Totalitarianism and democracy in black humor novels: An investigation on 1984, The Brave New World and The Futurological Congress

Totalitarianism has been one of the biggest political problems of the 20th century. In this regard, examples such as Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Francisco Franco and Joseph Stalin are encountered when examined the 20th century world history. Totalitarian administrations, one of the biggest dilemmas of western history, have gained fame with their antidemocratic practices. In the same period, many literary works were written to criticize totalitarian administrations. Literature as a discipline of science has been used throughout history to criticize and direct generally the whole life, in particular the political one. In this regard, the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy has been examined through three literary narratives that brought harsh criticism to the totalitarian administrations. From this point of view, in the first part of the study, totalitarianism and the historical origins of totalitarianism, as well as the tools used when a government is totalitarianizing, are analyzed. Based on this conceptual and historical framework, the concept of democracy is studied in the second part of the study and it is examined how a democratic order should be as the inverse of totalitarianism. In the third and last part of the study, the conceptual and theoretical codes given in the first two chapters, in other words, the relationship between totalitarianism and democracy, were analyzed on the axis of fictive reality in the novels of George Orwell's 1984, Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and Stanislaw Lem's The Futurological Congress. In the study, the phenomenological analysis and discourse analysis techniques were used as method in the center of qualitative theory (Interpretive information theory-hermenotic- qualitative approach). Key Words: Totalitarianism, Democracy, Brave New World, 1984, The Futurological Congress.