Prospectus, version 1.0
Well, here it is. Attempt #1. This is the introductory statement/rationale, which will eventually become part of the introduction to the dissertation. The rest of the plan can be found on this blog back in October 2008, but I'll be revising that in coming days and weeks.
Suggestions welcome.
The title of the final book of the Christian Bible, John of Patmos' [GREEK FORM GOES HERE] has been translated as "Revelation", but the Greek "Apocalypse" has passed into our vernacular as a synonym for catastrophic endings and destruction. Apocalyptic literature is far older than even the New Testament's Book of Revelation; the apocalyptic books of Enoch, Daniel, Isaiah ......[Baruch?] reveal to their ancient Hebrew listeners the truth of their current situation, a transcendent truth beyond simple predictions of the fall of a civilization, the truth of the nature of history itself.
The lofty goal of apocalyptic literature, the goal of enlightening and revealing, has been subsumed in recent decades by a more (perhaps profitable) concrete purpose of positing possible, albeit dark, futures. The apocalyptic genre has moved from sacred literature to popular fiction, and not without accompanying aesthetic and rhetorical shifts. Whereas once the genre "QUOTE FROM COLLINS," the utopian and dystopian literature produced since the Enlightenment (itself a revelatory moment) lacks a godhead to direct history; instead, human agency and the science of causality together determine whether human civilization continues or falls. Since Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto, a teleological sense of history has ruled the fictions--we know we are going somewhere, progressing to some fulfillment of human potential, either ultimately good or horrifically bad. The speculative fiction of the mid-twentieth century was decidedly leaning toward the latter.
These dystopian--or anti-utopian, as some say--fictions, while still firmly within the apocalyptic tradition, Something about fear/pity and tragedy as well. Like the great Greek tragedies, these narratives seem to hold a permanent place in our collective consciousnesses that we wouldn't expect from pulp "science fiction." Brave New World, 1984, Fahrenheit 451, and Lord of the Flies are listed on most junior high and high school curricula and feature heavily in Advanced Placement English classes [CITE], and dystopian narratives comprise much of science fiction television and film today. A "dystopian impulse" QUOTE BOOKER. This impulse to explore the end, and, in exploring, reveal and predict it, Quote RABKIN. Human seem to have a need to foresee the end; perhaps as a survival instinct, perhaps as morbid curiosity.
Understandably, most studies of dystopian fiction focus on explicating the particular philosophies and social systems each text proposes; comparisons to Marx's vision, examination of power a la Foucault, reworking of "the human" from Heidegger to Haraway. Frederick Jameson's recent work Archeologies of the Future, much anticipated among utopian studies scholars, offers a predictably Marxist analysis of utopianism, often blurring real utopian projects, formal texts proposing utopian communities, and utopian fictions such as Francis Bacon's The New Atlantis into one, uniform idea. M. Keith Booker's two studies on dystopian fiction provide a good introduction the the genre, but also focuses mainly on the social systems proposed within the texts. Seeing dystopian fiction as literature seems to be a problem among most critics; Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction begins with a disclaimer--he will not be including "didactic fiction" such as Orwell's 1984 in his study because it is too obvious in structure.
Dystopian fiction has often been included in other genre studies, as part of science fiction, fantasy, or both.--something about todorov's genre study and rabkin's--why they don't give us enough, but their overall understand of genre is good. To study the genre of dystopian fiction as literature, we would want to understand how it works, its purpose, its structures, and its rhetorical impacts. Early dystopian fiction such as 1984 and Brave New World have clear directives and proposals for their audiences, but how those arguments are made palatable to a reading audience has not been examined in depth. What, we might ask, is the pleasure of a text mired in death, fear, and loss?
Return to ancient western rhet. Deliberative genre. Kenneth Burke is good for this because his scholarship focuses on social change through text, literature as "equipment for living" and the ameliorative qualities of symbolic action. Burke gives us a language for literature as rhetoric, for aesthetics as persuasion, for heroes as avenues for identification.
