"'The Tree of Knowledge is not that of Life'; or, from the Enlightenment to 19th century Gothic literature, the Rise and Fall of Scientific Utopias Mémoire de Master 1 Sous la direction de Mme Christine Murphy Berthin, professeure à Parix X Nanterre (original) (raw)
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Genre History and Ideology in Utopian Literature, 1750–1840
Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Literature, 2024
During the Renaissance, utopias existed outside known and mappable space as well as beyond known historical time. They were thus doubly removed from the historical, evolving world, instead constituting static models of a better world to which no transition appeared practicably possible. With the publication of Louis-Sébastien Mercier’s L’an 2440 in 1771, a drastic change occurs: utopia is henceforth transformed from an unreachable space existing in an insular time to the known world as it has evolved in the future. The “temporalization of utopia,” as it is known, depends on the rise and eventual hegemony, during the pre-revolutionary Enlightenment and in the first years after the American and French Revolutions, of ideas regarding social, institutional, moral and scientific progress as an active principle of history. Though Enlightenment thought is by no means either homogeneous or lacking in skepticism regarding the factuality of progress or the imminence of utopia, the writings of Anne-Robert-Jacques Turgot, and, far more unambiguously, those of the Marquis of Condorcet, testify to a growing degree of confidence in the dynamic and evolutionary nature of historical development and, ultimately, in the prospects for infinite perfectibility—in other words, in the ontological openness of time and history. Mercier’s paradigm-shifting novel emerges on the ground of such ideological shifts but also betrays the existence of significant ambiguities in the Enlightenment’s philosophical legacy, since it both foregrounds and denies the connection between future progress and political revolution, presenting its reader with often contradictory content and an internally divided form. Ironically, the very growth of confidence in the imminence of utopia entailed, by the early 19th century, a rejection of narrative fiction among the three most prominent utopists of the period: Henri Saint-Simon, Robert Owen, and Charles Fourier. Their shared belief in the practical applicability of their schemes marks a clear departure from the playful or aporetic character of utopian fictions in the Renaissance and heralds the rise to dominance of system-building blueprints. A distrust of the political sphere, construed as one of violent antagonism among classes and group interests, as well as an emphasis on devising ways through which the social sphere can be harmonized in the interests of shared prosperity and happiness, is characteristic of all three thinkers, as is a cosmopolitan spirit and an aversion to nationalist chauvinisms. Naturally, differences are also present among them. Saint-Simon privileges the role of scientific specialists, manufacturers, and merchants in securing rule by the productive classes and the waning of both economic parasitism and political violence in the future. Owen emphasizes the role of education in reforming social mores and sees experimental communities founded on his teaching of new and rational principles as capable of instituting “an entirely new state of society” that can be emulated internationally. Fourier, meanwhile, focuses his energy on devising methods for reconciling the conflictual personalities and passions of individuals with social harmony, and for harmonizing pleasure and social regulation, freedom and organization. The narrative utopia would return after the hopes of the utopian system-builders of the early 19th century and their followers were disappointed through a combination of internecine conflict, the economic failure or repression of the social experiments inspired by their writings, and the rise of working-class militancy, particularly in France, Britain, and Prussia. Étienne Cabet’s Voyage en Icarie (1840) can be faulted for both aesthetic failure and rather repressive emphases on homogeneity, discipline, surveillance, and a retrogressive conception of gender relations, but it also contains the seeds of fairly important innovations, among which the most important for later developments in the genre are its sophisticated mode of braiding together the temporal horizons of history and utopia, its engagement with the occasional inevitability of revolution and of revolutionary violence, its concurrent attentiveness to the importance of the political moment of crisis, its developed exploration of the complexities of revolutionary transition, and, finally, its accommodation, despite its otherwise doctrinaire spirit, of a degree of open-ended dialogism which utopian fiction had not enjoyed since More’s founding text.
2019
The present dissertation explores the (e) utopian schemes of Edward Bellamy's Looking Backward from 1887 to 2000 and Yorick Blumenfeld's 2099: A Eutopia. It aims at shedding light on the socialist blueprints of the two (e) utopist authors, mainly through applying two rudiment terms of Capitalism and Socialism that depict the salient alteration from an omnivorous capitalist doctrine to socialist utopian thoughts. The analysis of the two (e) utopian plans relies on the Marxist perspective that has a fundamental role in the full comprehension of their societal structures. In questioning the (e) utopian principles of the two novels understudy, we have also decided to apply two other literary concepts of Irony and Ambiguity. These terms attempt to depict the pitfalls and the deficiencies of the utopists' accounts and disclose their unexpressed association with despotism. In this sense, the (e) utopian thoughts of the two authors that are affiliated with authoritarianism reveal the way through which they evoke a dystopian world.
Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism
Romantic Prophecy and the Resistance to Historicism, 2016
Before the eighteenth century and in certain inflexions later on, history was coded by social significance: knowledge of the past kept alive the values of the past. History was, by and large, biography; the struggles and achievements of "great men" provided models for aspiring readers to admire and emulate. With the introduction of proto-industrial forms of commercial media, however, the events that comprise history's significant moments "accelerated," to borrow a term from the theorist of history Reinhart Koselleck, to such an extent that the differences between important and unimportant people, significant and insignificant events became difficult, if not impossible, to discern. Instead of a collection of significant events, time became a series of proximate and seemingly random happenings. The resulting "crisis" (the term is again Koselleck's) produced a panoply of temporally conscious media including literary magazines, serial narratives, critical philosophy, and pseudo-prophetic poetry, in which the acceleration of time, the overlapping of pasts, presents, and futures, and the contemporaneity of different eras became occasions for rather than obstacles to historical reflection. Attention, then, shifted from great men to great movements that could explain how social forces embodying different times and temporalities-residual, dominant, and emergent, in Raymond Williams's memorable formulation in Marxism and Literature-produced historical change. Renewed interest in the temporally conscious media that precipitated the crisis of history during the eighteenth century has also occasioned several recent and important critical studies, Christopher M. Bundock's Romantic Prophecy and Timothy Campbell's Historical Style among them. In some respects, these studies could not be more different. Bundock reads several of the most complex texts in the Romantic canon, including Wordsworth's Prelude, Percy Shelley's Hellas, Blake's Milton, and Mary Shelley's Valperga and The Last Man, as well as several philosophical works by Kant, Schelling, and Kierkegaard. By contrast, although Campbell concludes with weighty chapters on Scott and Godwin, he is concerned mainly with examples of what once would have been considered bibliographic ephemera: satiric prints, fashion magazines, portrait paintings, minor correspondence, and specific copies of redacted editions. Bundock aims to show how the Romantics tried-and, in his perspective, largely succeeded, at least in an aesthetic capacity-to resist serial time by refashioning in a radically self-conscious way the forms and tropes of a prophetic idiom in their literary and philosophical experiments. Campbell, meanwhile, is more interested in the ways that Romantic-period authors (and primarily its novelists) capitulated to the new temporality, especially as it was manifest in the worlds of commerce and fashion, even when they were also resisting it. Yet, Campbell and Bundock share a keen awareness of how the expansion of commerce and trade, the intensification of popular politics, and the diversification of print culture inspired thinkers to question not only the social conditions of their own time but the nature of time itself. Bundock agrees with many recent critics that the proliferation of media in the Romantic era and, more specifically, the Romantics' obsession with the remediation of print into visual and aural forms are indicative of a wish, never to be fulfilled, for "immediacy," a mechanism of social contact that might restore the sense of community drowned out by the expansion of print in the first place (17). But in Bundock's view the wish for immediacy is also a longing for the sacred, that is, a communal vehicle for an understanding of historical significance beyond the quotidian mundanities circulating through a commercial, secular society. The