장벽과 울타리의 디스토피아

Dystopias of Walls and Fences: A Recent Trend in American Young Adult Literature

This paper analyzes the rise of the dystopian narrative, which has become one of the dominant trends that characterize young adult literature in the context of the post-9/11 American society and culture, focusing on three popular young adult dystopian novel series: The Hunger Games trilogy by Suzanne Collins, Divergent trilogy by Veronica Roth, and The Maze Runner trilogy by James Dashner. The recent trend in apocalyptic, post-apocalyptic, and dystopian themes in American popular culture across various media platforms, rangu1g from print fiction to film and television to video game, has been often attributed to the trauma of the 9/11 attacks. Popularity of dystopian fictions among young readers can be also seen as reflecting their perception of the post-9/11 American society. This paper argues that, by criticizing future societies characterized by strict social and spatial control and narrating the resistance of the protagonists with interstitial or flexible identities who challenge the existing systems by means of crossing spatial and social borders, the three aforementioned series criticize the dominant post-9/11 discourse that emphasizes the binary between self and the Other and demands internal homogeneity. While each text reveals its own limitations, the objection against the claustrophobic society, imposed boundaries, and fixed identities that these fictions display are significant in that they reveal young adults' fears, dissatisfactions, and desires in the contemporary United States.