of a Thesis submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy. How Should We Live? A Study of Social Critical Theory, Feminist Utopianism, Anarchism and Eco-political Thought by Seònaid Mary-Kate Espiner Resistant discourses such as feminism, anarchism and environmentalism can be read as assertions that social life could be arranged and experienced in ways other than how heteropatriarchal capitalism structures society and culture. These criticisms are both utopian and ontological. Inherent in these critical discourses is both the concern that things are not as they ‘should’ or could be, and the proposition that dominant discourses do not hold a monopoly on reality. This play between reality and improvement, between the possible and the immanent, is a hallmark of utopianism, and is well-trod ground in utopian theory. Holding academic work, activism and fiction to be collaborators in a perhaps unintentional utopian project, I analyse a number of examples from fictional writing, resistant discourses and social critical theory. In the postmodern era however, resistance and even the suggestion of alternatives to heteropatriarchal capitalism seems particularly difficult and likely to be subsumed by dominant discourses. Yet although resistant discourses remain entangled with dominant ones, unable to transcend the cultural conditions which produce them, they all nonetheless contain ideals and alternatives for

Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia, and Hope

How should we live

Die beiden dystopischen Romane Margaret Atwoods, Oryx and Crake (2003) und The Year oft the Flood (2009), werden hier analysiert. Ausgehend von dem Gedankenexperiment des Vergleiches einer literarischen Gattung mit einer 'Warnung' befasst sich diese Arbeit zuallererst mit der Begriffsgeschichte der Utopie, der schlieslich die Dystopie entsprungen ist. Dann werden einige Uberlegungen von 'utopian scholars', wie etwa Tom Moylan, vorgestellt, die die Utopie nicht nur als eine literarische Gattung, sondern als ein grundlegendes politisches Phanomen sehen, das den Anreiz zu gesellschaftspolitischen Umwalzungen geben kann, was zu Atwoods Auffassung von Dystopien als Warnungen passt. Vor allem unter der Fragestellung, wie viel Gewicht der Absicht der Autorin beizumessen ist, wird daraufhin die Dystopie als Warnung auf einer literaturtheoretischen Ebene diskutiert, mit Berucksichtigung auf die theoretische Differenzierung, die der Tod des Autors nach sich gezogen hat. Schlieslich werden die beiden Romane auf ihre utopischen und dystopischen Merkmale hin untersucht. Vier von den dystopischen 'Warnungen', die gefunden wurden, werden naher beleuchtet und in Zusammenhang mit der derzeitigen Situation gebracht. Diese Untersuchung zeigt, dass die in den Romanen dargestellte dustere Gesellschaft gar nicht so weit entfernt ist von der derzeitigen Gesellschaft der westlichen Industriestaaten, und dass die skizzierte globalpolitische Situation sehr ahnlich zur tatsachlichen ist. Auserdem werden die in den Dystopien versteckten Utopien einer genauen Beobachtung unterworfen mit dem Ziel, herauszufinden, ob Tom Moylans 'utopischer Impuls' in ihnen gefunden werden kann.

Ecological and ethical dystopia in Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and "The year of the flood"

For a familiar future: ‘jobs’ and ‘net zero’ as performative markers of worldviews in England’s nuclear heartland

My aim is to comment on dystopia based on an approach that has foregrounded, from its very beginning, issues of writing in their intersection with gender and the deconstruction of high and low culture. In the first part of the article, I carry out a reflection on the genre of dystopia, how it has changed, its constituent elements and their transformations, with a look in particular to its gender dimension, its formal and thematic features, as well as to its modes of articulating horizons of hope. In the second part, I discuss dystopian conventions and developments, drawing from Lyman Sargent’s (1994, 2022), my own work and together with Tom Moylan (2003, 2020), Ildney Cavalcanti’s (2000), Ruth Levitas’s (2007) contributions. I understand that dystopia remains fundamentally a term for a distinct literary genre, with its particular history, its formal characteristics, but also its evolving form. In the third part of the article, I analyze Leni Zumas’s Red Clocks, as an example of critical dystopias produced today. Finally, I conclude that in dark times, dystopian literature becomes even more important to us, providing both the tools and the necessary incentive that we need to critically interpret and transform our present.

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Finding Utopia in Dystopia: Feminism, Memory, Nostalgia, and Hope

Citations

How should we live

Ecological and ethical dystopia in Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and "The year of the flood"

For a familiar future: ‘jobs’ and ‘net zero’ as performative markers of worldviews in England’s nuclear heartland

Recovering Hope in Darkness: The Role of Gender in Dystopian Narratives

References

How should we live

Ecological and ethical dystopia in Atwood's "Oryx and Crake" and "The year of the flood"