This thesis analyses two British and two German technological dystopias published between the First and Second World Wars: Konrad Loele’s Zullinger und seine Zucht (1920), John Bernard’s The New Race of Devils (1921), Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932), and Paul Gurk’s Tuzub 37 (1935). While there has been a considerable amount of scholarly research into interwar British dystopias, German texts have rarely been analysed; furthermore, dystopian studies have often focused on a small number of novels that were considered canonical and particularly influential. This thesis compares Huxley’s canonical Brave New World with Bernard’s less known The New Race of Devils and the two German texts, reading all of them from the standpoint of the early twentieth-century crisis of the traditional notion of humanism. Chapter 1 focuses on the two earlier novels and on their portrayal of the creation of ‘perfect’ workers and soldiers with the use of eugenics. Chapter 2 centres on the two later novels and on their depiction of a completely mechanized World State where citizens are mass produced and incapable of independent thought. The thesis shows that the four dystopias envision a radical change in the nature of men and women as a result of the mechanization of society, and concludes that they all speculate on the future of the human race once the traditional conceptualization of humanity has been destroyed by contemporary technology. Loele’s and Bernard’s texts introduce the idea of a partly artificial ‘eugenic liminal being’ who is difficult to fit into the established taxonomy of living beings. Huxley and Gurk highlight how the inhabitants of the technocracy will not be capable of meaningful action and traditional rebellion will become impossible. The four texts prove more radical than other contemporary technological dystopias and anticipate some of the most important issues of late twentieth-century posthumanism.

Changing humanity: a study of four dystopias at the dawn of the biotechnological age

Counterfactualist approaches to the past (e.g., “What if Germany had won WWII?”) are common, if commonly derided, in various subdisciplines of history, and increasingly prevalent in popular film and narrative fiction. Literary criticism, however, has only begun to consider the phenomenon (and medieval studies not at all), despite counterfactual history’s potential for opening up the textual past in new ways. This essay risks the censure of “responsible” historians by asking what implications the interwoven topics of genre prescription, gender ideology, and historical contingency may have for the practice of counterfactual literary history in a specifically medieval context. My case study, drawn from the trilingual miscellany Harley 2253 (c.1330–40), is a scandalously obscure Anglo-Norman bourde (jest, tale) known as Gilote et Johane: a fast-moving, genre-bending hybrid in which two young women debate sexual mores, take lovers, outwit fathers, shout down clergy, advise passing wives, preach their a...

Histoire Imparfaite: Gilote et Johane and the Counterfactual Lessons of Harley 2253

Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan are two of the foremost German-language poets of the post-1945 era. Celan, a Jewish poet whose parents were murdered in the Holocaust, and Bachmann, the Austrian daughter of a National Socialist, both sought a way to write after atrocity. Both writers struggled to use German as a poetic medium in their poetry and prose, as language appeared to have been poisoned through its association with National Socialism. Wider cultural concerns such as Theodor Adorno's dictum that to write poetry after Auschwitz is barbaric influenced the post-catastrophic literary landscape. In 1958, Celan famously compared writing poetry after 1945 to sending out a message in a bottle. This metaphor characterizes his dialogic approach to writing poetry. Famously, Bachmann and Celan carried out a poetic dialogue in their published work as they shared motifs and themes which they reinterpreted in their own works. From the time that Bachmann and Celan first met in Vienna in 1948, they began exchanging letters and poetry until Celan's death in 1970. In 2008, the letters that Bachmann and Celan exchanged between 1948 and 1967 were published for the first time in the volume Herzzeit. These letters provide new insights into the authors' struggle to find a viable mode of expression after 1945, and how they sought to overcome these problems through constructing a dialogue. This thesis will argue that Bachmann and Celan continued their poetic dialogue in some of the letters and that these letters serve as a poetic form in their own right.

Das Briefgeheimnis: Ingeborg Bachmann and Paul Celan's Poetics of Correspondence

Relevant Utopian Realism: The Critical Corporeality of Juli Zeh's Corpus Delicti

Formations such as gangs stand in a complex relationship to other, more conventional or socially
normative groupings and collectives, such as the family. This article probes the gang’s function
as a kind of alternative family and as a lens through which to view the relationship between
family and non-family groupings. The tension between family and non-family is examined at the
intersection between utopian order and Dionysian disorder as the gang incorporates elements
of both. Drawing primarily on the utopian/dystopian fantasy of the German fin-de-siecle author
Frank Wedekind, with reference also to other texts of the period (Thomas Mann, Alfred Kubin),
and to 21st century cinematic reworkings of Wedekind (Lucile Hadzihalilovic, John Irvin), the
article studies the Dionysian/utopian interface through the gang while conversely thinking the
gang as a kind of Dionysian utopia, a in which family structures are undone in the name of an
alternative erotic collective.

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Negating the family: Ritual and Dionysus in modernist utopia

From Thomas More onwards, writers of utopias have constructed alternative models of society as a way of commenting critically on existing social orders. In the utopian alternative, the sex-gender system of the contemporary society may be either reproduced or radically re-organised. Reading utopian writing as a dialogue between reality and possibility, this study examines the relationship between historical sex-gender systems and those envisioned by utopian texts. Surveying a broad range of utopian writing from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including Huxley, Zamyatin, Wedekind, Hauptmann, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this book reveals the variety and complexity of approaches to re-arranging gender, and locates these 're-arrangements' within contemporary debates on sex and reproduction, masculinity and femininity, desire, taboo and family structure. These issues occupy a position of central importance in the dialogue between utopian imagination and anti-utopian thought which culminates in the great dystopias of the twentieth century and the postmodern re-invention of utopia.

Catríona Ní Dhúill

Papers

Sex in Imagined Spaces: Gender and Utopia from More to Bloch