Futurist Resistance: Gendered Critical Literacy in the Dystopian Age

Abstract

Abstract:This article claims that recent dystopian fiction for teenagers presents critical literacy as futurity's primary form of activist resistance. Both M.T. Anderson's Feed (2002) and Patrick Ness's The Knife of Never Letting Go (2008) grapple with the far-reaching consequences of a society that has demonized literacy in various ways. Feed is a bleak examination of future America's uncritical, corporatized dependence on technology, theorizes narrative—both the ability to tell a story and the ability to interpret it—as a mode of resistance within a dark, corporate-dictated future. In the first of Ness's futuristic Chaos Walking books, young protagonist Todd struggles to reconcile what he has been taught and what is empirically true; his baggage is that of uncritical indoctrination. Both texts rely on young female characters to teach critical literacy: Violet encourages Titus to escape from his exaggerated albeit typical narcissistic teenage bubble while Viola is Todd's only point of entry into the only surviving written words in Prentisstown, his ma's journal. This article argues that the imagined futures in such literature conceptualizes our current need for analytical literacy, and the empathy constructed through it, in the face of "alternative" facts—theorizing resistance through critical reading as its own form of New Futurism.