EVERYONE’S WATCHING YOU: THE FUTURE OF SOCIETY IN DAVE EGGERS’S “THE EVERY”

• Authors: MacMillan Catharine
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article explores Dave Eggers’s 2021 dystopian novel “The Every” from the perspective of philosopher Roberto Esposito’s intertwined concepts of community and immunity, as put forward in his books Communitas (1998), Immunitas (2002), Bios (2004), and Common Immunity (2023). In Eggers’s novel, “The Every” is a gigantic, world-dominating corporation which, through soft totalitarian means, seeks to create a utopian, peaceful, politically correct, and environmentally friendly world. It thus aims to immunise the world from the violent void at the heart of community by encouraging surveillance (of self and others) through a wide variety of apps. However, in its attempt to create a homogenous, peaceful world, “The Every” arguably suffers from an excess of immunisation from Esposito’s perspective. This result in an autoimmune crisis, leading to both the exclusion of large swathes of the population, such as the poor or the technophobe Trogs, and to increased mental illness and even suicide among those subjected to constant surveillance and self-censorship.

Keywords

EN

SURVEILLANCE; DYSTOPIA; TECHNO-CAPITALISM; IMMUNOLOGY; TOTALITARIANISM; DAVE EGGERS

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 4
• Pages: 79 – 92

Contributors

author

MacMillan Catharine

• English Language and Literature Department, Faculty of Arts and Sciences, Yeditepe University, Istanbul, Turkey

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3915-1530

Identifiers

DOI

10.31577/WLS.2024.16.4.6