surveillance in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive and negative worlds), this book offers an in-depth account of the ways in which the most creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned alternative worlds in which surveillance in various forms plays a key concern. Ranging from Thomas More’s genre-defining
Utopia
to Spike Jones’ provocative film
Her
,
explores the long history of surveillance in creative texts well before and after George Orwell’s iconic
Nineteen Eighty-Four
. It fits that key novel into a five hundred year narrative that includes some of the most provocative and inventive accounts of surveillance as it is and as it might be in the future. The book explains the sustained use of these works by surveillance scholars, but goes much further and deeper in explicating their brilliant and challenging diversity. With chapters on surveillance studies, surveillance in utopias before Orwell,
itself, and utopian texts post-Orwell that deal with visibility, spaces, identity, technology and the shape of things to come,
sits firmly in the emerging cultural studies of surveillance.
Key Features:
The first sustained account of the representation of surveillance in eutopian and dystopian literature and film
Charts surveillance’s historical development and creative responses to that development
Provides a detailed critical account of the ways that surveillance studies has utilised utopias to formulate its ideas
Offers new readings of literary texts and films from More’s
through George Orwell’s
to Margaret Atwood’s
Oryx and Crake
and films from Fritz Lang’s
Metropolis
to Neil Blomkamp’s
Elysium
and beyond