ملخص
The dwindling or loss of any sense of a future – diagnosed in the 1980s and 1990s as the signature of postmodern culture and of neoliberal politics – is now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, overlaid with a widespread unease that “current conjunctural trends have no long-term direction other than generalised devastation” (Eagleton 65). And yet the production and popularity of dystopian fictions continues to climb, unembarrassed by this eclipse of the future as anything other than a time of ‘generalised devastation’ (Tally 19-44).
This paradox poses problems for literary-theoretical traditions of understanding dystopian fictions as warnings about potential bleak futures (Moylan 111-182). A warning assumes that the thing warned of can be avoided. Dystopias have historically been treated by literary critics as part of a pedagogy of fear, a fictional apparatus which twinned utopia’s pedagogy of desire (Sargent 7-9). The question confronting literary critics of dystopia in the present is not a question of whether there is anything to fear in the non-future already approaching us but a question of what a novel can do with a present widespread certainty that things cannot get better, they can only get worse.
This paradox poses problems for literary-theoretical traditions of understanding dystopian fictions as warnings about potential bleak futures (Moylan 111-182). A warning assumes that the thing warned of can be avoided. Dystopias have historically been treated by literary critics as part of a pedagogy of fear, a fictional apparatus which twinned utopia’s pedagogy of desire (Sargent 7-9). The question confronting literary critics of dystopia in the present is not a question of whether there is anything to fear in the non-future already approaching us but a question of what a novel can do with a present widespread certainty that things cannot get better, they can only get worse.
اللغة الأصلية | English |
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عنوان منشور المضيف | Wastelands and Wonderlands |
العنوان الفرعي لمنشور المضيف | Essays on Utopian and Dystopian Film and Literature |
المحررون | Matthew Leggatt |
مكان النشر | New York |
ناشر | SUNY Press |
الفصل | 13 |
الصفحات | 115-145 |
عدد الصفحات | 31 |
طبعة | 1 |
حالة النشر | Accepted/In press - يناير 10 2025 |
ASJC Scopus subject areas
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