The New Americanist

The New Americanist Volume One / Number Three Autumn 2019 American Studies Center University of Warsaw Editor Matthew Chambers Assistant editor Joanna Mąkowska Advisory Board Paulina Ambrozy, Adam Mickiewicz University Laleh Khalili, SOAS University of London Charlotte Beyer, University of Gloucestershire Alex Lubin, University of New Mexico Christopher Breu, Illinois State University Josephine Metcalf, University of Hull Lori Emerson, University of Colorado Boulder Małgorzata Myk, University of Łódź Keith P. Feldman, UC Berkeley Andrew Pepper, Queen’s University Belfast Dominika Ferens, University of Wroclaw Benjamin Railton, Fitchburg State University Pawel Frelik, University of Warsaw Caroline Rody, University of Virginia Steffen Hantke,Sogang University Laurence Roth, Christina Heatherton, Barnard College Susquehanna University Tim Jelfs, University of Groningen David Schmid, SUNY Buffalo Reece Jones, University of Hawaii Jonathan Silverman, UMass Lowell Daniel Kane, University of Sussex Roberto Tejada, University of Houston Amy Kaplan, University of Pennsylvania Marek Wilczynski, University of Warsaw Caren Kaplan, UC Davis Richard Yarborough, UCLA Design Rafal Benedek and Filip Zagórski, Type2 Typesetting Andrzej Zawadzki Printer Sowa Sp. z o.o ISSN 2545-3556 Copyright @ American Studies Center, Warsaw 2019 The New Americanist American Studies Center Al. Niepodległości 22 02-653 Warsaw POLAND [email protected] newamericanist.com Submissions The New Americanist is an interdisciplinary journal publishing scholarly work on the United States and the Americas broadly considered. We are especially interested in work which includes a global perspective, introduces new critical approaches, and proposes theoretical frameworks to the study of the US. We welcome contributions from scholars from around the world and across the humanities and the social sciences. If you are interested in contributing, please submit a 250-word abstract and 200-word biographical note to [email protected]. Completed articles of a 6000–8000 word length based on accepted abstracts will be subjected to peer review. The New Americanist comes out twice yearly in association with the American Studies Center, University of Warsaw. Please submit previously unpublished work only. All submissions will be subject to a double-blind peer review. The New Americanist is always seeking book reviews and commentary. Please contact us if you are interested in contributing. Printed in 150 copies TABLE OF ContEntS 5 Introduction: James Gifford and Orion Ussner Kidder Hobgoblins of Fantasy: American Fantasy Fiction in Theory 17 Robert Smith Living in La‑La Land: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Realism and the Lovecraft Virus 45 Robert T. Tally Jr. Teratology as Ideology Critique; or, A Monster Under Every Bed 61 Misha Grifka-Wander Moving Forward: Gender, Genre, and Why There’s No Hard Fantasy 83 Philippa Campbell The Ivory Tower Stands Firm: Campus‑Fantasy Fiction and its Implications for Materialist‑Fantasy Criticism 103 Taylor Driggers Archaeologies of the Future: Deconstruction, Fantasy, and the Fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin 127 Max Bledstein Speculative Surveillance: Fantasy and Foucault in Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad 153 Swatie Biopolitics and Gilead: Torture and Ritual in The Hand‑ maid’s Tale 171 Book reviews 187 Contributors Introduction Hobgoblins of Fantasy: American Fantasy Fiction in Theory James Gifford and Orion Ussner Kidder “A frightful hobgoblin stalks through Europe. We are haunted by a ghost, the ghost of Communism.”1 This epigraph comes from the 1850 translation of The Communist Mani festo by Helen Macfarlane, and this special feature in The New Americanist assumes that a similarly frightful hobgoblin stalks through genre fiction, too. Fantasy as a genre is haunted by that same ghost: the ghost of critical cultural theory, the ghost of the literary criticism borne of Marx and Engels’s work. The fantastic, the hobgoblin, and fantasy literature as we know it were “always already” present in the early articulations of critical theory. Fantasy, though, does not merely echo within, or from, Marx and Engels. It presents unique challenges to critical theory, both to readers and to literary critics, not least because of its seem- ing opposition to realism, materialism, and history itself. That is to say, critical theory’s ostensible rationalism confronts fantasy’s vision of itself as myth. Even the word “myth” carries such different meanings in the theories of Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, Roland Barthes, or Jacques Lacan, rather than in fantasy, that the two can barely un- derstand each other. From Barthes’s Mythologies2 to Kathryn Hume’s The New AmericanisT 03/2019 6 The Metamorphoses of Myth in Fiction,3 it is not hard to see that we can- not even agree upon terms at the centre of fantasy as a genre. That in- stability roots fantasy in a “negative capability,” possibly even an anti- foundationalist tendency, when it comes to theorizing it—definitions or rhetorics of fantasy abound amidst a paucity of agreement on what they mean. Darko Suvin or Fredric Jameson, for example, set fantasy in opposition to science fiction, its twin genre in many respects, especially under the increasingly-prevalent über-genre “fantastika.” So while fantasy finds more traction than SF in political allegory or feminist critique, that very capability to demand interest from the “school of resent- ment” (the most vital part of literary criticism today) clashes with the class theory of history, the critique of neoliberalism, and the derogation of identity politics as a distraction from the dialectic of history that SF ostensibly contains. It is as if we must remember that Helen Macfarlane, who penned the frightful hobgoblin, was not only a communist and Hegelian but also a feminist and a woman. The tensions between an essentialist and an intersectional Marxism are clearly early and deep. The result is that fantasy vacillates between Marxist critique, with its de- terminism and false consciousness, and progressive social commentary, with its politics of representation and even accusation. Where the grand narrative of class conflict elides all other forms of intersecting or con- flicting identity, it finds fantasy lacking—where the proliferating narrative of intersectionality distinguishes such forms, fantasy flourishes with often radical potentials. What then are readers to do? Must the hobgoblin be exorcised, or do we find a medium through which to communicate with it? Is the hobgoblin itself a product of the struggle between fantasy and rationality, or surrealism and mimesis? Must we surrender the concept of history in critical cultural theory, a materialism deep-set into our habitual modes of reading (and with enormous value to critique), in order to find fantasy’s forward potential? Is fantasy a literature of subversion or the literature of counter-revolutionaries? Do the identity politics of fantasy render it always reactionary even amidst a neo-liberal guise of progressivism and plu- ralism? Is there an antifoundational reading of its foundational myths? In his Introduction to “Theorizing the Fantastic” that appeared shortly after the Call for Papers for this issue, Brian Attebery remarks “fantasy is seriously under-theorized,”4 and we would argue this problem persists. However, this does not mean that it persists in the form we may tend to most readily imagine: an absence of critical theory. Rosemary Jackson’s Fantasy: The Literature of Subversion5 found its fusion of Marx and Lacan hobgobliNs of Fantasy: American Fantasy ficTioN iN Theory 7 through Fredric Jameson’s “Magical Narratives,”6 the article that went on to become the key chapter of his most influential book,The Political Unconscious—the result is a sense of fantasy’s exhumation of desire in a Lacanian sense based on Jameson’s refinement of the unconscious and the psychoanalytic deep structures of the psyche as mere manifestations of a bourgeois mode of production. It is a political and material unconscious much ahead of its time in 1981. So, it is not so much that fantasy is under-theorized as it is that we are not particularly made to heed the theoretical bases of our interpretive habits with fantasy. The hobgoblin stalks, not strides, and by remaining hidden and hunting, it protects itself behind a veil of ideology and cultural hegemony. The invisible hand of the interests of a ruling class remain hidden and disguised as normative values, all the more powerful for being unseen, but so too are many of our theoretical assumptions for how to read fantasy as genre. These are the questions and concerns that fuelled this special feature in The New Americanist under the title of Hobgoblins of Fantasy: American Fantasy Fiction in Theory. The answers we received to the question are varied and point to as many traditions in theory as they do in fantasy. Robert Smith’s “Living in La-La Land: Speculative Fiction, Speculative Realism and the Lovecraft Virus” points to a post-rationalist tradition and the expanding terrain to which scholars like Steve Fuller and Nick Land alike (despite their great differences) drive other scholars at work on Actor-Network Theory and Object Oriented Ontology and the after-lives of continental philosophy toward a neo-reactionary Dark Enlightenment. By drawing on the worst excesses of H.P. Lovecraft’s racist fantastical forms, wandering between horror, fantasy, and SF in a real “fantastika” vision, Smith probes the whisperings of Cthulhu in our modern media age. It is as if this particular hobgoblin drives readers toward a dissolution of the rational and therefore self-determining subject of Western philo- sophical traditions. As a mid-point between critical fascism and a viru- lent infection that we must cure, Smith’s proposition is that our resurgent authoritarian historical moment must meaningfully struggle with the presumed estrangement of progressive science fiction and the presumed reactionary authoritarianism of fantasy. Whether there is any conflict between social anarchism and libertarian capitalism remains open and very much at stake in Smith’s provocation, beyond any neoliberal reading of fantasy or fantastika as genre.

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