Abstract
The following compilation of student papers titled, Cure against the entropy of human thought. Anti-utopian motives in world literature came into existence mainly from works written in two seminars about anti-utopian literature taught in the Department of Czech Literature and Comparative Literature Faculty of Arts at Charles University.
The compilation opens with the paper of Ondřej Slačálek Utopia today: apparition, method and tool of the dialog, where he reflects on the role of utopian and anti-utopian literature in the postmodern world. Anna Dvořáková focuses on an essential element of anti-utopian literature - media and the manipulation of information.
She analyzes not only the ways of handling information and the roles that the media play in a fictional world, but also how the world itself is portrayed through the media and how the inhabitants of that world receive the presented information. Ondřej Pomahač offers a detailed analysis of the artificial language found in the novel Nineteen-Eighty-Fourand evaluates Orwell's concept of natural language and in the conclusion elaborates on the mutual relationship between both concepts.
Pavlína Tvrdá analyzes the character of "leaders" in anti-utopian worlds in terms of Christian doctrine and focuses mainly on the "godlike attributes" of Big Brother. The paper of Lukáš Malý is devoted to the "femme fatal" in anti-utopian literature.
He provides a basic analysis of these characters and a summary of some of the works he examined in this genre. The last paper is mainly focused on Hungarian literature.
Lucie Šťastná studies the novel Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler, which also bears the distinctive elements of anti-utopian literature.