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‘Fahrenheit 451’ by Ray Bradbury

Professor Dennis Hayes introduces a discussion of the dystopian classic.

7:00pm, Thursday 30 July, online, via Zoom

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Introduction

During a summer of pulling down statues and renaming buildings and streets, could the next step be the symbolic burning of books? Ray Bradbury’s Fahrenheit 451 is a book about the burning of books in a future society that no longer reads them. Dennis Hayes will explore the construction and vision of the book as well as what it may or may not contribute to our understanding of the present.

The book is the subject of two films one directed by François Truffaut (1966) and, more recently, an updated interpretation directed by Ramin Bahrani (2018)

Fahrenheit 451 stands as a classic of world literature set in a bleak, dystopian future. Today its message has grown more relevant than ever before.

Guy Montag is a fireman. His job is to destroy the most illegal of commodities, the printed book, along with the houses in which they are hidden. Montag never questions the destruction and ruin his actions produce, returning each day to his bland life and wife, Mildred, who spends all day with her television ‘family’. But when he meets an eccentric young neighbour, Clarisse, who introduces him to a past where people didn’t live in fear and to a present where one sees the world through the ideas in books instead of the mindless chatter of television, Montag begins to question everything he has ever known.

Listen to the discussion

SPEAKER(S)

Dennis Hayes
professor of education, University of Derby; founder and director, Academics For Academic Freedom (AFAF); co-author, The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education

READINGS

Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury (buy this book from Amazon (UK))

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