Further Reading

Podcast Episode

David Guignion, ‘Discipline and Punish (Part 1/2), Theory and Philosophy [LINK]

Information and media studies scholar David Guignion provides a detailed run down of Michel Foucault’s Discipline and Punish. He aims to provide an accessible but thorough chapter by chapter breakdown of Foucault’s book which acts as an excellent reading companion if you are just starting out with Foucault.

Magazine Article

George Orwell, ‘Freedom and Happiness (Review of We by Yevgeny Zamyatin)’, Tribune (1946) [LINK]

Author of well known dystopia 1984 George Orwell compares Zamyatin’s We to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. I don’t agree with everything Orwell says here (I think We is a good book!) but it is interesting to see him reflect on dystopianism before he had begun 1984.

Academic Article

Phillip E. Wegner, ‘On Zamyatin’s We: A Critical Map of Utopia’s ‘Possible Worlds’, Utopian Studies, 4:2 (1993), 94-116. [LINK]

Phillip Wegner discusses whether it is possible to read Zamyatin’s We as a utopia (as well as a dystopia). He emphasizes the importance of I-330 to the novel because, he argues, she prevents it from becoming an anti-urban narrative about how we should escape all cities and go ‘back to nature’.

Academic Book

Amy Butt, ‘“Doors that could take you elsewhere”: The Architectural Practice of Reading Science Fiction’ (2023) [LINK]

Amy Butt has written her forthcoming PhD thesis on the relationship between architecture and science fiction. This thesis is not yet published but you can read the articles which it is made up of via Amy’s website, including an article titled ‘The Present as Past: Science Fiction and the Museum’ where she argues that the ancient house in We is an important site of resistance.

Background Reading

Yevgeny Zamyatin, A Soviet Heretic (1970) [LINK]

This is a selection of Zamyatin’s essays, reviews and autobiographical writing. It includes his essay ‘On Literature, Revolution, Entropy and Other Matters’ (which can be found elsewhere online) where he expands on his ideas about the necessity of continual revolutions to maintaining utopia.