Character and Dystopia: The Last Men (Routledge Studies in Twentieth-Century Literature)

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. 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 twentieth and twenty-first 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. Cover 1 Half Title 2 Series 3 Title 4 Copyright 5 Dedication 6 Contents 8 Acknowledgements 11 Section I Background 14 1 Introduction: The Last Men in Europe 16 2 The Character of Dystopia 45 The Language of Despair 45 Realist Dystopia 48 Setting and Character 53 Setting as Character 56 3 What We Talk About When We Talk About Dystopia 65 The Good Place 65 Anti-utopianism and Anti-utopias 70 Dystopian Narrative 74 Dystopian Law 78 Post-apocalypse 79 Future (Im)Perfect 81 Section II De-forming Character 92 4 The Last (Hu)Man(ist) 94 Humanism in Crisis 94 Utopian and Dystopian Humanism and Anti-humanism 100 Dystopianism, Naturalism, and Modernism 105 Defensive Forms: Humanism, Anti-humanism, and the Dystopian Novel 111 Dystopian Humanism 111 Dystopian Anti-humanism 115 5 Anti-Bildungsroman: Dystopia and the End of Character in Zamyatin, Burgess, and Ishiguro 125 The Novel of De-formation 125 Allegories of Progress 128 Divine Minus: Zamyatin’s Reverse Bildungsroman 132 The Predator’s Progress: Burgess’s Satiric Bildungsroman 138 Crimes Against Posthumanity: Ishiguro’s Bildungsroman Incarnate 146 6 Paranoid Plots: Dystopia and the Fantasy of Centrality in Dostoevsky and Orwell 161 Romantic Paranoia 161 Paranoid Poetics 166 “Streets that follow like a tedious argument / Of insidious intent” 171 Diseased Romanticism: Dostoevsky’s Psychological Dystopia 174 He Loved Big Brother: Orwell and the Fantasy of Persecution 180 Section III Dystopian Variations 192 7 American Anti-pastoral: Running Down a Dream in West and Mamet 194 Dystopian Design 194 What Happens to a Dream Deformed? 197 West’s World: Dystopian Picaresque in West’s A Cool Million 200 Utopian Plots: Dystopian Capitalism in Mamet’s Glengarry Glen Ross 205 8 Romancing the Child: First Teens in Lowry and Butler 218 First Teens 218 New Worlds for Old Desires 221 A Family Affair: Romantic Humanism in Lowry’s The Giver 228 On the Road Again: Anti-romantic Anti-humanism in Butler’s Earthseed 235 9 Epilogue: The Dystopian Real 245 Postscript 261 Works Cited 264 Index 278 Character and Dystopia examines dystopian characterization through analysis of the "last man" figure. 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.