Fiche bac : the notion of progress

Fiche anglais 3

Introduction :

I am going to present the notion of progress. First of all, I think it is very important to define the words of the notion. Progress is a question of moving on and evolving with positive or negative consequences. The last 2 centuries have seen societies progress at an ever-increasing rate on many fronts such as industrial, scientific, technological ones, for example we have witnessed a social revolution where the rights of women have been transformed in most of the English-speaking world. That is one of the good aspects of progress but there are also bad aspects, for example the scientific progress has its benefits but it can also have its downsides as humanity is faced with the impact of climate change

The dystopian evolution of our society can be a very interesting subject in order to study this notion.

Problematique:

I will study:

• How Anglo-Saxon literature and film has change his opinion through time about our future society?

• How will the world of tomorrow look like?

Annonce de plan:

I. Dystopias: a new vision of the future

II. Our world is deteriorating through time

I

• Dystopias became more and more popular in the 20th century in the context of post war era but what is it? A dystopia is a an imagined state or society in which there is great suffering or injustice, typically one that is totalitarian or post-apocalyptic.

• Four centuries ago, Thomas Moore coined the word “utopia” with his book Utopia published during the 16th century. An utopia is a perfect place which doesn’t exist.

• Facing technological, scientific and political threats, most works are dystopia such as Hunger Games, 1984, Divergent and so many others.

• One of the first dystopias was Brave New World by English author Aldous Huxley released in 1932 which is a pessimistic vision of the future with clones for example.

• The example of the book we studied a few months ago was 1984: the main character lives under a doomed regime in a dismal world controlled by the government: Big Brother. George Orwell warns the readers against totalitarian regimes and with this title 1984, he wanted to say that this regime could occur in the next 30 years.

-The industry of dystopia’s movies/books gave a pessimistic image of the future society but is it always that close to the reality? Are they mirror our fears concerning tomorrow’s world?

II In this part I will show to what extent society is going to change in the future

As we said, progress can have negative consequences, one of the most current is global warming. People are feeling more and more concerned about what's going on... so they want to make the rest of the world aware for example

• In an extract from a documentary names an Inconvenient Truth, Global Warning is explained through a cartoon and it criticizes the non-actions of politicians with

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