Overview

This is the first extended study to specifically focus on character in dystopia. Through the lens of the ""last man"" figure, Character and Dystopia: The Last Men examines character development in Yevgeny Zamyatin’s We, Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange, Kazuo Ishiguro’s Never Let Me Go, Fyodor Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground, George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, Nathanael West’s A Cool Million, David Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross, Octavia Butler’s Parable of the Sower, Lois Lowry’s The Giver, Michel Houellebecq’s Submission, Chan Koonchung’s The Fat Years, and Maggie Shen King’s An Excess Male, showing how in the 20th and 21st centuries dystopian nostalgia shades into reactionary humanism, a last stand mounted in defense of forms of subjectivity no longer supported by modernity. Unlike most work on dystopia that emphasizes dystopia’s politics, this book’s approach grows out of questions of poetics: What are the formal structures by which dystopian character is constructed? How do dystopian characters operate differently than other characters, within texts and upon the reader? What is the relation between this character and other forms of literary character, such as are found in romantic and modernist texts? By reading character as crucial to the dystopian project, the book makes a case for dystopia as a sensitive register of modern anxieties about subjectivity and its portrayal in literary works.

Full Product Details

Author:   Aaron S. Rosenfeld
Publisher:   Taylor & Francis Ltd
Imprint:   Routledge
Weight:   0.453kg
ISBN:  

9780367543310

ISBN 10:   0367543311
Pages:   286
Publication Date:   06 May 2022
Audience:   General/trade ,  General
Format:   Paperback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Table of Contents

"1 Introduction: The Last Men in Europe 2 The Character of Dystopia The Language of Despair Realist Dystopia Setting and Character Setting as Character 3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Dystopia The Good Place Anti-utopianism and Anti-utopias Dystopian Narrative Dystopian Law Post-apocalypse Future (Im)Perfect Section II De-forming Character 4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist) Humanism in Crisis Utopian and Dystopian Humanism and Anti-humanism Dystopianism, Naturalism, and Modernism Defensive Forms: Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Dystopian Novel Dystopian Humanism Dystopian Anti-humanism 5 Anti-Bildungsroman: Dystopia and the End of Character in Zamyatin, Burgess, and Ishiguro The Novel of De-formation Allegories of Progress Divine Minus: Zamyatin’s Reverse Bildungsroman The Predator’s Progress: Burgess’s Satiric Bildungsroman Crimes Against Posthumanity: Ishiguro’s Bildungsroman Incarnate 6 Paranoid Plots: Dystopia and the Fantasy of Centrality in Dostoevsky and Orwell Romantic Paranoia Paranoid Poetics ""Streets that follow like a tedious argument/ Of insidious intent"" Diseased Romanticism: Dostoevsky’s Psychological Dystopia He Loved Big Brother: Orwell and the Fantasy of Persecution Section III Dystopian Variations 7 American Anti-pastoral: Running Down a Dream in West and Mamet Dystopian Design What Happens to a Dream Deformed? West’s World: Dystopian Picaresque in West’s A Cool Million Utopian Plots: Dystopian Capitalism in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross 8 Romancing the Child: First Teens in Lowry’s The Giver and Butler’s Parable of the Sower First Teens New Worlds for Old Desires A Family Affair: Romantic Humanism in Lowry’s The Giver On the Road Again: Anti-romantic Anti-humanism in Butler’s Earthseed 9 Epilogue: The Dystopian Real"

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Author Information

Aaron Rosenfeld holds a Ph.D. in English Literature from New York University and is Associate Professor of English at Iona College, teaching classes in 20th-century literature.

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