Imagining Surveillance

Abstract

Imagining Surveillance provides the first extensive and intensive study of surveillance as depicted and assessed in literature and film. Focusing on the utopian genre (which includes positive eutopias and negative dystopias), this book offers an in-depth account of how creative writers, filmmakers and thinkers have envisioned other worlds in which surveillance operates, for good and ill. It explores how surveillance scholars have utilized these fictional works in understanding the myriad implications of surveillance in the contemporary world. From Thomas More’s Utopia to recent novels and films such as Dave Eggers’ The Circle and Spike Jonze’s Her, Imagining Surveillance traces the long history of surveillance in imaginative texts well before and after George Orwell’s iconic Nineteen Eighty-Four. The book argues that creative texts have long offered subtle, complex and provocative readings of surveillance that investigate the human dimension of this fast-developing, at times invisible, and undoubtedly transformative element of twenty-first century life. Novels and films supply scenarios and narratives that prompt readers and viewers to consider the personal, ethical, social and political questions proliferating surveillance raises. With chapters on the relationships between surveillance and visibility, spaces, identities, technologies, and the shape of things to come, Imagining Surveillance establishes itself at the leading edge of the emerging cultural studies of surveillance.