My paper will discuss the role of censorship in both literary and real-life societies in the maintenance of power. First, I will define “censorship”, and what can be censored. After analyzing censorship in fictional societies, using novels such as The Republic by Plato and Fahrenheit 451 by Ray Bradbury, I will explore internet censorship in the United States and China. By analyzing these societies and their social and political environment, I will address not only the how , but the why of censorship. In doing so, I will reveal the underlying motives of those in power that enable censorship.
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I can see you moved around parts of your original proposal; however, I’m questioning if it was necessary. Just make sure that you organize your ideas the way YOU want whoever is reading your proposal to understand it. I think you could also try to directly relate your main intention and the steps you plan to take, as laid out in the first paragraph, to the questions you intend to answer in the second paragraph; the intention being “to explore the use of censorship in utopian and dystopian societies and its role in the maintenance of power,” and the steps being “defining the term “censorship” in terms of the breadth of what may be censored.” and “discussing the real-world implications of censorship using secondary sources listed in [your] bibliography”.
It is evident that you have narrowed down your scope than before and you are going to focus on just censorship and its role in the utopian/dystopian society. However, I think aiming to analyze so many texts and the then comparing the Chinese and American forms of censorship would make the paper too long. Maybe you could focus more on either the texts or the American/Chinese forms of censorship and use the other as a secondary source. Furthermore, you have not identified what kind of links or relationships you hope to find between the texts and the forms of modern day censorship of China and America. Posing some questions or hypothesis regarding that may help your reader understand what you are hoping to achieve.
You’ve further narrowed your thesis and the questions you would like to pose, and the question of what motivates leaders to censor information is really cool. I agree with Asir that you have a very large scope right now; looking for the motives for censorship in fictional societies, and then in the United States and China, could be too much to take on. Perhaps, though, you could rephrase your question as something like, “How are the motives for censorship different in an authoritarian state from those in a democratic state?” Then you would be able to use China and the fictional authoritarian societies to determine authoritarian governments’ motives for censorship, and the United States and democratic fictional societies to find democratic governments’ motives for censorship. This, or another similar question, might help you narrow down your area of research so that it’s not so overwhelming.