Impossible Balance

The issues concerning utopian and dystopian literature have been discussed more vigorously in the past twenty years than ever before and scholarship grows at a rapid speed both at home and abroad. However questions crucial to the nature, ontological status, interpretation, and understanding of utopian and dystopian literature still raise important and challenging questions. Questions such as what the nature and the ontological status of utopian and dystopian text are; how the relationship between utopian and dystopian texts affect each other; how the textual factors meant to maintain textual stability cause the textual instability in both utopian and dystopian texts and how the readers interpret the text. As a matter of fact, these questions not only concerns the logical and ontological status of the unity of utopian and dystopian literature, they are also related to the significance, at the epistemological level, of the conditions for the possible knowledge of one of the greatest efforts in the human history, the writing of utopian and dystopian fictions.This dissertation concentrates on the study of textual instability in four utopian and dystopian fictions, a topic less concerned by scholarly studies. The study is conducted basically on two levels, the logic level of a text which concerns the intension, extension, and taxonomy of texts, and second, the epistemological level of text, which concerns the understanding, the interpretation and discernibility of texts.This dissertation will start from categorizing and examining the functions of the texts in The Republic, Utopia, Brave New World and The Handmaid's Tale respectively. The main issue in this part of the dissertation is to identify the rationale for the textual devices intended by the author to keep their textual stability. Secondly, the dissertation will discuss the interpretation and understanding of texts in the four selected utopian and dystopian works. The effort in this part is to expose how the interpretation and understanding influence the textual stability from the perspectives of the characters in the selected works and Plato, Thomas More, Aldous Huxley and Margaret Atwood. Thirdly, the dissertation will discuss limitations of textual meaning in its influence on textual stability in the four works. The three efforts mentioned above are to prove that textual instability is the major motive for the adoption of the textual devices by the four authors.The last part of the dissertation is the attempted conclusion which argues that textual instability mainly comes from the craving for the stability which has been exhibited from the following aspects. First of all, the function of the text from the logical understanding of text; secondly the textual instability is caused by the various understanding of the texts; thirdly, the textual instability is the result of the limits of understanding of its meaning apart from their historical authors. Textual instability leads directly to the instability of society. And finally the dissertation argues that textual instability exhibits the mutual supportive relationship typical of the genre, the stabilizing strategy frequently leading to textual instability both in utopian and dystopian literature.