"The equivocal opening phrase, 'imagine, if you can', suggests that the capacity for imagination is already dwindling and that the disappearance of orality in the short story is, in part, symptomatic of this decline. To that extent, 'The Machine Stops' is not a tale of the future but an allegory of the present where formal inconsistencies describe tensions in contemporary cultural thought."
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Original Language: English
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Sources
Paul March-Russell. 2005. 'Imagine, If You Can': Love, Time and the Impossibility of Utopia in E. M. Forster's 'The Machine Stops'. Critical Survey 17, no. 1: 56-71.
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The Machine Stops
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