A trilogia Jogos Vorazes: repressão, totalitarismo e corpos dóceis para a manutenção das desigualdades

Abstract

The Hunger Games trilogy was written by the American author Suzanne Collins, who began her career as a writer of children's stories for television programs and only later became one of the most acclaimed authors of the 2000s, with recognition from critics such as the ones from The New York Times, Book Review and Time Magazine. Collins was inspired by the war stories of her veteran and late father, as well as impacted by the recent events in the world and people's ease of abstraction, in face of disasters, in order to create a futuristic world full of extreme challenges for its citizens and, mainly to its heroine, Katniss Everdeen, who becomes the face of the revolution in Panem. On account of it, and due to such relevance that the trilogy has been conquering in the literary world, in this work, we have carried out a bibliographical research through which we have found that the trilogy is part of the group that many theorists, such as David Belbin (2011), Peter Hunt ( 2010), and Teresa Colomer (2003), have called juvenile or young-adult literature, and that the boundaries which separate these two subgroups are not exact, contributing to the flexibility and richness of emerging works such as the one we analyze here. Also, it was found that The Hunger Games belongs to the literary genre of dystopian fiction and, from the studies carried out on the subject, we found that this genre has distinct characteristics that portray future societies full of calamities, which motivated us to appreciate more closely the society portrayed in The Hunger Games and what makes it possible for its totalitarian government and control measures to remain in power: the masses. Throughout our research, we have noticed that the theme of totalitarianism is basic and almost indispensable for the plot of dystopian literatures, so we have chosen to focus on it and on some of the principles that put it on the scene, such as the social and political profile of a country. Therefore, we have relied on the work of scholars such as Hannah Arendt (2012) and Irwin et al. (2014), the latter, specifically, bring together works that relate The Hunger Games and multiple philosophical theories – some of which are presented in this monograph, such as the idea of a Social Contract, presented by the philosopher Thomas Hobbes. Based on the results achieved here, we hope that this work will contribute to a critical and conscientious reading of works that aim to awaken the reader to a careful look at the world and its society, acting in a way to impact their environment, since, by its nature, the dystopian literature also has the function of alerting in the present time possible future consequences that result from current behaviors.