Ideological Foreclosure and Utopian Discourse

Abstract

My interest in recent utopian fiction has led me back to the 1950s and the recollection that only a short time ago, utopias had been declared obsolete. In this context, the revival of utopian themes in the 1970s raises questions about what can or cannot be written at a given historical moment and about how and why certain themes and genres enter or re-enter public consciousness and discourse. Although there were ostensibly no utopias during the 1950s, this “absence” can be charted and studied in the flourishing of its reverse – the anti-utopia. In this paper, I would like to present the first part of an investigation of the absence of utopias in English during the 1950s: a mapping of the permutations of utopian writing in this period, particularly anti-utopiasand science fiction. For, according to most critics, the anti-utopia had, by the middle of the twentieth century, become the most important form of modern utopian writing; moreover such anti-utopian writing was now produced primarily within the generic boundaries of science fiction. However, while many critics have discussed this rise in anti-utopian themes, few have attempted to classify its forms or to map the predominantly dystopian permutations of the utopian writing and science fiction of the 1950s.