Power and Freedom in Dystopian Fiction : Disciplinary Power and Biopower in George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley's Brave New World

Sammanfattning

This essay offers a comparative analysis of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World through Michel Foucault’s concepts of disciplinary power and biopower. It argues that Nineteen Eighty-Four depicts disciplinary power as surveillance and punishment that produce self-regulating subjects. It also argues that Brave New World depicts biopower as population management through the regulation of bodies, reproduction, and desire. By comparing these modes of population control as they become visible through dystopian exaggeration, the essay shows how power operates through institutions, norms, and language, and how these forces narrow what can count as freedom. The analysis keeps pedagogical value as part of the main argument, since the novels’ exaggerated systems of control offer accessible entry points for upper-secondary students to develop critical language awareness and to discuss how conformity and obedience are produced and sustained.