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Loyola University Chicago Utopian Discourse In LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO UTOPIAN DISCOURSE IN CONTEMPORARY SPECULATIVE FICTION A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN ENGLISH BY CASEY A. JERGENSON CHICAGO, IL AUGUST 2020 Copyright by Casey Jergenson, 2020 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS I would like to thank all the people who supported, encouraged, and advised me while I worked on this dissertation. I was fortunate enough to have an excellent dissertation committee. Dr. Chris Kendrick’s expansive knowledge of utopia and science fiction was an invaluable resource. Dr. Jack Kerkering was a wonderful teaching mentor, and his attention to detail while reading my chapters helped me to become a more disciplined writer. As the director of my committee, Dr. Badia Ahad helped me to translate my often rambling and disorderly thoughts into a critical intervention. My fellow graduate students at Loyola were also supportive throughout this process, especially Shelby Sleevi, who read and provided nuanced feedback on multiple sections of this project. Importantly, my work was enabled by funding from the Loyola graduate school, including an additional year through the Teaching Scholars Program. I am also grateful to my professors in the English Department at Creighton University; Dr. Lydia Cooper, especially, has always been a great mentor. Writing this dissertation was often a frustrating process, and my friends at the Loyola Community Literacy Center helped me to remember what it was all for. Finally, nothing was more important in helping me to finish this project than the unfailing support of my parents and siblings. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGMENTS iii INTRODUCTION 1 Utopian Genre and Utopian Discourse 4 Chapter Outline 11 CHAPTER ONE: “EVERY SECOND OF TIME”: ANTICIPATION AND CATASTROPHE IN POST-APOCALYPTIC FICTION 15 Negative Utopianism 18 Anticipating Utopia in the Twenty-First Century: The Road and The Broken Earth Trilogy 24 CHAPTER TWO: UTOPIAN DIALECTICS IN MARGARET ATWOOD’S MADDADDAM TRILOGY AND CHANG-RAE LEE’S ON SUCH A FULL SEA 48 Negative Dialectics and Utopian Discourse 49 Totalitarianism and Resistance in the Modernist Dystopias 57 Utopian Dialectics After the Cold War 63 The Limits of the Dialectic 89 CHAPTER THREE: EMBODYING UTOPIAN CONTENT IN CHINA MIÉVILLE’S BAS-LAG TRILOGY 92 Theorizing Utopian Content 93 The Utopianism of Monsters in Perdido Street Station 98 The Scar, Iron Council, and the Route(s) to Utopia 115 From Utopia to Uchronia 130 CHAPTER FOUR: JOURNEY AND RETURN: RECURSIVE TEMPORALITIES IN URSULA K. LE GUIN’S CRITICAL UTOPIAS 132 History and Narrative Time 134 Rescuing the Past in Ursula K. Le Guin’s Critical Utopias 138 Beyond Negativity 158 CONCLUSION 161 REFERENCE LIST 164 VITA 172 iv INTRODUCTION The history of utopian literature since the late nineteenth century has been marked by generic ebbs and flows. Kenneth Roemer observes that “Between 1888 and the early years of the twentieth century, at least 200 literary utopias appeared in the United States alone” (93). This profusion of optimistic visions of a better future was relatively short lived. The subsequent decades saw a generic reversal in response to the Great Depression, World War I, and the rise of authoritarian regimes that professed utopian aspirations. The literary turn from utopia to dystopia—part of the broader cultural phenomenon called Modernism—produced nightmare visions of futures in which human thought and action were controlled by combinations of physical coercion, psychological conditioning, and eugenic manipulation. The hegemony of dystopia in the early and mid-twentieth century eventually gave way to a brief renaissance of utopian thought in the 1960s and 1970s, as authors—in tandem with the rise of second-wave feminism, the Civil Rights movement, and so on—began once more to imagine better futures. These literary texts—authored primarily by women, such as Ursula K. Le Guin and Marge Piercy—are what Tom Moylan has called the “critical utopias,” texts that “reject utopia as blueprint while preserving it as dream” (Demand 10). The fading of the revolutionary possibilities of the 1960s, the onset of neoliberalism in the 1980s, and the consolidation of the globe under late capitalism after the end of the Cold War resulted in a cultural shift back to dystopia. Raffaella Baccolini, among other critics, has described this as “a ‘dystopian turn’ in Anglo-American science fiction” (520). 1 2 For the purposes of this dissertation, the dystopian turn of the 1980s marked the beginning of a period of speculative fiction production that continues to the present day. This is the period that I define as “contemporary,” and it is characterized by a profusion of dystopian and post-apocalyptic texts in every narrative medium.1 If we take this generic distribution at face-value, it seems symptomatic of the utopian idea’s retreat from cultural production since the end of the Cold War. This raises questions regarding how we should interpret the relatively uncontroversial genre history I have outlined above. Is the oscillation between utopia and dystopia symptomatic of broader cultural shifts between optimism and pessimism, hope and despair? This interpretation is implicitly present in a great deal of criticism, but there are reasons to be skeptical of it. The most important reason, for the purposes of this dissertation, is that utopian and dystopian narratives cannot be correlated in any straightforward, one-to-one manner with a prevailing cultural mood. Conditions of poverty, precarity, ecological breakdown, or political oppression may very well result in a profusion of dystopian narratives, but this is not always the case. Degrading conditions may lead just as easily to compensatory visions of a world in which those conditions have been ameliorated. As Roemer writes of the utopian narratives of the 1890s, “The destructive effects of the industrial revolution undermined belief in the inevitability of progress. But this dystopian challenge to progress also set up a tension that 1 At the time of this writing, Lyman Tower Sargent’s online annotated bibliography of utopian literature lists 126 publications in 2019 (Utopian Literature). Sargent provides a brief annotation for each entry but does not systematically classify all of the entries by genre. His annotations explicitly label only 72 (57%) of the 126 texts as dystopias, but most of the other texts are also dystopias that are simply not labelled as such. Sargent’s bibliography also only includes novels and short stories, omitting films and television series, so it is a limited source of statistics on the relative proportions of utopian and dystopian narratives in recent years. 3 created fertile grounds for utopian theory and literature” (82). The prevailing material and ideological conditions in any historical moment will become sedimented in that moment’s cultural productions, and it is certainly worthwhile to consider the generic oscillation described above in that context. The primary danger of such readings, however, is that they may lead to reductive definitions of the political functions of utopian and dystopian narratives. These genre distinctions sort texts into different categories based on the nature of the dominant social order they describe. These labels should not be understood as describing the text’s politics or the position of the utopian idea within it. As we will see below, a number of critics drew attention to this in the 1990s and early 2000s; their valuable responses to this insight generally involved revising the traditional genre categories to accommodate a greater degree of political complexity within them. This included redefining the dystopian narrative to acknowledge the possibility for these bleak and frightening narratives to contain utopian hope. These projects nonetheless retain an investment in traditional genre categories that, I argue, are decreasingly useful in understanding the politics of contemporary speculative fiction. I argue that to grapple with the political and generic complexity of contemporary speculative fiction, it is useful to deemphasize the traditional genre categories organizing utopian literary studies and to approach utopianism as a discourse. I define utopian discourse as a body of thematic concerns, procedures of representation, and patterns of formal organization traceable through a wide range of speculative fiction texts that are invested in the politics of radical social betterment. This body of textual practices is informed by the basic problematic of utopian representation: that, as the “good place” that is “no place,” utopia cannot be represented. Works of utopian discourse, therefore, generally refrain from offering blueprint images of a “perfect” 4 society. They instead explore utopia’s conditions of possibility, lending conceptual content to the utopian idea, embodying that content in the text, and then orienting it toward unrepresented horizons of utopian possibility. This understanding of literary utopianism disengages it from the genre of utopian narrative, allowing us to track it through contemporary works of dystopian and post-apocalyptic fiction, science fiction, and fantasy that otherwise may be illegible as utopian texts. Doing so reveals that hope is a major structure of feeling in speculative fiction today, despite the paucity of recent texts depicting “good” societies. Utopian Genre and Utopian Discourse Identifying the place of the utopian idea in recent speculative fiction
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