While literary responses to global environmental change have been varied, many have adopted a dystopian tone offering bleak visions of the future and thus helping to reinforce present-day perspectives and prevent action. In this essay, I examine texts that diverge from the prevailing apocalyptic mode and propose a more optimistic vision of the future: neither narratives of catastrophe and extinction nor eco-modernist tales of techno-optimism, these – what I call – ‘modest utopias’ sketch scenarios of livable futures beyond the Anthropocene. I discuss Ursula K. Le Guin’s work as an important model for this way of writing and thinking about the future and climate change, focusing in particular on her Always coming home (1985) and some selected essays. Novels, as Le Guin claimed in “The carrier bag theory of fiction,” are best seen as medicine bundles “holding things in a particular, powerful relation to one another and to us” (2019b: 933). Accordingly, my exploration of Le Guin’s works traces the relations they have helped establish in contemporary critical theory and climate fiction and examines the latter’s efforts to transform the present by imagining habitable futures through solarpunk utopias that are participatory, peaceful, and nurturing, and that focus on process and relations rather than on progress and growth.
The aim of this paper is to present a selection of findings from my doctoral dissertation on the relationship between Philip K. Dick’s novels’ and posthumanist philosophy. Specifically, I offer a reading of The Man in the High Castle that investigates the novel’s alternative-history setting and the role of inanimate objects, as well as the broader nature-culture material assemblages to which they belong, in revealing for the human subjects the contingent nature of reality. My analysis focuses on the climactic scene where the character of Mr. Tagomi, a high-ranking official of Imperial Japan, seemingly transports to an alternative timeline while contemplating a piece of jewelry made by a Jewish craftsman. Drawing on Graham Harman’s object-oriented ontology, Jane Bennett’s philosophy of vital materialism and Francesca Ferrando’s thought experiment of the posthuman multiverse, I argue that, within the narrative of the novel, inanimate objects and works of art are portrayed as active agents capable of altering individual perceptions of reality. Such instances uncover the complex contingencies guiding the organization of their reality, refuting the essentialist ideology of fascism dominant in the novel’s setting. Ultimately, I argue that Dick’s novel, in concurrence with new materialist philosophies, challenges dominant hierarchies of essential humanism and highlights the transformative power of encounters between humans and nonhuman actants.
Inspired by Wai Chee Dimock’s (2009 [2006]) innovative reconceptualization of American literature, this article explores her notion of “deep time” with regard to literary genre, understood in terms of Wittgenstein’s family resemblance rather than as a category in the classical Aristotelian view. When applied to American literary texts, this approach makes it possible to notice affinities between these texts and the works which time- and space-wise exceed the conventionally recognized boundaries of American literature. As an instance of such a reading, I propose to re-examine Sylvester Judd’s (1813–1853) utopian romance Margaret (1845), apparently the most successful novel of Transcendentalism, in the context of Early Modern English utopia. Although at first glance American utopias are distinct from English representatives of the genre, under a careful consideration it is possible to discover several parallels between them that allow the two traditions to be understood as “cousins” sensu Dimock. Drawing on Artur Blaim’s (2013) study of Early Modern English utopia, the article discusses selected features of the genre and demonstrates how reading Margaret exclusively as a New England novel may lead to misunderstandings and misconceptions. Finally, the notion of “deep time” is explored as an intra-textual thematic thread via which the utopian community simultaneously exists in particular spatio-temporal conditions and within what can be called, after Dimock, a “denationalized space”.
The literature of the American South has often been seen as an example of literary regionalism and of writing turned inward upon its own history. This article, however, argues that this literature in the period between 1919 and 1945 was decisively shaped by its thematic and formal interactions with post-Versailles Europe. The event of the First World War was a critical point in this re-orientation of southern literature toward the extra-regional and toward modernist experimentalism. It was a lifelong literary task of William Faulkner, beginning with his earliest fiction in the 1920s and culminating in A fable, to try to understand this war as a collective southern experience (which in A fable is achieved through the symbolism of the Black Atlantic and that of the Unknown Soldier). The article employs Wai Chee Dimock’s theoretical categories of planetary extension and deep time to show that the South of the southern modernists was a transatlantic South, one permeated by alternate geographies and long durations. Works such as Faulkner’s A fable, Zora Neale Hurston’s Moses, man of the mountain and James Agee’s Let us now praise famous men not only extend beyond the territorial borders of the regional South but reach into the long duration of theological time and of evolutionary biology. In this regard, the article particularly stresses the unexpected influence of Weimar political theology on Faulkner and Hurston’s work. Through their bold use of planetary geography and long durations Faulkner, Hurston and Agee emerge as radical critics of their region and its agrarian ideology, offering an imaginative counter-statement to such fixed southern entities as segregation, endemic agricultural poverty, and internal colonization.
