In the master's thesis I focus on the analysis of media in dystopian novels and their contextualization through the prism of the history of utopian thought, Lukács's theory of the novel and past totalitarian regimes such as Stalinism and Nazism. In the latter, I rely on the theory of Hannah Arendt, who among other things, as one of the elements of totalitarianism recognizes the propaganda spread by the mass media. As a starting point, I set a question, why the study of media in the dystopian literature can still be relevant today, when on the one hand it seems that due to the development of modern technologies some Orwellian projections of the future seem increasingly feasible, but on the other hand we feel that – with strong conviction of their crimes – past totalitarian regimes are dumped forever in the dustbin of history. The characteristic of utopia is that it is not possible in reality, even if its framework is determined by reality – the same applies to dystopia, since it is considered the »back side« of utopia. In the first, theoretical part of the thesis, I focus on concepts that help us understand these frameworks in the case of the media; in the second part, where I discuss three »dystopian classics« – We by Yevgeny Zamyatin, Brave New World by Aldous Huxley and 1984 by George Orwell – I try to find out to how the dystopian presentation of the media in the novels corresponds to the way the media works in reality.
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